Hi everyone, and welcome to really the first of our investor calls on YouTube for quite some time. First of all, thank you very much everyone who is here right now. The second thing is, as you'll see on the screen, we have myself, Roger Hamilton, the CEO of Genius Group. We also have Peter Ritz, who has come and joined us on our board as the CEO of FatBrain and now also Board Director of Genius Group. Then we also have, just for the first part, I asked Michael Moe to come and join us here so that we could basically hear from Michael, not just from the point of view of the new Chairman of Genius Group, but also as he was the Chairman of FatBrain. And he has been investing in many, many EdTech companies.
His entire background in investing has meant that he's been investing in a lot of the top EdTech companies around the world. To have him on board with us right now and having the opportunity to have someone who has got so much experience in the industry is fantastic. And I thought it would be great if, Michael, we started off with you just sharing a little bit with all the investors, which includes the FatBrain investors who will be here now as well, just your own perspective of the industry, where we sit in it in terms of Genius Group, and what this merger means from the point of view of investors, the way you think about it. And then hopefully we'll set the framework for what we're going to cover on this call.
Sure. And thank you, Roger. And very, very excited to be with you today. We think the combination of Genius Group and FatBrain has enormous potential of where 1 + 1 could truly equal 11. As Roger mentioned, we have and I have significant experience investing in leading EdTech businesses over the years. And what we see happening here is not just how online learning is transforming the $7 trillion education industry, but how it's really meeting the needs of society as things are changing faster and faster. And you're not going to be learning the ways that people traditionally did, where you went to a physical classroom and dropped out of life. This kind of learning on the fly and learning things that are highly relevant is incredibly important.
What we have here is we have a leading platform with 6 million students on the platform that is focused on the two areas that are the most important for the future of society: AI and entrepreneurship. When you look at the students and universities today, 65% of them say they want to be an entrepreneur or work at a startup. You look at what AI is doing in terms of changing every single business, people are going to need to be AI ready just to participate in the future. We say that AI is like air. We say it's like air because it's invisible, it's ubiquitous, and you're going to need it to live.
We've got this tiger by the tail, we think, in terms of this platform going very, very quick and then merging that with FatBrain to provide really the kind of powering this whole genius ecosystem. Again, we've had the benefit of investing in many of the leading EdTech companies in the world. We think that this business has the potential to be a dominant leader in the space that's the most relevant, which is focused on AI and entrepreneurship. Again, I couldn't be more excited about what we're doing here.
The last thing I guess I'd mention just in terms of the real competitive advantage that we have, when you look at any online learning business, frankly, any online technology consumer business, it's all about one of the key metrics, obviously, is what is the cost to get a customer, your student acquisition cost, and then what's the lifetime value of a customer. This has the most powerful, extraordinary metrics that we've seen. We're now with AI and the methods that we're using through gamification and invisible learning, we're able to acquire a student for less than $1, and the lifetime value of a student is $20+. And so when you look at it across the board, there's nobody that comes close to those types of dynamics right now.
If we can continue to do that, which we think we can't even improve upon it, that becomes very, very, very, very powerful. I think it will also have very significant implications how investors value the business. With that, Roger, I probably took more time than you asked, but we think there's really enormous potential here. Thank you.
That's fantastic. I'm just going to ask a follow-up question to that, and then I'll let you go as well, which is a really big part about our investor community is they themselves are also lifelong learners, like all of we are as well. Obviously you're really the founder and the head of GSV, which is very interesting in terms of it being all about Global Silicon Valley and the idea of actually taking that ecosystem to different parts of the world, which is obviously what we're doing now also with Genius City. But you're introducing this year alongside the GSV Summit, the AIR Show, which is all about education. We've got a lot of our investors are also in education as well.
Could you just share just briefly so that everyone gets off this, not just hearing about our company, but also things they can be doing to move forward as well, how the AIR Show differs from the GSV Summit?
Yeah. So we have a summit with ASU, Arizona State University, which has been ranked the most innovative university in the world or United States last nine years. And so that's a three day event. We have 900 education technology companies come to that event, 7,000 people from 100 countries around the world. And that's the core event that we've had for 15 years. We've added to it a two day event in front of that we call the AIR Show, standing for AI Revolution, which is going to be 100+ AI EdTech businesses and how AI is really, as I mentioned before, really transforming this $7 trillion industry. So that's going to be in San Diego, April 13th through the 17th. And if you want to learn more, asugsvsummit.com.
But again, we think that the platform that we've built at GSV can be very advantageous to Genius Group and FatBrain as we continue to move aggressively forward.
That's fantastic. Thanks very much for that. With that, Michael, I will let you go and look forward to seeing you again soon. Then we'll come over to Peter. Thanks, Michael.
Thank you.
Excellent. Peter, let's start before we actually get into the agenda here with really the same question for you again, because we have FatBrain investors on here as well. I know everyone is looking at how post-acquisition, post-merger, we are working together. Just from your perspective, I'll be showing as I go through this as well what the real key benefits are that you see and how this becomes a creative partnership for the future in terms of how we're going to be growing the new and large Genius Group now.
I'll probably focus on two things. We've been fortunate to build a strong business providing what I would call acceleration and enablement services in AI. Over the last several years, close to $200 million of revenue just in that kind of space. Now, powering engineers with AI and AI with engineers, so to speak, it's a symmetrical relationship. It has become quite in vogue, what we've been doing for a long time and really successfully for large enterprises. What we found key was the fact that most people need to be educated first in order to consume AI in the right way. That has taken and used to take us a long time. As we looked across our customers, existing customers, and asked them simple questions: Can we teach you more about how things are and give you that kind of an entrepreneurial boost into your organization?
Everyone's raised their hands. So we have a robust pipeline of that kind of a business, in essence, taking what you've done, Roger, and selling it to our existing customer base. So that's very exciting. And we used to give it away for free. So here's a situation where and it had taken it would normally take longer because in order to sell something, they have to know what they want and so on. So there are many examples now where folks at kind of city-states and other places that are very advanced are taking advantage of this idea. Let's get people educated first. And then let's start delivering the kind of solutions and kind of enablement that's real and that's practical and incredibly meaningful because until you know, you don't know what to build. You don't know how it can help you and so on.
So it's a very exciting time for us, not only from that perspective, but also from the perspective of accelerating our ability to sell our larger institution because, as Michael said, education is like air and AI education is like oxygen, is how I would say it. So it's vital to kind of understand how this is going to transform. And you've used things like electrification and things like motorizing us from mobility for literally millennia. Humans used horses to get around. And boy, what if the world changed when we could use 40, 50, 100 or more horsepower? Not even talking about jetting around. So there are so many different opportunities we have, but we're very excited to be part of the team.
We're very excited to kind of bring really an accelerated course of lifelong and in-place and kind of immediate accelerated learning to the enterprises and governments really that we've been lucky enough to serve. So it's a great prospect all around.
