Hey, good afternoon, welcome to Genius Group's fiscal year 2021. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and all participants are in listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow today's presentation, and you can find that in the Q&A in your control section of your Zoom. Before we begin, the company would like to remind everyone that various remarks about future expectations, plans, prospects constitute forward-looking statements for purpose of safe harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Genius Group cautions that these forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause their actual results to differ materially from those indicated, including risks described in the company's filings with the SEC.
Any forward-looking statements made on this conference call speak only of today's date, Thursday, May 26th, 2022, and Genius Group does not intend to update any of these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that occur after today. A replay of the conference call will be available on Genius Group's website at www.geniusgroup.net. I'd like to turn the call over to Genius Group's Chairman and CEO, Roger James Hamilton. Mr. Hamilton, please go ahead.
Thank you, Danny, and good afternoon to everyone on the call today, and thanks for joining us and taking the time to be here on our very first conference call with our investors as a public company. I have got on the call with me Jeremy Harris, who is our current Acting CFO. He's in Australia, and a little bit out of reach, I think, on our laptop. We'll see how it goes. If he could add anything when we get to the financials, but otherwise I'll be covering the presentation on this call.
The person who just introduced me is Danny Acut, who is our Head of Investments as well, and as I'm sure you will hear as you ask questions and connect in future, we are and have been always very focused at making sure that we're providing all the latest information to our investors, over 500 investors even before we had our IPO. Welcome to many of you who are here today, and welcome to new investors who have come and joined us since the IPO as well. I'm gonna start by just sharing my screen, and I will cover a presentation which is also available on our website straight after this call. You can see here on the very first screen here, Genius Group leading the education revolution.
I'm gonna be sharing what our overall mission is, and our plans as well as our financials from last year, and also what we expect to see as we go through this year as well. You see all of the normal disclaimers in terms of forward-looking statements, and also our non-IFRS financial measures, which is our EBITDA, and I'll be talking more about that as we go through the call as well. Let me first of all just start with the highlights, and I'm sure for any of you who actually read through our prospectus or looked at our investor deck at the time of our IPO, you saw numbers which were as of, the middle of 2020. These numbers are all updated as of the end of 2021.
So as you can see here, we are very focused at how we connect on our EdTech platform. Students, together with partners, providing, in the same way that Amazon provides for retailers, a global digital store that allows them to reach their shoppers all over the world. We provide educators with a global digital classroom, which allows them to build their entire school with all their courses, with all their programs, to all of our students on our platform as well. We believe that we're disrupting the current education model with a student-centered lifelong learning curriculum that prepares students with the leadership, entrepreneurial, and life skills to succeed in today's market.
Two things that I'm gonna be sharing with you a little bit more about when we actually get onto the whole picture of our business is that we are focusing on the entire lifelong learning cycle from 0 - 100 years old, and we also are focusing very much at building a curriculum which is entrepreneur-focused and helping people to create a job instead of get a job. We've now got 2.7 million students on our platform, and now over 1,200 new students every day. As you're listening to me today, as we're getting to the end of the day in the U.S., we've already completed the end of the day in Asia. We just welcomed another 1,200 students into our community, which continues every single day and is continuing to accelerate as well.
They are coming on board for our 5,000 courses, our 6,000 virtual events where we are not just providing pre-recorded courses, but we actually do the majority of our education live with our partners who are our faculty all over the world. We've got over 10,000 partners in over 200 countries and over 20,000 cities, and we track all of them. We believe the largest entrepreneur platform, entrepreneur education platform in the world, in terms of the scale of number of students and number of partners. As you can see here, our revenue numbers for 2021, we have just provided the SEC with our 20-F, which is basically our annual report for last year.
We reached $28.6 million in terms of our total post-IPO group revenue. If you do look at any of the sites out there and see how they're quoting our revenues from last year, if you see there's a discrepancy between the smaller numbers they're reporting compared to what you're seeing here in our annual report, that's because we now have got eight companies in the IPO. After the IPO, we have eight companies, of which there's just one pending, and that's our university that we're going through the final closing steps for, whereas for all the others, they're now part of the group. This is the total pro forma revenue for the entire group, not just what was part of the pre-IPO group before the IPO.
Do be thinking this year as we give the guidance later that we are actually now talking about these eight companies all collectively together. We had $12.7 million in gross profit. We had a positive EBITDA, and I do wanna stress that while there may be other EdTech companies in the on the public markets right now as well, I believe that we may be unique at the moment in terms of scaling at the pace we're scaling. Maintaining a positive EBITDA as we go as well. We've done that every year since we started as far as the whole pro forma revenues go. That's a very important part of our future growth as well, in that we're not looking to raise funding just to cover our operational costs.
