All right. All right. I'm excited to introduce to you our next presentation. Let's please give a welcome to the CEO of Banzai , Joe Davy.
Hi. Morning, everyone. Hope everyone's been getting some chance to get some sun while we're down here. I'm from Seattle, so you know take every chance I can get to get extra sun. Just going to kick off, talk a little bit about the company. Before I do that, this entire presentation is available on our IR website. I'm not going to bother to read this disclaimer line by line, but go to the website, download the presentation. If you want more details, feel free to reach out to us. Happy to answer any follow-up questions afterwards. Before we get into this, I'll talk briefly about my background. I started this company a few years ago with the goal of basically helping to solve problems in sales and marketing by basically what we like to say is giving marketers superpowers.
We do that by building products and making acquisitions of products, AI enabling those products, and then integrating all those products so that a marketer that uses one of our products can then go on to use a second, third, fourth product. We like to think of ourselves as basically being the AI SaaS platform for sales and marketing. Again, our primary focus is making our customers' lives 10x faster and easier. We do that by giving them solutions that make it very, very easy for them to get the job done, reduce their anxiety, reduce their stress. Our customers are the most stressed out people in any organization. Marketing is wearing more hats than anyone else.
From our perspective, the more options that we can give them to solve different pieces of the different slices of the pie of problems that they're dealing with on a daily basis and using AI to do that, the more effective we can be at A, making their lives easier, but B, growing our revenue, growing our EBITDA, growing our ACV. Our model is really simple. Solve one problem for a customer, solve a second, third, fourth problem for a customer, integrate all these products so they work together seamlessly. It keeps customers in our ecosystem, and over time, just grow our customer base and grow our business. What got me excited about this opportunity? Prior to starting Banzai , I helped to build a company in the fintech space that we grew to today, it's over $1 billion in revenue.
We did it using this exact same model that we're using at Banzai , both organic and inorganic growth. We would make acquisitions of strategically complementary products. We would put them on the platform, and we would go cross-sell those products, expand, grow our customer base organically, and then sell additional solutions into those customers over time. What got me excited, we ultimately sold that business for about $8.5 billion. What got me excited about this opportunity is I think it's very, very similar, the model that we're following here, very, very similar to that business. The difference is I think the market here is an order of magnitude larger. That ultimately gets me really, really excited about what we can do here over time. We're just getting started now, but I think the opportunity here to create value for our customers and ultimately for our shareholders is enormous.
The MarTech market is really being driven by a few trends right now. One, just more and more digital transformation. Companies want to use video. Companies want to use automation. Companies want to have AI do more of the thinking and the work for them. The average enterprise today is using 120 different marketing tools. As we go, we're starting to own one, two, three, four of those solutions. Over time, we'll own a bigger and bigger piece of that for our customers, integrate those things to make it just really, really simple and easy for them, rather than having to deal with really the complex zoo of integration stuff they have to deal with when they're dealing with 120 different vendors. We can simplify that for them. I think that's where the kind of magic opportunity is for our customers and for our business.
The market is growing very fast. It's about an 18.5% CAGR. Last year was just shy of $500 billion, forecasted to be $1.7 trillion within the decade. I think that's ultimately what gets me so excited about this opportunity for us, for our shareholders is this is an enormous market. We want to be one of the major players in this market. I think we already are in several of the segments that we're in. Our goal is just to continue owning a larger and larger share of this market over time. The way that this works, the great thing about marketing is that the problems just don't change that much from day to day and even from decade to decade. I can go, these are kind of the four, we call this the four horsemen of the apocalypse of marketing.
This is basically the problems that marketers are trying to solve at all times: attracting new leads, engaging those leads, tracking what's going on with their leads so they can figure out what's working, and getting better data and better intelligence to power their campaigns. At the end of the day, none of our customers are going to come back 10 years from now and say, yep, I'd really like to have fewer leads. Yep, I'd really like to have less engagement. Yep, I'd really like to have less data. We know that these are going to consistently be the same problems that customers deal with over a long period of time. I think the mandate for us is to figure out how we can solve those problems for our customers. Where is the technology going? Where is the market going?