That's great. All right. Thank you very much. I'm going to be coming back to Peter as we go through the key topics that we're going to cover. We shared that in the press release and also in the post as we had them going out as well. So what I'm going to do now is basically share my screen and take us through the agenda of what we're going to be covering. So let's have a look here. First of all, I am going to be just covering the key aspects in terms of what we are covering today, nothing that we are covering here. Basically, in terms of what we're sharing should be seen as promises for the future. But we are wanting to actually give you a very, very clear picture of what our new roadmap is.
You're going to see here that there's a total of six things that we're going to be covering. We're going to cover the mission and market first of the expanded group, which is not just ourselves and FatBrain, but also our recently announced merger, which is in the works with OpenExO as well. We're going to go into the AI product range, our growth strategy, our updated 2024 guidance as a result of this. We're going to give an update on legal actions and shareholder Q&A. We do have Mary, who is tracking all of the chat right now. If there are questions, we're going to do our best to try and capture them. As a result of that, hopefully now, of course, we can't be sharing anything which is nonpublic information.
What we will do on the updated 2024 guidance, we're going to be releasing a PR piece at the same time. So that's largely the largest piece of nonpublic information. But as we go through all of this, if there are additional questions, you can always be sending them to the investor@geniusgroup.net website that or sorry, to our Genius Group website, which many of you are coming to regularly, and put it to that email. The contact details are all there, which I'll show you again in a moment as well. So just before we come into the very first section, which is going to be our updated mission, let me also share that we have committed and many of you have been with us for a year or more now as our investors. And we're always committed to be providing as much information as possible.
For a number of different reasons, we have had to basically have the information much more restricted than what we can share. But as you would have seen, now that we're out of a quiet period, we're in for over six months, I'm now sharing more and whatever I can share, which is possible, I will. There's two different places that you can find this information on an ongoing basis. One is on my Twitter account, which many of you are following right now. And every time I have an ability to be posting, I will be posting on here. And then the second one is that we also have different people who are actually sharing about our own company and what we're doing now as well. This one's worth looking at because it's actually from Peter Diamandis. We've been together through this week.
That's where we've been having the likes of Elon Musk and Michael Saylor and all of the top experts at AI with us in Los Angeles. As you'll see after this as well, some of our investors are going to be joining us at our AI Day, which is taking place tomorrow. I'll provide more information on that on my Twitter account after this call is over. So you can refer there as well. I'm going to share also for some context, what we were just talking about with Michael Moe was the ASU and GSV Summit, which is happening in April. This is the AIR Show, which is all about AI Revolution and education, which has a lot of the top leading speakers within education and now specifically within the AI side as well. So just giving you an orientation of that.
Finally, of course, this is our website with our investor section, which is all in here and all the information that we're talking about on this call. The FatBrain AI website would now be basically integrated into the things that we're doing within Genius Group. Salim Ismail, who we're going to be talking about his business as well, OpenExO, we're going to share how this all links in to the plan as well. So with that being said, let's jump right into it. We have upgraded our mission as a result, obviously, of the huge growth in AI to be a mission of powering our exponential future through AI education and acceleration.
When we're talking about exponential future, the best way that I've been describing it, let me give you two different metaphors of this so you can see what we mean in terms of the education and what we mean in terms of what's different in the future. There was a huge pivotal moment that took place about 100 years ago. It was when all the horses that we saw on the streets suddenly were joined by cars, right? When that took place, mostly every single person who was on a horse had no training on how to drive a car. In fact, most people didn't have a car to start with.
But for those that actually were producing those cars and putting them on the road, what happened at that point was that those who actually got to learn about how you go about driving a car, which is not one horsepower, but now it's maybe 100 or even 1,000 horsepower. When you think in that way that this is about how do you actually change your vehicle instead of being one horsepower, you are 1,000 horsepower. We're now seeing that within AI, meaning but it's not horsepower, it's human power. And so, for example, we're going to be talking about some of the new things that we've launched recently, which include this tool, which is giving us huge results, which is called Student AI. So this is part of our platform.
You'll see on here, it's giving all the tools that allow one student to be not one horsepower, but more than more like 100 horsepower. It gives them that in the form of different AIs. So here's a human, right? James Copper, who is actually an AI that can do your research for you. Allison can manage your maths problems. There's different people like June, who are really focused at data analytics. So it goes on. You can see how someone can very quickly build up an entire team. In this case, it's for university students. We are also now moving forward with a joint venture for younger students in terms of K-12. Then we also and by the way, that's not just for the student. It's for the student to be guided in a much more personalized way.
And then for the parents and teachers that also have assistance as well. We then, through basically popular request, launched the C-Suite team, which is for entrepreneurs. And you'll see here, there's a lot of very recognizable faces. And that's because this is where we actually have the opportunity to be able to have a character in all different areas, right? Like if you wanted to have Albert Einstein or Michelangelo, and so goes on in each of these different areas and different characters, you can have that. And again, it means one entrepreneur or even like one team member within a company can build an entire team. And of course, just like a car, you have to learn how to pilot these AIs and how to personalize them and how to make it really work well for you.
I'm going to be sharing how this has been such a huge success as we've been growing it and now linking this together with the companies that we're now merging together. This allows us to create something which I believe is a lot further ahead than what we're seeing our contemporaries within EdTech doing at this point. Why is that important? Because if we start thinking about that, first of all, that it got to a point where it wasn't even an option to ride a horse down the street, that really does change the whole future of work, right? It means that everyone's really going to need to be able to drive AI at some point. That's really what we mean about an exponential future where any one person can get the 10x productivity or 100x productivity.
If you think about it that way, then it links to the second part, which is a large part about how you build cars is you need electricity, right? You need to have factories. So it was actually the cities at the time when there was the shift and we all started going electric. It was actually at that point that we saw that the cities that were first to go electric, the very first one in America was actually done by Nikola Tesla. That was in Buffalo, New York. Then from there, New York itself, then Chicago, Los Angeles. They all started one by one adopting electricity. Those who actually did it the fastest, they became the leading cities even today. So we think that there's going to be a series of cities we call Genius Cities.
Because if you think about the idea of a smart city, generally a smart city is all about how do you build smart technology and integrate it into a city. And it's a public-private partnership. The government gets involved. The mayor gets involved. But also the companies get involved as well. So it's very, very important to think in that way that if we actually start thinking now not about electricity, but about intelligence and how that intelligence actually gives us all very powerful tools to be able to then scale and grow as the city or as a country, that's for us the most exciting part about the Genius City plan that we're going to be sharing with you today as well.
And hopefully you then see those two pictures, right, of the fact that at the individual level, we have a multiplier, which is the individual, and how we bring those people on board and then grow them within our platform. And then the second one is a city model and how we actually then grow those out with the partnerships that we are putting in place right now as well. So I'm going to share my screen again, and we're going to go from the mission to the market and what that looks like today. You'll see that from here, the entire lifelong learning market is a $10 trillion market. These are statistics that come from HolonIQ, which is one of the leading EdTech and ed, frankly, all around education research companies. You can see basically how it's been growing over time, which is pretty phenomenal, right?