We're actually looking for more funding for the acquisitions that we're doing, and the future development growth that we are focusing on right now as well. The biggest part of that is our EdTech growth, which grew by 83% last year. That is the digital education revenue, which is distinct from the campus revenue, which I'll share a little bit more about later as well. Just to break this into bite-sized pieces, and we'll cover hopefully the Q&A in a fairly similar format. We're gonna start with the mission and market, then we're gonna move on to our curriculum and companies, and then we're gonna finish with the financial results and the outlook.
These photos, by the way, were taken this week, where we had 50 of our closest team members, partners, students, and investors come and join us on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for the bell-ringing ceremony. We've all just basically traveled to our own parts of the world, all over the world, since we actually did that on Monday evening. First of all, the mission. Our mission is to develop an entrepreneur education system that prepares students for the 21st century. Now, I know some of you who are on this call, that you've heard this a number of times before 'cause you've been supporting us for many years, whereas for some of you hearing about this for the first time.
Like, when I explain this mission, hopefully it will make a lot more sense as to why we have the strategy we have in the way that we're growing our business and plan to continue to grow it as well. We believe that the current global education system as a whole is in need of a more relevant, upgraded, student-centered curriculum that is both high tech and high touch. We believe that such a curriculum can be a force for good. We love this quote from Nelson Mandela, "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." Today, we believe it's actually the entrepreneurs of the world that have the greatest power to trigger change.
That means that anybody who's going through university, anyone who's a student, or frankly, anyone who's part of the Great Resignation, where they are an adult already and they are leaving their job to look for a new pathway which is more meaningful and where they can make a bigger difference, they're gonna want to have some of the skill sets that we have been educating our network on in terms of being more entrepreneurial. Like I said, that doesn't mean necessarily running your own business.
It simply means carving your own pathway, your own future, to be doing something which actually is more unique to yourself, to create a job where you're delivering value and then begin to earn as you go, even if that means being a retail investor, being a musician, something which doesn't even need you to have your own company, but actually being resourceful enough to actually find out what those pathways are, given that jobs continue to change and the world of technology continues to change, versus someone who's just learning how to get a job and then is out there in the job market, and if they can't get that job, then they find that they then are at a disadvantage in the world.
This, we believe, is what all individuals can really benefit from if there was a curriculum that enabled this to happen. Given that's the mission, what is the problem that we're solving? We're solving a problem for the entire pie of lifelong learning. If you look there on the left-hand side, you'll see that this is projected to reach $10 trillion by 2030. That's significant. You'll see there on the right how that splits up in terms of the pie, where over half that pie is actually primary and secondary school, from K-12. You have the light blue, which is another 8%, which is the pre-K market. You've also got 25% post-secondary, which is all colleges and universities.
The part where we've been focusing up until now, before the IPO, has largely been in the gray part, the 8% lifelong learning, where there's entrepreneurs actually paying their own way. There's another 6%, which is all corporate training. When you bring all of this together, you have the opportunity, if you have a company focused at this, to not only have a much bigger pie than someone who's just being a primary school or just being a university, but what you also have is you have the ability to have a customer for much longer. Obviously, if you go to university, you're only there for three years.
If you actually are coming into a platform where for your entire lifetime, there are different tools, different mentors that you can tap into and that you can also become a mentor yourself, it gives you a way of building an entire education learning network, which is really what we're all about. We believe that as a result of that, we have a different dynamic in terms of how much a customer is worth to us, and that's our students and even our partners. At the same time, when we actually have them coming on board and joining us, how much it gives us all an opportunity to focus at a different objective than most of education as we see it today.
The objective in both primary or high school is to get you through to your high school diploma, and what happens to you after that isn't as much of a concern. The biggest objective of university is to get you up to degree level, and then when you actually pass your degree, whether you get a job, whether or not you're in student debt, these are things which are not as much of a concern to a university. They're certainly not tracking people's success 10 years later. The way that we're working together with our students is that we track that success over 10 years and beyond. We do believe that as a result of that gives us a different model financially, which we'll cover as well.
Problem we're solving is a problem that we see across all ages, that the current education system and training systems available are delivering a standardized, out-of-date curriculum that most students agree is failing them. With the current jobs crisis and education crisis and the pandemic we've just gone through, which clearly is not yet fully over, this problem has become more pronounced than ever, in fact we believe we've seen an acceleration of this during this time. By the way, this problem was around even before the pandemic. This here is a link to a white paper from the World Economic Forum in 2020 calling for a 21st century education system, and what the components of that system are.
You'll recognize in our solution that we're touching on each of these different areas in terms of technology skills, interpersonal skills, how we actually build global citizenship skills, and innovation and creativity for entrepreneurs at all levels as well. What is our solution? Our solution that many of you who already are familiar with our platform, and even for those of you who might be trying for the first time, we have three elements to do with the delivery, which is the EdTech platform that we have that allows everyone to have their own personalized profile and actually follow a personalized path. We have accredited courses, which is a very, very important part of how we are focusing on our acquisition programs right now.