We can be ahead of that curve and kind of be delivering new value, new solutions to customers over time. Right now, we're really focused on these four areas. We have solutions in both the attract and engage side, and we're looking at the intelligence and tracking side. Business has been on a real run over the last year. We ended Q2 with about $3.3 million in revenue. That was up 205% year- over- year. We are growing extremely fast, scaling extremely fast. We grew our gross margin by just shy of 1,400 bps to 83%. We have a phenomenal gross margin. We have very, very profitable product lines, and we have very quickly scaling revenue. Just talk through a couple of highlights.
One of our big focuses, one of my big focuses here, and Dean, our CFO, is sitting in the back of the room there, is scaling up EBITDA. Our adjusted EBITDA was about a $1.5 million loss, which was roughly flat despite the fact that we tripled revenue over that same period. For a lot of companies, especially in the technology space, what you'll see is, as the revenue grows, the losses grow too. I think for us, the story is the opposite, actually. We think that we can grow revenue and grow EBITDA at the same time. That's a really big focus for us right now. We have been working on our balance sheet. We've increased our shareholders' equity by $35 million over the last year. We've increased our cash balance, and we've put a long-term capital solution in place. The business is well capitalized.
I think we've got everything we need operationally. We've got everything we need to pursue these strategic opportunities that we're working on. One of our other big focuses has been just working on expanding our leadership team. As the business has scaled up, we need to expand the type of people that we have. We've added Dean as our new CFO. We've added a new Chief Revenue Officer, a new Head of Sales. We've grown our customer base to over 140,000 total customers in 90 countries. We have an enormous platform of customers that use one of our products, maybe two of our products. Our goal is to then get them using two, three, four products over time, grow the ACV for those customers, grow the retention. We have a big focus in the BFSI space, banking, financial services, insurance.
Probably over half of our revenue just comes out of that space. We announced a couple of months ago, we signed a big deal with RBC Capital Markets. We have tons of customers like that that we can't talk about because they don't want us to. We're a secret weapon for them. We always like when they let us talk about them. Our big strategic priorities right now are really simple. Like I said earlier, strengthening the balance sheet. Just a big focus on continuing to add shareholders' equity, build up cash, and eliminate debt from our balance sheet. We announced last week, it's not in here, but we announced on, I think, Thursday or Friday, a major payoff for our senior lender. That's very exciting. Basically, we're trying to get to a no liability or no long-term debt balance sheet probably in the next couple of quarters.
Big focus for us there. Strengthening our leadership, obviously continued focus on organic growth. Our CRO, our new VP of Sales, people like that have all kind of done this path from the phase that we're at right now to $100 million, $200 million in revenue. We're really excited to have them on board. They've already made a huge contribution. M&A is a big focus for us, finding opportunities where we can bring additional businesses, additional solutions onto our platform, integrate them in, use our expertise in AI to AI enable those products to create more value for customers, and really just scaling up the business very, very quickly from there. We have a huge pipeline of deals that we're working on right now. Really, really excited about that. Dean and I have been spending a lot of time on that.
I think hopefully we'll have some more developments in the next couple of months there. We'll see. Right now, we have really nine core products in our product lineup. This ranges everywhere from AI-powered webinars to video capture to video marketing to demand generation. We have a newsletter platform that we launched just a little while ago called Curate that uses AI to write newsletters for you and grow your subscriber base automatically. I think our idea here is, over time, we're going to build new products when we think there's opportunities. We're going to make acquisitions when we think there's good opportunities that we think are accretive to our shareholders. I think we found just an absolute ton of those opportunities out there in the market right now. Like I was saying, we have about 140,000 customers.
This is obviously just a very small snapshot of those, but all across the Fortune 500 and ranging from tech to health care to financial services, insurance, banking. I think what's exciting to me about this is every single one of these customers on this slide right now and many, many more that aren't featured here represent seven-figure opportunities for us. Our focus right now is just to go out, bring more of these accounts onto our platform, and then take these accounts that are already on our platform and just continue expanding them over time. We think about our business model in terms of a flywheel. Basically, building great products, growing usage. As more customers come to depend on our products, we get more data. We get more usage. We can use that ultimately to grow the data and content that's hosted on our platform.