These projections to more like $10 trillion by 2030. And what's very interesting about this, when you look at all the spend, you've got 55% of it, which is actually K-12. And then there's another 25%, which is colleges and universities. So 70% or close to 80% of all the funding either is government funded or has been at this point largely private funded. We believe that the future is largely going to be corporate funded, that the only people that have a bigger challenge within the education field than the students who are trying to look for the most relevant education are the companies that are looking for the talented students, right? Every company is looking for new employees joining them who already understand AI or have an interest in it.
This is where we come in at being the ones that actually link those companies and their ability to then sponsor programs with the students as well. You'll see here as well in terms of 8% being pre-K and also the gray area, which is lifelong learning. That's where we're talking about the likes of people reading bestselling books, going to follow their own YouTuber or podcaster, where they attract millions of people to follow them, but they may not necessarily be part of a certified curriculum. What we're doing is bringing this away that they actually can be. Hopefully in the future, they could even be a replacement to the existing education system. It's the things that people really want to and need to learn versus those that the current curriculum are trying to teach.
At some point when each of those programs were put in place, they were relevant. But things are moving so quickly today, the structure that you're seeing or we're seeing in most school systems are not growing at the pace that they need to through basically a platform like the one that we've developed. So we see this as being a very, very important part of our future. And finally, something that you might think is a very big part of the market, this is the corporate side, the 6%, is actually tiny compared to everything else. It's important. But we want to actually make sure that we're covering the entire market. And so someone who might start now is still with us 10, 20, 30 years in the future.
One thing that is being recognized really for the first time by governments is this is not a maybe, this is a must, right? This is not like an option. It's an obligation. And what I mean by that is that we have seen some massive technological jumps that have taken place. For example, when the internet came along, many people adopted it, but there was no government that made it mandatory that you had to be part of that structural change. Same thing happened when mobile phones came along as well. But what we're seeing in AI now is something very different. In the same way that when we went to electricity and we went to cars, the government basically from day one said, this is going to be something that changes everything. So we need to be involved.
We actually need to not just put money towards it. We actually have to at the same time put regulations in place to enable everything that we're doing to be able to grow. In Singapore, for example, they've actually mandated for certain groups of people that they have to be learning AI. In fact, very recently, Singapore put together a $1 billion fund, much of which is going to education. Now if you're over 40 years old, they're encouraging everyone to reskill with AI as well. But then they're also providing the funding for it. Saudi Arabia is also getting very, very proactive to ensure that they actually stay ahead. All of the government departments have to basically be embracing AI. Abu Dhabi is making some huge shifts and changes in terms of how they're also looking at the market.
In fact, all of UAE, when Singapore came out with their $1 billion commitment, Abu Dhabi came out with their $400 billion commitment. Saudi Arabia just a few days ago did the same for $40 billion. Of course, for that, what they need is not just their technology. They need the education partners to basically bring this in place. That is our ambition, that we can be seen as a world-leading education partner for anyone that's looking to build out their AI and entrepreneurship within their city. One thing that I will say is that in terms of the highlights, we have got at this point 5.4 million students, 15,000 partners. We have some new estimates for this coming year that we're going to be explaining more in our guidance section.
What we are doing, if it was all boiled down to one thing, is solving the problem that with the current AI disruption and also the jobs crisis and education crisis, with people looking to find a solution to the problem that the current system is out of date, and we need something much more agile, which will allow us to grow. Who is it that actually needs this? We're now seeing there's four different stages. There is the student stage, which is basically for those that are looking for an AI-powered education system that empowers schools and university students for the future of work. There's the entrepreneur side, which is AI-powered training and tools to exponentially grow and scale purpose-driven ventures. Some people said they've never seen Elon Musk this pensive. Well, this is actually an AI image. It's not actually an image of Elon Musk.
You've got here then the B2B enterprise section, which is AI-powered training platform and pure intelligence to prepare and equip enterprises for the future. And then finally, there's a government section, which is where we're doing the same for Sovereign AI as we build as well. And whereas Genius Group has been largely built on the business of student and the business to consumer or entrepreneur section, it's actually OpenExO that is doing this both for entrepreneurs and also with a lot of the Fortune 500 companies. And we're going to show you what that path looks like. And then there's also the AI implementation at both the business and the government section, which is where FatBrain has been focused. So we create a continuum that builds on all three.
That enables us to have an EdTech platform where you saw some examples of that a moment ago with the Student AI. We also have accredited courses, a global faculty, which is those 15,000 that we have that have joined us. That community then allows us to actually have city leaders and country leaders as well as certified trainers. And that means that anyone who actually really loves the idea of what we're doing and has the right connections and has the right ability to then build their own Genius City, we're giving them those tools to do that. And they don't have to be a certified trainer, no different from someone who may be a principal at a school, does not have to be the person who is the best teacher. They could be the person who's the best administrator, the best marketer.
We have that same partnership pathway. Then finally, we've got our daily calendar where all of our different courses can also be experienced through an actual tutor that could be taking you through that offline. So it's not a student just sitting on their own, going through the program. They're going through as a community. It's gamified. There's competitions. And the endpoint of it is that you're meeting connections from all over the world that you can then create partnerships with or even receive funding from. This is the Genius Cycle. It's where we basically say that post-merger of all the companies coming together, we then will have four different aspects, which are the four that we saw here.
However, they're actually now shown in a cycle where we really believe that if you're just trying to start with the students, you're missing the first place where revenue can be generated, which is actually where you're providing training at the vocational level or at the entrepreneur level. They pay their money immediately as opposed to basically waiting six months for a contract to come through. They want to get the results now. So for example, the AI Day that we have tomorrow in Los Angeles, there'll be people around the world that get connected to it. There'll be people who actually show up in person. But the most important thing is that everyone has paid in advance to be there. That enables us basically to have a very strong cash flow model going forward.
That then leads to the B2B, which is where some of these individuals, or students, will actually then get into our summits and our sprints that we do at a corporate level. This year at the B2B level will then lead to the government level where when they see that there is a high demand, then they will be working alongside companies like ourselves. And then of course, you then have the longer-term and by far the largest part of the market, which is the B2S, which is the students. But of course, if you've got this cycle going, then you're going to have funding in place for those students. I'm going to show you how that works here. And that would then lead basically to the students growing up, getting to a point where they actually have those entrepreneurial and their AI skills. And then the cycle starts again.
And we see this very much like a virtuous cycle, which continues to improve and grow to enable us to be able to achieve a sustainable economy, what we're calling an exponential economy. Just on these parts here, before we go into the products, Peter, I'd love for you to share on this because we've obviously been working on this for quite some time. And we're already seeing the results of basically us having this as the core message when we're speaking to mainly the partners that we're actually looking to bring on board at the moment. What would you add that I've missed or that you think would be important for us to be sharing with everyone right now in terms of the Genius Cycle?