A big issue, I think, for quite a number of EdTech companies is they can't easily get government certification for their programs 'cause that tends to take many years to be able to achieve. As a result, they'll partner with universities or with schools to deliver on their certifications, but that means you have no ability to innovate to the actual programs that are really gonna help. By us acquiring high schools, universities, it enables us to then have ownership on the actual certified courses. That means that the government's willing to support with funding. It means that we can then also modify those courses to be even more relevant to the people out there, on a day-to-day basis globally.
Our global faculty are all over the world, which means that when we do something like acquire a university, as we are doing in California, we can then deliver those courses all over the world immediately through all of our different partners around the world. In terms of how we then connect with each other on an ongoing basis, on the right-hand side you'll see the idea that the global community is as valuable as the learning itself. There are many connections that happen on a daily basis on our platform.
Daily calendar, so people can come back again and focus at the programs that are most relevant to them, and the 100-year curriculum so there's always another year and always another step for those that are actually going through this pathway, regardless of whether they're a student in school, whether they're in a first startup, whether they happen to have multiple companies, or whether they're already an accomplished investor looking to invest in other people's companies as well. We have 10 principles that make up our entire Genius curriculum. It includes some of the things I've already mentioned, like lifelong learning or like, you know, personalized versus a standardized pathway, but there's also a number of other things you'll notice in here that we haven't yet covered.
For example, challenge-based courses where everyone who's coming into our courses tends to be part of competitions, where there's winners that come out of those competitions. It's gamified. It's impact-focused, so we have, for example, the Purpose Test that links to the 70 United Nations global goals. You actually get to choose which one is the one you want to focus at and partner with other companies to achieve that. You've got the positive credit system, which you'll see we call GEMs, which effectively is a point system that leads to student credit instead of student debt, and so you're actually earning and learning as you go as well.
The global classrooms, which means that every class we have has got students from all over the world that may be experiencing it firsthand with a mentor at a local level, but also at the same time where they can be connecting with people in all different countries and learning from different countries and in different languages, as well. One additional thing we have, which I think is very important to just share, is the merits that someone receives, and the point system they receive, is that it's gamified, is not just for what they're learning. In fact, we have a clear philosophy where we believe that learning through doing doesn't start with reading a book. You know, you don't end up learning how to ride a bike by reading a book on riding a bike.
You get connected to the right people who understand how to ride it. You get connected to the bike itself. Same as learning a game or playing football, you get connected to the team first of all. We see connections and who you're connecting to being something which is worth rewarding and connect to the first step, then learning from that group, then earning, which is how do you actually convert that to a return on investment, then acting, which is the actions you take off the back of that, and reviewing your actions.
All entrepreneurs and those who even are investors, like everyone on this call right now, you've actually learned your skill set by connecting to the right groups, by learning through what they're learning today, and then converting that learning into earnings, and then acting, reviewing on a daily basis, which means that this lifelong learning process never stops. We've actually built that into a system within our online platform. We believe that this is relevant and gonna be of benefit not just to the students, but obviously to the parents of those students, many of which become our mentors, to the teachers out there that can actually now have ways to themselves build multimillion-dollar businesses.
I think many teachers have sat on the sidelines watching YouTubers earning millions on their YouTube channel and thinking, "Well, I have better content than those YouTubers," but there hasn't been a leverage mechanism that they have been able to follow with their certified courses on a place like YouTube or even on a place like Amazon. Whereas with our GeniusU platform, we're aspiring to be that platform, and that place where they can now bring their classes and reach a global audience as well. Plus the schools and colleges that we're looking to partner with and also the companies and even governments themselves, we're seeing that we have, as we go through this pathway, the opportunity to be of value to all of them. I don't believe there is any one of these stakeholders that today believe that the current education system is perfect.
In fact, they're all looking for change, and so we want to be a catalyst for that change that's coming as well. Knowing that we've got a $10 trillion market, knowing that it's a very complex and ambitious plan to build a new curriculum structure, given that the very last time that a global curriculum structure was created, it was way back 50 years ago in the 1960s with something called the International Baccalaureate, which was specifically just for primary and high schools. That has become now a multi-billion dollar platform that now many, many international students go through. But there has not really been any one acknowledged curriculum that lasts all the way from 0 - 100. This is not something that we're gonna achieve overnight.
This is a long-term goal, and most of our investors that have come and joined us in the early days have come on board for that long-term goal as well. Phase one was from 2015 - 2020. This is what we call our pre-IPO days. This is where we focus very much at entrepreneurs. And this, by the way, for those of you who are curious as to where this got inspired by, it got inspired by Elon Musk's blog where he posts first of all about his secret plan which had also three steps. Where he started by saying, you know, "We wanna go out there, and we wanna revolutionize the electric car market, but we're not gonna do that by trying to go out to everyone all at once.