We take all of that data, take all that content, and turn that into AI context. Basically, this is like we get more oil, and we can use that oil. We can refine that oil and make our products more valuable because all of a sudden, we have more data. The type of data that we have is very, very proprietary to our customers. We're talking about things like their leads, their opportunities, their pipeline, data that you can't get publicly anywhere. Part of the business model for us is bringing that data into the AI context so AI can help our customers make smarter decisions, help them come up with marketing strategies, help them execute faster. Ultimately, over time, that just enables us to build more superpowers into our products. Curate's a great example. This is the AI newsletter I was talking about earlier.
This allows customers to go out and say, I want to start a newsletter, but I don't want to spend $200,000 a year to hire a team and go buy all the technology and infrastructure to do that. What we allow them to do is we allow them to tell us what their customers are interested in, who their target customer is. Curate goes out, it finds interesting content, writes content for you, publishes it. It even figures out who your ideal leads are and markets to those leads for you and invites them to subscribe to your newsletter. Basically, from our customer standpoint, this is like hiring an entire marketing team to go build and run a newsletter, but it's all run by AI.
It takes them five minutes a week to run this thing rather than having to hire three, four people to go do it and a bunch of expensive technology. In terms of M&A, we're looking at a few areas that I think are really exciting. Because we've been in the space so long, Dean's been in the space even longer than I have. I've worked in the technology industry for 15+ years at this point. We have relationships with every major VC, every major private equity firm, at least in the U.S. and probably most of them in the world. We're seeing a lot of inbound deals now coming to us from VCs that are saying, you know what? I've got a business that's got stable growth. It's got a great product. It's a leading product in its space. It's got great EBITDA.
It's not going to be OpenAI, maybe that one product. It's not going to be my 100x, 1,000x winner. It can be valuable for us. We're in this space where we're looking at deals that are at scale, great stable businesses that are producing EBITDA, that have great customer bases, that have great products that we can take and bring into our platform. In many cases, we can do this in a way that's very, very accretive to shareholder value. We've closed two acquisitions in the last year. Like I was saying earlier, we have a huge pipeline of additional acquisitions. One of the main things that we look at is just customer alignment. Basically, what are the products that our customers are going to want to use to solve additional problems that they have? We might already be solving their webinar problem for them, their video problem for them.
How can we help them solve ads to drive more views to those videos? How can we help them with data so they can run better marketing campaigns, things like that, very related to the problems we're already solving for them and easy expansion from using one or two of our solutions to using the next one that we bring in? That's really the way that we think about this as a strategy. Just very quickly here, like I said earlier, we've been seeing this business scale up very quickly. We've been seeing gross profit scale up very quickly. We've been seeing our gross margin scale up very quickly. Essentially, we're just getting more and more efficient. We're bringing in higher quality revenue. We think about each one of these products as basically like a little money printer that we can set up.
As we have more and more of these money printers, we'll see gross profit probably continue to go up. We'll probably see gross margin continue to expand as well. I think we've already got probably best-in-class gross margin. We're probably in the top 10% for comparables. I think we can always be better there. Again, our focus when we're looking at acquisitions is how can we add more and more EBITDA into this business? I think as we get to a scale of $30 million, $40 million in annual revenue, which we're very close to, I think we'll be there hopefully very soon. That will take us into being net profitable. We're really excited about that. In summary, I think fast-growing business, great margins, great expansion, fast-growing EBITDA, strongly capitalized, 140,000 customers, tons of blue-chip customers. I think we have a phenomenal executive team.
Happy to answer any questions anybody might have. I know we got a great room here. Wow, the room is very, very full. That's great to see. Yeah, go ahead.
I think you mentioned that half the customer base is banking and related. Is there something in that industry that your products appeal to or they needed?
I think there's an underlying trend here of companies that for many, many years, marketing was kind of this walled garden within the organization that anything that was like, I'm going to create a video, I'm going to run a webinar, I'm going to run a marketing campaign, that all had to go through this central marketing team. I think there's been a fundamental shift over the last couple of years of marketing teams saying, I want to actually rely on my sales force, my account managers, my account executives to go carry the flag for the company. One of the things that we do pretty much across all of our products is we enable small teams to go have the impact of as if they had a large marketing department in that small team. A great example of this is RBC , who I mentioned earlier.