No, I think you articulated it just right. was yesterday when people were thinking that by going to either a grade school or a university, you will obtain all the necessary skills, which will last really a lifetime. I think there's a tremendous demand that we're seeing in every part of the engagement that we've had for upskilling. As you said, just bringing in this new technology and new way and new systems to be able to innovate, even within tried-and-true kind of institutional pillars of economies, whether it's telecommunications sector, whether it's logistics, finance, or anywhere else.
Everyone needs innovation. Everybody is looking a little bit scared and with a bit of fear to say, how is this? How am I going to be disrupted? And what we're doing is, don't fear the fear. Get enabled, get upskilled, get educated. That way, you know where the problems are.
Once you understand what kind of tools are available quickly to solve the problems, you know, lie in front of you. You can be faster to market. You could be faster to fail. And it's okay because sometimes it's easier and cheaper to fail virtually, right? It's just to kind of test things out. But I think that's what's very exciting, that we're really comprehensively covering every area of engagement from K to gray, so to speak. And that kind of reach and that value, I think, is going to sustain a strong growing business to line up with the strong growing market. So I think it's very exciting from all those kind of perspectives.
That's great. Thank you. Thank you very much, Peter. Okay, I'm going to go into the second of the items that we want to be covering right now as well. Again, if anyone has, we may not be able to answer all the questions, but if anyone has questions about each of these items as we go through it, please just drop it into the chat and we'll cover as many of them as we can going forward. Okay, so the second of the items that I'm going to cover is this one here, which is the AI product range. So if we have a clear picture of where we want to be going, what does it look like? How do we get there from the point of view of the products and the product market fit?
The first thing is that the AI-driven EdTech platform that we've been building, we've been building this and we've been consistently growing by about 50% per year, we had a goal when we started the company that if we could start with 1 million students and we could basically just be adding that 50% or at least spend the first year building and then get to that million, then if we went up by 50% a year, by 2030, we would achieve the 100 million mark, which is what our goal has been. Now, of course, we may get there sooner. It may take longer. So we're not making projections at the moment of exactly when we reach that.
But what I will say is that we've actually linked our goal of reaching those 100 million students with the goal that the board has tasked me as a CEO to achieve, which is the billion-dollar revenue number. And of course, we don't stop there, but we say, okay, what are the actual steps that allow that to happen? And the way that we build the platform is until AI came along, we were using assessment algorithms to be able to at least get personalized information on all of our students.
Now, what's changed is that while this has always been done by asking a series of questions in assessments, and that's one of the things that's allowed us to bring our cost of acquisition per student down, now it's actually a whole different game because, of course, an AI can get all this information and continue to evolve it over time as you evolve, as you grow as an individual as well. And so now we've actually found that the actual value and the actual cost of finding a student has dropped by a factor of three. So now it's like for $1, we're actually seeing that we're getting 3 students versus what we were doing before, which was getting one to two students. And that's pretty phenomenal. And that's because everyone always is more interested in themselves and those that are interested in them than the content itself.
They want to learn what's relevant. They want to be guided to the right, not just things to know, but also people to know, and then make those connections directly as well. We're now at the stage where that's happening at scale. The way that we actually had things evolve before, it was a freemium model that leads to a premium model, where the question is, can we get a student for $1 or less? Can we get them to a point where, on average, they're actually spending at least $1 a month? Because if that's the case, then it means that over the year, we're getting a 10x return on our marketing money. In the first month, we're getting our marketing money back already. We've been achieving that pretty constantly as we've been growing the business.
Now we're basically revamping those numbers based on having brought AI into everything, always with the same objective, which is that we're personalizing everything as much as possible. That data of the student stays with the actual platform and with the student as well. That's very, very important. We're going from a world where the likes of Facebook, Google. We've seen the challenges you have when you get to a certain size. The entire system that's been built is based on a closed system, but open data, right? So your data gets shared with advertisers. Your data gets shared with the executives and the companies that are actually part of that platform. But when it comes to the system, you don't have many ways to change the system yourself. It's really the company that controls that.
We're now seeing a reversal of that, where instead of having a closed system and open data, we're seeing that there are open systems and closed data. You get to hold onto your own data. It's not the company that does that. That's a really important thing because if you want to move from one AI, like ChatGPT, for example, to another AI, like Gemini, the challenge there is that you're not going to want to give much information that's private, especially if you're in a company, for example, to ChatGPT or Gemini, if you know they're openly sharing that with everybody else.
However, if you know it's your information, and if you find something which is better than any of those, for example, for Gemini, you actually find that a brand new type of platform comes along, well, then you can actually keep your data and basically just switch with that. So when you actually look at each of our different platforms, when you come to something like Student AI, when you go into the image generator in here, you'll see that it actually allows you to use DALL-E, allows you to use Midjourney. And if new ones come along, it'll allow you to use those as well, but still with your data in place and with memory. So every one of your different tutors, you can keep growing their memory and what they're learning.
And you can add that memory in, not just in terms of what they know, which is how you want to be guided, but also your actual company data. That also is something that you can actually get it to remember. So every time you come, you're not having to share what your plans for the year are, what your financials are. And you'll see on here that we've got the likes of your CFO that you can have, where if you basically took on a CFO and said, okay, the person that I want to have who's going to be working with me is going to be John Rockefeller, right? Or it's going to be Oracle of Delphi. Well, you could also say, well, actually, I want you to read all of the books by Warren Buffett and basically guide me with the principles that he has.
It then actually does that, right? This is where it's super important that we are moving so quickly with AI. You want to have your data, but you also want to be able to evolve the AI. Right now, if you ask your CFO, what is the best strategy for the year, it can advise you, but it's right now not doing it in a way that actually develops your entire spreadsheets and your budgets and then goes out and actually even makes payment for you. We believe that time is coming very quickly. Right now, we're text to text when it comes to using AI, going from text to task, where it's actually doing the task as well.
With the way that we're building right now, we're going to be, I think, be on the forefront because we're making sure it's personalized, the memory is there, and you can keep upgrading the body or the system while that's taking place as well so that we'll always be at the forefront. And more importantly, the high value will be in the data that we have and the loyalty of our users based on the fact that they know that we can't take that. Where that actually shows up the most is in Sovereign AI, which is where a place like Dubai or UAE actually has a different set of values, a different set of a different culture than Singapore, for example, or New York.
And so the fact that you can actually also do this at a national scale, where the government can actually have a say as to what's allowed and what's not allowed, so it follows the rules, it follows the culture, that also is fantastic because it means they're not having to work with international companies who may not recognize or be able to really tailor it the way they want. And most importantly, those technology companies can still be involved in the whole process, but they have us there to help them localize that as well. So Student Pathway, this actually shows everything I was just talking about in numbers now. We can see here that for every $1,000 in marketing spend, we're actually getting over 7,700 visitors.
And then from there, when you look at the number of who actually upgrade, it's not a massive number from the 7,700, but with the premium side, which is where people then pay, we then are seeing somewhere in the region of over $1 per month on students. We're experimenting constantly on different ways we can improve on that. For example, our test assessment was one way. We run challenges, which are effectively like competitions, gamified. We have summits, which is where we have a much larger number of people coming for a small period of time. Each one of them gives us a different return on acquisition spend, where we're seeing it going as high as 55-87x .