So let's start with the Roadster with the people that can afford the sports car, and then let's go for a mid-market car, and then let's go for a mass-market car." We took a very similar approach to say our very first step, which is educating entrepreneurs. It's about let's go to the people that can afford to pay for their own education and frankly need it. Everyone who's been part of our community up to the first million and now what's coming to 2 million, they all were entrepreneurs that were running their own businesses, and we were able to grow all around the world with the education we provided to those entrepreneurs. Many of them are now our investors as well because they were successful in how they grew their business.
Now with the IPO, we are in the second phase that's gonna go all the way through to 2025, where we're now taking all these tools and building them into the schooling system so that we actually have accredited high school degrees with university-accredited degree programs that can also be in an entrepreneurial nature, and that can be funded by the government and support those that are actually looking to get this kind of support together with companies that are actually gonna be supporting our programs as well. Then that will lead to our third phase, where we then go mass outside of our own programs, and that will be from 2025 onwards.
We believe that that's where we can then partner with programs all around the world and schools all around the world that would like to use our coursework inside their schools and our platform inside their schools as well. We see ourselves as being very much collaborative with the current system. What's really important is that the curriculum is one that we're building step by step, so that at every point we can still maintain a positive EBITDA, and at every point we can still maintain the growth rate that we've been achieving to date as well. That's where we get onto curriculum and companies. First of all, on the curriculum side, what does it look like to have an entire curriculum from 0 - 100 years old?
We believe that even at the 0-7 years old, there's ways to nurture a family and nurture a very young child to be already in an environment of discovery, in one in which you can already start personalizing their learning. It's already not standardized where they're having to compete with others even to get into primary school or the kindergarten. That actually starts not with the education of the child, it starts with the education of the parent. That is gonna link, as you're gonna see later, to Education Angels, which is one of our acquisitions, which is already part funded by the New Zealand government, and is run by Angie Stead. That's one of our acquisition companies that is now already filling up that gap at the prep area.
That leads to primary and secondary school, where, of course, you know, every parent wants their child to go through and get a great education, but to have an education that's personalized to that child is really critical. As you're about to see, the way that we actually de-design that personalization on our platform is a really important part of our strategy linked to the very best entrepreneurial courses that already are out there. You're gonna see that we've just acquired E-Squared, which is one of the best entrepreneurial schools in South Africa.
It's already partnered up with Microsoft for the Imagination Academy that, as part of Microsoft's program for schools, is already attracting entrepreneurial parents to bring in their kids, where they can actually learn how those kids can start up businesses, and how they can learn all the skills that they need, whether it's robotic skills or technical skills, to be able to grow their business as well. We're now looking to expand that globally as well. It leads to the apprentice or the university level, where we have now acquired and we're now in the final stages of completing the acquisition of University of Antelope Valley, which happens to be where I am here today.
That was set up by Marco and Sandra Johnson as a vocational college, which now has also become an entrepreneurial college. It's very well known already for its business school and its medical school, that's providing many certifications at a vocational level as well as degree programs that are all part of the WASC approval process as a university and supported also by the Department of Education. For us, really important to be able to provide the entire pathway, which is part of our post-IPO plan right now. That then leads into all the entrepreneur programs we currently have, where, of course, many of those entrepreneurs are really looking for those students that can come and join their companies as well.
That leads into the mentors, which is all the way up to 100, where we are seeing many accomplished entrepreneurs and investors who've got to a point in their life where they want to pass back their knowledge, and they've just never had a good forum to do that. We provide that forum on our platform as well. One of the most important ways that we provide it, which you're gonna see on our model later, is that we don't just start with the high-cost programs. We also don't just limit ourselves to the low-cost programs. We start with everyone coming on board and joining for free.
Many of you have seen what's happened in, let's say, for example, the games market, where if we go back just 15 years, if I had my son and my son was going to experience a game, they'd have to go and buy a Sony PlayStation or a Microsoft Xbox and then buy the game before they had the opportunity to see if it's the right game for them. Well, a lot of traditional education's been the same. You've had to, you know, buy the spot for your student at school, or they've had to buy their spot into university before they've actually managed to get to the university, to understand if it's the right program for them, and often it's the wrong program. This whole concept of pay before you play is how most education has been built to date.
Whereas that whole new way of doing things, which is a freemium model, which is try before you buy, which is where you've seen the likes of Fortnite, for example, right? Or Roblox or any of these other massive play online games that have actually taken over from those set-box games. This has actually totally transformed the whole way that gaming has gone. We believe the same will happen within education as well, and that everyone deserves a right to be able to trial and find out whether or not something is the right program for them before they actually go through the process of actually deciding whether or not they're gonna run the certification. Just to give you an example of why we believe this is so revolutionary.