We've got a couple of divisions of RBC now. They want to enable their front line, their brokers, their wealth managers, their capital markets people to go run their own campaigns, create their own videos, stuff like that. For many, many years, that all had to go through a central team, right? I've got the two or three people in my corporate marketing department. They do video. Everything goes through them. That doesn't really work in a kind of modern marketing environment where you might have 5,000 people all interacting with clients every week, all sending out their own newsletters, all sending out their own communications. In a lot of use cases, we've been able to go in and say, you know what?
We're going to enable your entire 5,000-person sales force, account management team to be able to go out and create videos that are going to be the same quality as what they would be coming right out of your corporate marketing team because we're going to leverage templates, AI, workflow, automation, stuff like that. We're going to maybe allow your corporate marketing team to just approve things for compliance reasons, for example. We have a big focus on compliance workflows. We have a big focus on end-user enablement. A lot of those businesses have huge sales forces that they want to enable. I think that's been a big focus for us. Yeah?
I just want to talk about the history of Banzai and everything that you guys kind of went through with that. It looks like it was a, it looks like just from the research, it was a stack deal at the moment?
Yeah.
You guys came up with it.
Yep, yep, yep.
Why did you guys decide? What made you really want to go public? What made you go for the stack? Was there any lessons learned from it?
I mean, how much time do we have? I don't think we have enough time to cover all the lessons learned.
I don't know if you should do it.
It's a great question. I think we initially decided to go public really as a tool because we thought that this would be a more effective way of capitalizing our strategy of doing M&A. I think, obviously, at the time we decided to do a de-SPAC, that was a really good idea. I think between the time that we decided to do it and the time it closed, it became a really bad idea. We obviously had some challenges coming out of that. I think we spent the first probably 18 months that we were public just cleaning up a lot of the issues that we inherited or a lot of the problems we inherited doing that. I think now what we've got is a business where, again, we've cleaned up all those issues. We've kind of recapitalized the business. I think we're in a very solid position now.
It did take us a while to get there. Definitely took a lot of work to get there, much more than we anticipated. If you want to catch up in the hallway afterwards and talk about some of the lessons learned there, I'm happy to do that.
Competition?
Yeah.
What are you facing out there? Is it mostly internal?
That's a fantastic question. Thanks, John. There are 14,000 companies in the marketing technology space. It's a very competitive space. I think a lot of people would look at that and say, wow, that's a big problem. It does present challenges. I think it actually presents this huge opportunity because there's so many companies that are in this space. There's an enormous field of M&A targets for us and many of them that are at very, very attractive multiples, very attractive prices. I think actually, from my perspective, it's probably our biggest asset, just the number of companies in the field. I think as we bring more and more of those products onto our platform, what we've already started to see is that it gives us more credibility with our customers, gives us better conversations with our customers. We can be a much more value-added partner to our customers.
I think that's a great question. There's obviously huge platforms in this space. There's precedent for creating multiple billion-dollar companies in this space. HubSpot is a great example. Klaviyo is a great example that have both done really well. I think we're basically trying to replicate in many ways what HubSpot and Klaviyo have done with their own platforms.
What's your pricing model? Do you have starters through enterprise? What does it look like?
It's a great question. It ranges. We have some customers that will come in and buy on our website for $100 a month, and we have customers that are spending six figures or seven figures. A lot of times, what we'll see is a customer will come in for $100 a month, and we'll identify that customer and say, oh, OK, this is actually like one person, but at a huge company. It's got a lot of opportunity here. We've done that a bunch of times where our account management team has been able to go and expand that account. We really look at that self-serve business. I mean, it is a great, super profitable business for us. It doesn't cost us a lot of money to run it.
The ACVs are much lower in the self-serve space, but then it basically gives us this huge pipeline of customers that we can go expand.
What's your churn?
In our core segment, so our enterprise segment, we have over 100% net dollar retention. That's a big focus for us. We're pretty maniacal about that. Anybody else? All right. Thank you guys so much for coming. I really appreciate it. Thank you for the great.