We'll be regularly reporting on this to our investors as to how these are improving because they are the backbone of the first five multipliers, which is the user multiplier. For every user, if we know we can be profitable, then that can allow us to keep on growing and accelerate our growth as long as we keep on improving on these metrics. We have that also for partners, obviously, that we do that with as well, where we aren't thinking so much about how much are they paying us, but more importantly, how much are we paying them? Like how much revenue can they generate? We do have some great success stories that we're building now into an awards program. As well as us having the Genius Prize for entrepreneurs or for students, we have the Genius Prize for our partners.
We're also building this out into a full ranking of the top Genius Cities around the world, where there will be cities we're not even working with yet that will make the list based on the nominations coming in from our partners and our users as well. So it is effectively like an Amazon for education. I myself am a New York Times bestselling author. If I was selling shoes, I could sell my shoes on Amazon. When it comes to my entire product pathway, other than the book, I can't be selling my courses on there. I can't be even reaching the students who bought my book. So as a result of that, there is a gap in the market, which is what we started filling with the GeniusU platform that we built.
That's why we built this all around the world at the stage that we have. The partner community includes people that already have over 1 million students, right? Or people following them in their podcasts, YouTubers. That's a very, very important part of us growing. The people who are at what we call the level three partnership, they're the ones that are putting their content on the platform and then allowing certified trainers to be certified on the platform as well. That's where the 15,000 faculty partners come in. You can search for any one of the partners that we have by your passions, by your purpose, by your country, by your city, and a whole series of other criteria. Most importantly, they all have rankings, right? Which all come from others who already use them.
So you know if you are picking the ones at the top that you're getting the most popular mentors on the platform together with the most popular products and programs on the platform as well. So that is it in terms of the product side. And what's important about that is that the growth strategy is the integration of those original products with where we're now going as a business. So I'm going to go through this so that at the end, I'm going to bring Peter on to share the FatBrain mix and how that links as well.
But our three-phase strategy is similar to, I was inspired to put this together after seeing how Elon Musk put together his secret plan, which also was in three steps, where it was like start with something where people are willing to pay for themselves and they're willing to pay a substantial amount. That's where he started with the Roadster, then go for the mid-market car, and then go for the mass market car, and one funds the next. We did the same thing from 2015 to 2020. We didn't go to schools or universities to try and get them on board when we were just starting. We went specifically to entrepreneurs that wanted to get an ROI on the training that they were doing to improve the size of their business with programs for startups or for scale-ups.
As a result of that, we got our first 1.4 million members. When we actually then came onto the New York Stock Exchange in America, that's where we basically then established leadership on the AI-driven companies. This is basically where we are right now. That basically has taken us up to over 6 million students. Then we're actually, by 2025, believing we're going to be ready to really expand out the Genius City model, the Genius formula. In fact, a lot of what you're seeing here is we're getting there early by launching all of this this year already. We believe we're going to have really strong proof of concept by next year already. What you're seeing here is dates. As it says here, these are internal targets and should not be viewed as financial forecasts.
But to give you an idea of how we're building our roadmap, we say, okay, you can get $2 billion either by having 100 million students paying you $10 a year each. You can also get there by having 100 Genius Cities that are each, on average, generating at least $10, sorry, $10 million worth of revenues. So we're pretty much using both of those multipliers to build things out. You can see here our focus is getting to that 10 million students. You're going to see from our guidance, we've actually upgraded this already in 2024. Why are we choosing this city model rather than just going like some of the other EdTech companies across globally and treating everyone the same way? Because we believe that now we are moving into a world where people want to have localized AI, right?
No one wants to have this kind of disaster that happened with Gemini recently because that was all done centrally, effectively, by a team, not by basically 100 different teams all doing their own thing in 100 different cities. In our case here, you would see that if we had Dubai with this Sovereign AI, they would not be affected at all by what might be happening somewhere else in the world. And this was actually Jensen Huang, who can be agnostic when it comes to the actual platform because he's the one generating the servers. He said this is one of the most important things. And he said this is where every different country should have its own AI. But we believe Sovereign AI is more than the data. Sovereign AI also is the talent.
Like I said before, smart cities are smart technologies, but Genius Cities are smart technologies and smart humans. We see that there are many different competing companies trying to build the sovereign AI platform, the sovereign cloud, with the same companies and countries. The challenge with that is we don't know who's going to be the one that wins out as far as the technology platform goes. We know that the ones who can figure out the model to be on the ground and to actually take the very best expertise that we can be building around the world and then actually be able to export that, that becomes very powerful. I was living in Singapore for many, many years, and I saw what happened when Singapore saw that one of its best exports was city building itself.
So now has partnerships with China, with India, where these countries are willing to do a partnership with Singapore and even give their land, their business contracts on the basis that they know Singapore has more expertise at real smart city technologies. As a result of that, Singapore has grown that in different countries around the world. We believe that the same will happen with companies that also find a very smart way to be able to build out these cities built on not electricity, but on intelligence. This also is about how we go about not just having the concept and then having the countries that then put the money into making it work, but we're seeing that the public-private partnership is growing massively.
Like this is in Singapore, where we're seeing the billion-dollar fund and the fact that they've already said that they want to have a tripling in the AI talent pool. These were all happening in December or in February. But it all started with Google AI and Caroline Yap, who we were spending a lot of time with this morning and yesterday. You'll see here they put together a full sprint of 100 solutions in 100 days at a countrywide level, which included government agencies, included initiatives that included the schools, and at the same time included startups and large corporations. And as a result of that, they all had the ability to learn from each other and scale. And it's only like what, six months later, and they've now got a second round of 150 more AI solutions that's taken place.
The program, Trailblazers, which is the Google program here. There is now a Microsoft program, which is called Pinnacle. But in each case, they have to go in, run this as a program, and then basically move on to the next thing. And neither of these technology companies are actually focusing at being education companies. So much better to partner with an education company like ourselves that really understands and is aligned to the same mission and the same problem that we're trying to solve as well. And then we believe that that really is the future. And the Genius Cycle will be a methodology that by proving this out, getting into partnership with our technology partners will enable us to really grow. So what does that look like in terms of us launching a Genius City?
Well, you're going to see in the next couple of months how we launched the Dubai, the Abu Dhabi, and the Singapore Genius Cities, right? And in each case, the whole goal is to say, well, if we have a goal of 10 million, there'll be some might be less, there might be some more. And we at this point are going through this process of launching these out where over the three phases, the first phase, which is called the seed phase, is where we launch the Genius City with the executive programs that OpenExO currently runs. We'll have 100 business leaders on it. It'll be basically a two, three-day program. And on there with those 100, each of which already can get to another 10,000 plus, that we want to be at a point where we can already be sustaining a small team at a million-dollar revenue target.