Now, some of the companies that have approached the university lately, for example, includes Tesla, NASA. It includes organizations that have a real need to bring the right leaders into their companies at the same time as the leaders who really are looking for the right programs for them to join. We've actually identified five different technologies that each of them are over $10 trillion in size, and each of them have got as many companies looking for the right people to come on board, and join them as they do have talent who want to learn about these different elements. There's a gap in the market between these two. These five are EdTech, which is the $10 trillion market we're in.
It's MedTech, which is all of the biomed companies or all of the, you know, future medical companies that actually are looking for the right talent to join them. It's GreenTech, which includes the likes of Tesla. It's SpaceTech, which includes the likes of SpaceX or NASA. It's also Fintech, which is anyone who actually wants to be learning about decentralized finance, of the future of blockchain, of cryptocurrencies, of NFTs, that this is where we are actually fitting a gap between the companies needing that talent, and the talent that's actually looking for that education as well. In every case, we'll be starting with the free courses, so someone can come just to learn about those courses.
Once they come join us, they can then decide what their personalized journey is, take the right assessments to learn, and then from there, go on a personalized learning path where they are paying as they go. Some might choose just for the weekend program, some might want to go for the summer workshop, some might decide to pay more like $3,000 now, pay for the full certification, or even up to $10,000 + and pay for the full degree program. We have already proven out this model with adult education, where for the likes of our Crypto Club, which is run by one of our mentors, Marcus de Maria, it starts with free programs and goes all the way through to people that are learning all about crypto trading.
Whether it's Property Investors network, which is one of our acquisitions, under Simon Zutshi, it starts by just seeing, well, what kind of property might you want to invest in? Then going through the process of even doing your first investment by just joining a workshop, through to building up a full portfolio, and actually joining the mentorship programs at a much higher cost. At every point, no one's really joining anything without knowing it's gonna already be a value because of the value they already had. If you actually compare what we're doing to other education or EdTech companies, hopefully you better see the difference in terms of our unique difference, which is that it's not just the content we're providing, but the pathway that a student actually follows to go through it.
When I mention about personalization, we are, we believe the only EdTech platform at the moment that begins not with knowledge, but with self-knowledge. Not with awareness, but self-awareness. We have got the Genius Test, which is where the GeniusU platform and Genius Group name comes from, which actually identifies what's your true genius, so that you can learn in the way that your genius works, connect in the way your genius works. It's not a standardized process where some people actually do not enjoy so much like the detail. Some people enjoy much more learning through people. Some people enjoy much more working it out for themselves. Depending on what your genius is, that will make a difference in terms of how you use our platform. Our Passion Test, which actually aligns everything to the right passions.
Our Purpose Test, which aligns to United Nations global goals. We are part of the United Nations Global Compact. We believe we're the first entrepreneur network and education network that's part of that compact to support those goals as well. We have a number of other profile tests, including our partners coming on board and using those assessments as well. When you go to your personal profile, you can see exactly what someone's different talents are or their different passions are. This becomes very valuable for people building teams as well. We see many teams being built off the back of our education platform, where no one's focusing on their weakness, but they're focusing at finding the right team members to fit their weakness and build their business while they focus at their strength.
Our EdTech business model, 'cause I'm about to get onto the next step here is, again, quite similar to other platform models, where our focus is helping other people be able to generate business on our platform. We will have a certain acquisition cost per student, which is $0.76, extremely low compared to the current acquisition costs of schools or universities, which are in the thousands of dollars at times. Also we are very focused at the lifetime value of that student. We are not yet able to calculate exactly lifetime value 'cause we're just simply too young. We have been tracking already 24-month revenue of students coming on board.
On average, for every $0.76 that it costs us to find a student, we see a 60 x return to $15, in terms of what that student is then paying within the first, two years. We're constantly looking at actually building those two numbers, and then supporting all of our mentors that are then using our platform as we grow as well. Our faculty partners also goes beyond, just those who actually want to be a trainer. While we have many trainers, we also have best-selling authors. I myself am a best-selling author.
I had a New York Times bestseller back in 2014, and I had the same challenge as every other best-selling author, which is that as long as I had my books on Amazon, I never knew who was reading my books because they don't share that data with me, and I couldn't invite those people to come and join my workshop or to actually be part of my education process. Now with GeniusU, I've been able to solve my own problem of actually having that pathway, and now we're solving that for many other authors as well, many of which actually have got their own network globally of trainers, where they have no easy way and no platform to be able to look after those trainers or to grow that training base.
With what we're doing, where we're providing not just student certifications, but also partner certifications, training certifications, anyone can come and actually build their entire global training network on our platform, and then scale that, using all the tools that we actually provide to those that come and join us as well. Our growth model, in summary, is that we are looking at partnerships with education companies that want to grow globally, as well as acquisitions of those that actually fit into our curriculum. We then go through a four-step process of acquisition, integration, digitization, and distribution.