We then lead that on with the second stage, which is where we actually run an AI summit, the EXO AI Accelerator, which is very similar to the ones that EXO runs right now and the ones that we have been running. Then the AI certification program, which actually enables other trainers to be learning how to also run these accelerators. In our experience, the vast majority of our people who get certifications started as students and then realized how much demand there is and how really strong the programs can be. Then this builds our own army of not just AI individuals, but also of human individuals that are talented at being able to then scale and impact others as well. This takes us to more like 10,000, which is 100 times, obviously, the 100.
And then the third stage is where we get up to the 1 million. And that's where we actually launch a full sovereign AI education and acceleration cloud. And if you say, well, well, well, what is this in terms of building the AI future skills, the entrepreneurial future skills? It basically, without going into too much detail here, is about knowing that every time you want to build something in a way that can be sustainable, it starts with who are the enabling stakeholders, which is our own Genius team that we're establishing in each of these places. It includes our investors that will be coming in. And these investors, what's very important is if you're having the government fund a program, they don't want that funding to go off to another country, another city.
So by actually creating a mechanism which allows them to know the money that they are putting in are actually going in to support their programs. This fits in very nicely with the current programs that are being run in Singapore, for example, or in UAE. They know that none of that money is going offshore to another company other than the technology. They can actually be looking to hire the right trainers on the ground. The challenge is at the moment, there are no trainers on the ground that are working at a world-class level because this is too new and too early for others to have even gotten involved and got started here as well. So the fact that we're in here as, I believe, one of the first to be building this out is clearly a multi-billion-dollar opportunity.
Education partners and marketing partners also are the enabling stakeholders. And they then lead us over here to enable stakeholders, the ones that actually are now superpowered with what they've learned and what they've put in place. That includes the government. That includes the businesses, the entrepreneurs, and also the students. That includes also the parents, right, that actually want to be part of a new way of thinking, a new mindset, and most importantly, a new set of tools that they simply didn't have before. You'll see that all the technology partners that we've been talking about, the ones that actually generate their own platforms, they will have to have localized AI apps as opposed to just global solutions. Sovereign AI solutions, which means that they actually are holding onto the data and building their own talent base.
Industry AI solutions, which means they have pure intelligence between the different companies. Enterprise AI solutions, which would then allow internally in a company to be able to actually upskill all of their actual staff. Citizen AI solutions, which is one of the biggest ones in terms of security, safety, and the tools that enable you to maintain your culture. And then impact AI solutions of how you can then actually make a bigger difference in giving back and supporting the biggest challenges that we see out there, whether it's environment or whether it's equality, and making sure that we've got AI solutions that are very specific to that culture and to that country as well. How do we then build all of this out?
We do it by basically making sure we're bringing the parties together and we have our own AI army, our own AI courses, like the things that we're just sharing. And then at the same time, the summits, the sprints, any country or city or even company can see the proof cases, right, through our awards and through our success stories. And then they can choose which one they're going for, knowing already it would work for them. And then all of the acceleration side, which is really having the tools. It's no good to learn how to drive the car if you don't have a car. And it's no good having a car if you don't know how to drive it. So you actually need both parts here. And education is at the center of it.
All of it's freemium to start with, so you can always come in and test it first before you then take it on. But this is where we have the avatar assistants, which are basically working with the industries. We have the Prime Cloud, which is where we can keep the data much more local to each of these areas. Talent platform, resource platform. And as we get more and more into the metaverse, NVIDIA already is creating avatars, which are in 3D that you can basically interact with. Then, of course, that's another medium that all of this can easily plug into as well. So based on what we're sharing here and here, I'd love, Peter, for you to put your articulation on it because obviously we're out in Dubai and Abu Dhabi recently. I'm going to be out there next week in Singapore.
We're seeing firsthand what the impact of this and more importantly, the reaction people are having to the need of this as we've actually gone and spoken to those on the ground. We'd love to hear just any additional thoughts you have. Even like the conversation we're having with Eric Pulier, the conversations we're having with potential partners, the Miami conversations, Austin. People see that this is happening even here in the U.S. as well as overseas as well. Peter?
Yeah, yeah, there is a tremendous demand and kind of drive by local governments. This is an interesting thing that local governments can actually do more. When I mean local governments, just think cities, mayors of cities, and involved, excited people who are kind of committed to do something.
We had a great example we'd shared before in climate change where mayors were able to do and accomplish more results when getting together and setting clear goals and everything else for how they could control, whether it was New York, Miami, Abu Dhabi, or other places, Singapore, and so on. Then governments, because governments are bigger, heavier, kind of more sophisticated tools. But what's really exciting for me and what we've heard, I think, together, and Singapore really kind of has shown how this is very practically doable and attainable. So it's real. And it's run in front of us is government doesn't have to start it. It simply can enable it. Start it doesn't like fund it and go through all the cycles. But they can enable it by simply providing a venue, a physical venue.
With all the virtual things going on, people still like to get together in person and see each other and learn from each other and so on. So what's interesting is this whole idea of 100 by 100 has driven really exponential multiples. So what Singapore did when it said, look, what can we do in 100 days and what kind of 100 use cases can we have? Because businesses already know the problems they have. If we just feed education as input and now everybody is on the same page, they can all understand what their real purpose is, what their mission is, right? What could transform them? And what could have real impact? And how it can be aligned. And it's different for different businesses. Sub-businesses care about service delivery. Some businesses care about automation and so on. But they know their pain points.
We come in and the tip of the pier is just to get everybody on the same page on what is the art of the possible. And that's what Singapore has done, right? It wasn't a massive kind of, hey, we're going to invest first. It was more like, let's get everybody together. Let's get them educated. And by the dint of that first 100 by 100 days, then all the kind of use cases fell out that could have most impact by the people and businesses that were kind of really aware of them. And then funding came. And I think now the same hymn is being followed by Abu Dhabi and at country level by Saudi and so on and so on. So I think the plan is there.
There is a tremendous kind of demand and almost a little bit of competition in terms of whether it's Vancouver or Austin or Miami, many other places that are saying, wait a second, we want to be a Genius City. There's a tremendous, you know, welcome and red carpet open for you to come in. Teach us what we need to learn. I think, again, this starts at the ground level. People pay their way, just like you said, in entrepreneur kind of scale and what Musk had mentioned before. People pay their way, businesses pay their way to understand the art of the possible, then come up with really practical, attainable use cases where they can implement it.
For some who actually need help, we can accelerate their journey because we have solutions that we've already done, proven at scale, to deliver them much faster and really kind of propel them into the future. Because interestingly enough, the future is happening to us, whether we like it or not. It just is. And if we don't catch up, it's difficult because there's lots of talk. Well, we're just in Los Angeles. So there's a lot of talk about whether human interaction with machine is going to be higher intelligence like we did with horsepower or doomsday like, you know, is depicted by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey or Terminator, right? So you have this kind of very interesting dichotomy that we're very excited and I think the cities are all excited to have impact and to have impact quickly, right?
So, you know, we have a modest, you know, projection as to how many Genius Cities we have. But to me, the ability to have two axes really, you know, learners on the one hand and then cities on the other hand, these kind of physical, physical and logical locations is very, very exciting and going to be highly accretive for us all around.
Yep, thanks for that, Peter. And I think one of the most important things is the way we've built out our model has been by having a team that's testing and measuring every day and optimizing to ensure we're getting maximum retention, maximum engagement, you know, lowest cost for new people coming on board, which happens when it's more viral and people are recommending it to their team members or even bringing all of their team or all their students on board.
This has been happening very much at a global level. For us to be having a team in each one of these different cities, often led by the actual city leaders themselves stepping up and going through the steps of building the city or even, you know, through the city mayor or the country government saying, okay, we want this now. We want to be a part of it. So we do have within our two board directors, Eric Pulier, who is leading the AI initiatives within FII, which was set up by the Saudi and UAE governments together with other governments around the world to actually do exactly what we're trying to do here. And they're looking for those solutions. Or whether it's Salim Ismail, who has many heads of state that he is working with, where they say they want this information.
They're bringing him in because he has a whole model which allows you to build an exponential ecosystem. They want it. Until now, he's never had the ability to then actually deliver them the solution. Whereas now, by us all being together, he opens the doors to all of the high-level contacts and we can then be coming in with that solution. That's a very, very exciting part of this whole process, is we all had a piece of the jigsaw puzzle. Now, by bringing the companies together, that's what really makes the difference right now as well. With that, let me just go on to how quickly does this have an impact on our financials? The answer is pretty much straight away. You'll see here that updated guidance, which is the next part of what I want to cover.
There's two elements to this. There's first, what's going on within our own company? It was back in January that we basically were thinking, or we actually came out with our guidance that we would be hitting between, you know, $56 million-$60 million in revenues, which clearly is a big jump up from last year.
But already with our combination and with our plans that are currently in place, we have put in place what we believe are conservative numbers, but certainly numbers that we are now, you know, basically looking to grow to and enable us to actually get ready for an even bigger year and frankly, number of years, which are accelerated from where we thought we would be at this point when we actually had our IPO, $105 million-$120 million, which is like 83% growth on our guidance that we gave just two and a half months ago. And with our EBITDA growing by 130%, might more than doubling from where we were expecting it to be when we started the year. And so more like $6 million-$7 million.
With that comes 11.5 million -12 million students and six Genius Cities that are in process. We've already mentioned three of them. We already have got a short list of the next cities, but we don't want to yet disclose because that could change. But we will have in process six towards our 100. It does mean that we'll see an acceleration going forward as we perfect the model and as we go closer and closer to the AGI that we all know is coming within AI. So I'm sharing this right now because there has been also a press release that came out during the timing of this. I'm just moving my document here on the basis here as well, which you can go refer to, which just provides more information and more detail off the back of where we are now.
But I think, you know, there's something we are constantly looking at how we improve, which how do we compare to our peers in the industry? There isn't anyone at the moment that is bringing AI to the forefront, right, where AI is the first thing that you actually get connected to. But there are many EdTech companies that are on the stock markets. And there are comparables that are companies that IPOed quite similar to where we were. And the metric we're taking, and of course, you know, all our investors and analysts will take different measures. But one we absolutely look at is how does that growth compare to other companies? How are we doing against them? And we can see here we've got a we just selected a number of the different companies. We have Udemy, we have Coursera.
We have Roblox, we have Docebo, and we've got Duolingo. And you can see that there's a pretty dramatic change in their growth rate, which is anywhere from 12%-39%. You know, as many of you know, we've been averaging around about 50%. With our combined group, we're actually now at a 43.8% growth rate, which is still higher than any of these comparables on the marketplace. And then in terms of our revenue growth, in terms of the numbers and what they look like, we have got here. Sorry, this was 2024. This is 2023. We can see here that we have got the actual growth rate from last year, meaning between 2022 and 2023, how much did the revenues grow? Again, 15.9%-43%. And we're at 66%. And then we have, well, what are the multiples?
Obviously, the multiple in revenue, which is to what extent are some valued higher than others based on their revenues? We can see there's a huge difference with 18.9x revenue is the market capitalization of Duolingo compared to Udemy. Now, if we actually look, well, is there a correlation between what their multiples are and what their growth rate is? Well, obviously, there is. We can see that. And it does make a very big difference if the company is sustainable. And everyone can do their own homework to see to what extent some of these companies are making profit and some of them are not and are burning through cash as well. So these are all the different variables that someone should be doing before making any decision.
But from our point of view as management, not so much as investors, but as the management to say, are we doing a good job of having communicated our message and at the same time attracted the right investors such that they understand the message and they want to stay with the business? And we can see here an enormous difference between these numbers, even these numbers, which were a multiple of revenues going up and up and up and up from 2.5x revenues to 18.9x revenues. Genius Group, you know, having achieved this number and looking to achieve a number which is more conservative now is trading at 0.7x revenue. And we know that there's a series of different reasons that this could be for. We all have our own theories of what they are as well.
But one of the biggest goals we have going forward is to make sure that we're doing a better job at communicating to all the investors coming on board that we have a bright future, which we absolutely believe we have, and for them to actually make their decisions, for analysts to make decisions as we get bigger as well. One thing which is very valuable about us all coming together is it does make us collectively stronger and bigger. And hopefully that also will be attracting more interest in terms of our analysts looking at our stock and where we're going. And focusing on that is a very important part for going forward right now as well. So I wanted to share that because I think that's very important.
That then also leads, right? That detail there to the things that a lot of our retail investors, those that are, you know, messaging on social media, etc., that of course they're very interested in what's going on with the legal action because I was very vocal this time last year and so on. One of the big things that we decided over the last six months or so, because of course, you know, if there's any controversy around the shares in a company or anything like that, then it could attract the wrong attention with the wrong investors as well as the right ones. So what we decided was we're really going to just focus on growing the business. I'm going to give you some legal updates at the moment. And I'm going to get onto Q&A as well.
But probably the biggest message I'd want to give, which I think is really important. This is something that Michael Moe said as we were basically out there having conversations with all of the strategic partners we can be having for the future, is let's not play defense, let's play offense, right? Let's not basically kind of like, you know, be trying to defend ourselves from anything that we feel could be a threat to us and our shareholders, even though we will continue to defend ourselves and our shareholders. But let's actually spend maybe 10% on that. Let's spend 90% on just building the business and doing a really, really good job of it. That's why you're seeing a lot of the things that I'm sharing, the things that I'm most excited about are the things moving forward.
You'll see that also we've left this very ripe to the end because everything else we've built, hopefully, will give you a good picture of where we're going. In terms of legal actions, really simply, we've currently got two legal actions that are currently underway. One of them is the ongoing legal action that we started a little bit earlier than this time last year, right? That was basically something we did with Wes Christian . We've been working very, very hard. He's been working very hard with his team as well. It is a very long process. He said from the very beginning, expect this to take three or four years, right? I would ask everyone also to just be patient. If you want to see results from all of that, we're committed to that pathway. We're on that pathway.