We are going to see over the next 6-12 months the fruits of our labor with doing this with our acquisition companies, and we're gonna continue to look for growth through acquisitions as we find the right certified programs that we can build into our platform, as well. We distribute that through all of our faculty and partners all over the world, which itself also is growing, at a very similar rate to our student growth. Our acquisition criteria is that we're not looking to just buy any kind of education company. We're looking to buy those that can actually fit into our curriculum or the campuses that allow us to then deliver on the curriculum as well.
It means that every student has the opportunity to either be homeschooled and just basically work one-on-one with mentors online, to be part of a micro school in a particular city where they could be together with another group and actually learn from top educators and facilitators around the world, through to basically showing up at one of our campuses.
Obviously Entrepreneur Resorts, which I'll share in a moment, is one of the companies that we acquired before the IPO that has already got resorts as well as our co-working Genius Central spaces, where we already have got people who are coming together to co-learn and also to co-work, and actually do it in an environment which is profitable for the acquisition of new customers as well. Obviously EdTech platforms is a big part for the future because we see artificial intelligence as well as the metaverse and the growth of new technologies to be a very important part of our growth, and that's gonna come through us acquiring organizations out there that already have got capabilities in those areas as well. These are the companies that actually now make up the entire group.
We have Genius Group as the as a holding company. We then have GeniusU, which is our EdTech platform that everything then gets digitized through. We have Entrepreneurs Institute, which was the original company that I owned that included the likes of Wealth Dynamics, Talent Dynamics assessment tools, where as a result of all of Entrepreneurs Institute now becoming part of GeniusU, we're able to now reach many, many more people with our entrepreneurial tools. Entrepreneur Resorts is our leading group of resorts, retreats, and co-working cafes for entrepreneurs.
We would love to invite you all, when you can make it out to Bali for our Vision Villa retreat there or to South Africa to our Tau Game Lodge, where we are constantly running accelerator programs, conferences for those that actually want to be focusing and making an impact in the world and actually having that great experience at the same time. Then the four that I have already mentioned, which we've just acquired as part of the IPO, we have Education Angels, which is delivering home education and childcare for 0 - 5 years old. We have E-Squared, which is South Africa-based but also now looking to expand globally. University of Antelope Valley, which is pending final acquisition. We just had the board meeting.
We believe that everything should be completed by the end of this coming month, the end of June. Property Investors Network, which also just closed recently after the IPO, which already is holding investor meetups in 50 cities around the U.K. and is now building that city model to all around the world as well. Those are our companies, and that leads us to one additional piece, that is a big part of our focus now going forward, is that we see ourselves globally as a metaversity. In the same way that a universe has universities, we believe that a metaverse should have a metaversity.
This is a global education and learning layer all around the world, which allows us to have people experience in real life with their avatar in three dimensions all of the learning that they'd want to be learning about. For example, if you are interested in stocks and the stock market, you can come and actually learn from the best leading mentors that are actually already able to share their knowledge by actually going into the campus which is focusing specifically at that area. If you're interested more in new blockchain technologies, then you can actually go into the space where those schools are actually learning as well. You can get connected to wherever they're meeting up in person for conferences, for summits, and take your learning journey with you.
Take your learning profile to get connected to the right people at the right time. We are really believing that if we can scale this globally, that we have a great opportunity of taking a larger piece of that $10 trillion pie. We have got a plan for this year of six campuses. Whether we actually end up with those six or we end up with less or we end up with more, as Danny said at the beginning of the call, nothing here is an absolute promise or an absolute prediction. This gives you at least a sense of what our intentions are of what we'd like to grow.
In the same way that we have these virtual campuses that we're building for startups, for scale-ups, for leaders that are currently in businesses, as well as for students at school or for university, for the mentors themselves to actually learn from each other and for investors to be learning on our platform as well. We're also gonna be attracting in the right partners to work with. So for example, we have Tiger Brokers as one of our sponsors, who themselves have got a package for people that are part of our Genius Group community to actually be able to build up your learning platform. Partners all around the world that actually are supporting different aspects of assets that investors can get involved in as well.
I highly recommend that if you haven't yet had a look at our GeniusU site, to look at what our campus is like, that you have a chance to, go and look at it maybe after this call. We are working with the top partners in the world, so we are actually building our metaversity, on, the Unity engine, which has also been used for the likes of Pokémon Go. Facebook, or what is now Meta, are also using that as their base.
NVIDIA's Omniverse suite, which includes our Genie, which is the idea of everyone having their own AI engine or AI virtual assistant to support you on your journey, that we can actually then also create your own mascot or your own Genie in your virtual world where you actually can be asking that Genie whatever questions you have, and they won't just answer based on what information is out there in the universe. They're also gonna be answering it based on your personal preferences of where you are. As I'm sure many of you have seen the Mini Jensen that Jensen Huang, the founder of Omniverse and NVIDIA was sharing, you might be able to ask you know the Mini avatar at this point.
By the way, Mini avatar is linked to GPT-3, which is the leading or we believe one of the leading AI engines right now, and it's also linked to the entire internet. You could go to your Mini avatar today, you could ask a question, which is something like, you know, "Explain the solar system to me." But if and it could answer that question. But if I asked a question like, "I'm going to Los Angeles next weekend, who should I meet?" It couldn't answer that question 'cause it doesn't yet have enough data about me.
Our ambition is that we actually will have a platform in the future where you can be asking your own Genie questions like, "What should I learn next?" or "What's the next step I should take in my business?" The Genie will actually be able to answer you because it's actually using the very best AI together with personalized information that it has in terms of your learning journey through the platform as well. We have got a plan over the next five years. We have an aspiration to reach 10 million by the time we get to the end of phase two. Sorry, we're talking about 10 million students to get there within the next five years.
We're obviously already, you know, aiming if we continue on what we've done so far, which is 50% growth. We're aiming for 4 million this year. Now, again, not a prediction, but if we actually are able to just continue at that rate of growth, it will mean that we will have 100 million students within the next 10 years. That is our own internal aspiration of what we'd like to achieve. Everything we're doing is focusing at the metric of the number of students joining, and the amount of revenues that gets generated by each of those students once they come on board based on the value of the entire community that we build.
We have got a plan over the next five years of the key targets we'd like to see achieved on an ongoing basis. You can come back and review what we've shared on this slide after this call or any questions. You'd be happy to answer those as well. Which takes me on to the final part, which is financial results and outlook. You'll see on our investor site on our website that we have provided already the annual report. To give you just a few of the highlights from the annual report at the moment, the first thing to share, like I was mentioning before, is that we put down to dollars and cents exactly what is the cost per student.
We can actually say what does our marketing spend need to be. If you ask, "How is it possible we have such a low cost per student, $0.76 for every student that comes on board?" There's two big reasons for that. One is that our first step of entry is an assessment where someone's learning about themselves, and we found people are much more interested in learning about themselves than they are learning about a subject. For example, if we're looking for someone to come join our Investor Campus, while we could have an option of actually promoting a particular course, but there's only so many people that are gonna click through to that.
If instead, we actually are able to say, "What kind of investor are you?" And take them through an investor quiz, they're much more likely to click on that and go through that process, and then we can then deliver up something which is the right thing for them. That brings down our cost of acquisition because we just end up with a lot more clicks per dollar spent. The second thing is that a lot of what we do is based on word of mouth. When someone actually starts using the platform, they go, "Well, I want my team to be using this. I want my family to be using this." For every one person that comes on board, there is a knock-on effect as they then bring on others onto the platform as well.
For both those two reasons, we're able to bring down the cost of acquisition. We wanna keep on focusing on how much lower we can bring that. Of course, on the other side, we also have got the revenues per student over that period of time. I already mentioned that's over $15. We believe we can continue to increase that every year. Certainly for those of you who are long-term investors with us, every year we'll be coming back to that number, and reporting on how we've been able to improve it over time. We have similar numbers for partners as well. We're as focused on bringing the right education partners on board and supporting them as we are the students.
For all the students that come on board, we then connect them to all the best teachers. That leads to how that's then evolved in terms of our revenues. In 2020, our revenues for the pre-IPO group were $7.6 million. In 2021, it rose to $12.8 million. If you include our post-IPO group pro forma revenues, that grows to $28.6 million. That was as of 2021. You'll see that the numbers here translate to a positive EBITDA, just marginally positive at the end of 2021.
This comes back to the point that we are looking at making sure that we can continue to grow without burning through cash by acquiring companies that already are profitable, and by finding smarter ways that all our money isn't going into marketing and into the education side because our marketing cost is lower than our competitors, and also the education side is largely owned by us. So the actual cost of that, of acquiring those certifications or those programs is also much less for us as well. If we actually take that into the summary of what that means for the entire pre-IPO group, that's a 67% growth in the last year.
If we take that just for the digital education side, because we're like, especially when we acquire a company, we're looking to bring as much of that onto the digital platform as possible and then scale that globally. We've seen an 83% growth in last year, and that's without us working on the post-IPO companies. Education revenue, which is the whole education, including in-person education, grew by 72%. Campus revenue includes food, beverage, accommodation for our campuses themselves. That also grew 54%, largely as a result of us starting to move out of the pandemic.
If we actually look at this from the point of view of each of the different companies, we've given a breakdown of, first of all, you know, the growth that we just mentioned, going from $7.6 - $12.8 for the pre-IPO group, which includes Genius Group, GeniusU, Entrepreneurs Institute, and Entrepreneur Resorts. You can see in a number of these cases, the companies either stayed the same size in the last year. Education Angels went from $1.1 - $0.9. E-Squared went from $0. - $0.7. Antelope Valley went from $10.1 -$9. If you ask, "Well, why are those numbers going downwards?" This is before we've had an opportunity to be able to provide all of our EdTech platform to those companies.
They have had to weather last year, the pandemic, where we were still fully in the pandemic through that time, compared to the year before, where we started it in the first quarter of 2020. That's why you're seeing those numbers go down. We are very optimistic that our growth plans for the future, we'll be reporting a different set of numbers a year from now. Property Investors Network is the one company out of these four that was already leveraging on GeniusU and was already digitizing more of their programs. You can see that reflected in the numbers, where they went from $4.6 million up to $5.1 million in revenues over that time. Where you can see the number of students they have is at a whole different factor.
They're already at 157,000 total students, of which 15,000 are paying students. The reason for that is because they have a lot of free programs, and they're following the freemium model, something which we're now gonna bring to the other three companies as well. In terms of assets, you can see how they're growing from what was $4.9 - $6.5. This does not value any of the value of the GeniusU platform itself. That's not showing up on our balance sheet. This now grows to $30.7 as a result of those acquisitions as our total assets during this time, and our shareholders' equity has grown to $40 million during this time as well. Now, obviously, the value of our company is what the market decides it's going to be.
One thing for certain is, compared to other EdTech companies that are out there right now, I'm sure for any of you who already are investing in them, you'll know that many of them are trading at 10x or higher in terms of a multiple on their revenues. We are at a fraction of that right now, and we believe that's 'cause we're fairly new to the market. Over time, you know, it's our hope that the market will see the real value in our organization and our company, and then also as a result of that, value us at a similar multiple.
We definitely see our own growth, which is our main focus, it has the opportunity to be able to at least fit in the same principles that we've actually set for the future. That really brings us to the guidance for this coming year. To date, not to say this is gonna be how we're always going to grow, but to date, we've always been growing by 50% or more per year. That's in our student numbers, and it also is in our revenues. That's because we have just traditionally been looking for at least a 20% organic growth in the company, as well as a 30% growth through acquisitions.
This does mean that this year we are coming up to the middle of the year at the moment, we do believe that we are on track to be hitting between 3.8-4 million students, which is a 50% growth on where we were at the end of last year. We do believe we're on track for a similar percentage growth in our revenues to $43 million-$45 million. As always, these are guidance numbers, but where we actually end up at the end of the year has much to do with our execution. We also believe we'll maintain a positive EBITDA in the coming year at this point, at maybe $1 million-$1.2 million.
We will have roughly around 30 million shares that will be on the market by the end of this year as well. Our main growth drivers obviously is about bringing the right students on board, bringing the right certifications programs. We're living in a world where technology is growing at the most incredible rate, and we don't wanna be left behind on that. We do believe that the leading education companies in 10 years from now will have harnessed what is happening right now with virtual reality and augmented reality. They would have harnessed artificial intelligence. They would have harnessed blockchain-based merits. I'm sure many of you are following right now Vitalik Buterin. If you aren't, I highly recommend you read his blog.
He is the founder of Ethereum, and he wrote a blog just yesterday about the future of education will be in the form of NFTs, where anyone can actually verify someone's certification at any time and verify their resume, and that's something that you'll build up through your lifetime. We believe exactly the same thing, and so we're gonna make sure that we're at the forefront of these different technologies as we evolve and grow Genius Group. We have an opportunity to also be at the leading edge of these technologies as well. There is an appendix which is just showing you the link between our net income or loss and our adjusted EBITDA as well. That really is my overall picture for the summary of where we're sharing.
Any of you curious where does the word genius come from? It comes from the saying, "Everybody's a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." It's time for personalized education and moving away from standardized education, and it's time for us to be igniting the genius within each one of us. With that, I am gonna stop my sharing and come back to Danny for any questions that we have. How was that, Danny? Did I cover everything that we needed to cover?
That's great. Thank you, Roger. That was very thorough, and the presentation and the recording, as you said, will be available on the investor relations website linked to Genius Group. We don't have any Q&A or any comments at the moment coming through, so I'm sure we will have possibly once people start to watch the recording and start to reach out to us, as well. At this stage, we probably will close the call. Thank you very much for the time, and enjoy the rest of your stay in the U.S., Roger.
Thank you very much. Yeah, we obviously are gonna be posting these slides within our investor relations site. We look forward to the coming months. Again, thank you everyone who joined us, and thank you everyone for investing in our vision for the future. All right. Thanks a lot, everyone. Bye-bye.