In fact, we're on the third phase of that pathway right now. The first phase was basically just investigating, bringing the right people on board to just see what was happening with our trading. Was there even a case there, right? Which we found there was, right? That took place in the early part of last year. The second phase is a 12-month due diligence process, which we've gone through, which ends up with a document, which is a huge document with all the evidence that's been found, with all the research, because you don't ever want to be taking any kind of an action without having that ability to do that. The third stage, which is basically where you're now going to go into a process, which is going to be a multi-year commitment.
That was a phase which was not a decision that we took lightly, right? Because we knew that the biggest challenge with any court case that a company might go through is that, you know, even if you think you've got a good case, if it's costing a lot of shareholder dollars in terms of legal fees, then no one wins at the end of the day. And so there is a process that it's possible with a company that believes that they have a very strong case, which is to get that case financed in such a way that the company itself does not have to pay for the case. And then the management team can just get on with running the business. And that's the approach we're currently taking.
And how long it takes for us to go through that process and then to actually, you know, take the next step on that in terms of filing. I don't want us to be focusing at that, but just to let you know that between these two different elements, because the third part here is there's legal action, we're also taking against one of our acquisitions on the founders and sellers. This is one in which we're currently going to mediation. The same thing, if we think we've got a very strong case that will recover money for shareholders, then we're going to go down that line as well. Collectively, without going to any more detail of this, there is over $250 million that we currently are pursuing, but there is no guarantee of success.
I just want to say very strongly that that number should not. It's just discount it totally. No one should be investing in our company because of a lawsuit, right? So I just want to say it hasn't gone away. We haven't been quiet for no reason, right? This is something that we've left with the lawyers now. I will have the lawyers give updates in the future, right? So we can just focus at the business updates for ourselves as well. But just know, because there's a lot of frustration of people saying, "Roger, why can't you say anything?" It's because there has not been yet anything material that I can share. And this is about as far as I will be sharing on this information.
Like I said, the questions which are more about the business, I think you're going to find much, much more valuable because it allows us to see, you know, where our investments all collectively go, including all of our team, because all of our team have got share options in the company as well. They're all shareholders. And I think that that's one of the most powerful things about what we're doing. I see this much more as a democratic movement that we're all working on together for the future of our children. And that's why basically I started this company up. And I really believe all those who come and work with us and all of those who become our partners and all those who become our investors are also doing it very much mission-driven.
So companies' focus, as I say here, is on the management of the company, and it's proceeding with financing mitigation strategies, which means we don't have to be paying the legal fees on the principle that legal costs should be minimized. There's no guarantee, not even of just success. There's no guarantee we even finish this phase. So I just want to make that really clear to everyone. But hopefully there's enough information there that satisfies, you know, any frustration or curiosity as to what happened that was very public last year. And then we went very quiet on as we went forward as well. And I'm sure more of this will come out in the Q&A, which we're about to get to. If there's some of this that's relevant to Peter, I'm obviously going to come over to him to answer.
If it makes more sense for me to answer, then I will do that. And I've got actually a sheet that Mary put together, which gives us all of the different questions here. So I'm going to be using that as we go down. If I am missing any questions, it's likely because it's already been asked already. Yeah, so there's a question here, which is, how are we growing to increase the share? How are we going to increase the share price? Hopefully, from what I've been sharing, I believe that there's really two main ways that we do it. The first is to make sure that we have a very strong, successful company that investors want to invest in.
It's simply a matter of time that as you grow bigger and we can be attracting larger investors, institutional investors, that that puts us in a very strong position. And that comes from number one, making sure that we have got a great story and a great trajectory with everyone that's coming on board. But number two is us communicating that in an effective way. So we're going to be returning to having regular investor meetings and being able to do it in such a way that really gives everyone the information that they need. And we're going to, as a result of that, I believe, make sure that this measure that we have becomes stronger and stronger as we go forward.
It will be my personal responsibility as CEO to make sure that in both of these two key aspects, we're aligning our teams in all the right places to be able to do this. When I say teams, that will mean AI talent as well as human talent as well, to really get to the achievement where we want. We have a second question here, which is, potential Saudi investors soon? What the market cap post-merger when that will be reflected on trading platforms? They can short update, share buyback, ERL shares. Okay, so I think Elon Musk, I think the only one on that, which we haven't covered, in terms of share buyback, as many of you know, I've already, you know, like said publicly, you know, I've been financing the business until we get to the right investors coming on board and so on.
So I think that's important. There's also a question of reverse split. We have no plan to do any reverse split at the moment. As far as ERL shares, I know that on the ERL side, there's two aspects. Obviously, that company got spun off. But if you go to either the Genius Group part on the ERL instructions or ERL, every single U.S. investor can take that pathway to receive your shares. If you have any problem whatsoever, as we've said in past press releases as well as on these meetings, simply go to our investor email and we will take care of you, right? Absolutely, we'll do that. But I know I've answered on social media at least like 15-20 x what that process is. Just go refer to that process.
And at the same time, Entrepreneur Resorts on their side have already said very clearly that there will be a tradable exchange for U.S. investors. And we already have a process in place to do that. But again, these things take time. But just know that it will be happening. The next question was, was there ever a share count given from last year? And the question on that, and was I told the lawsuit settled? As you know, I think I've answered that one already. But when it comes to the share count, we did have challenges by, you know, going to the right organizations that we believed we could get a share count from. We could not do it. We're still basically trying to find the best way to do that. And I'm not going to be able to say more about that at this moment.
To say that what we believed was possible could not possible. There's also in terms of other aspects. Yeah, I think there's a number of ERL questions there. What's your biggest takeaway from Abundance360 that will affect the whole of 2024 investment in Genius? Well, you've heard our plan, but I would say this. However fast you think AI is going, it's going faster. The one thing that came out of it for me was the message, we got to move faster. And I'm not just saying Genius, I'm saying humanity has to move faster. And we had Ray Kurzweil there. He since 2009 or earlier, he already was, no, sorry, it was 1999. 1999, he predicted that we would reach the singularity, would reach AGI by 2029. And Geoffrey Hinton, who is like one of the grandfathers of AI, he also was there.
He said that he disagreed with Ray Kurzweil back then because he said, there's no way we're going to get there so soon. And then now he says he still disagrees because he thinks we may actually get there sooner, right? Like everyone's changed their timeframes. And what that then means for individuals, think about like my analogy of the horse and the car. If you've gone 20 years into the car showing up and you still haven't learned how to drive a car, and you're still happily driving your, you know, like riding your horse, right, down Madison Avenue. And then you then suddenly are being told that you actually can't like ride your horse anymore. And there's motorways now and horses aren't allowed on motorways. And your horse gets taken away. You're suddenly at a big disadvantage.
We're talking about something which is 1,000 times as disruptive and as fast as this. And it isn't a matter of someone coming along and telling you you can't have a job, right? Or your business won't work without AI. It's a fact that no one's going to tell you. The market's going to tell you. And you're suddenly going to be out of a job. So this is coming very, very quickly. And this is why we're trying to move as quickly as we can. It's not just for us to be a bigger company. It's for us to do our part with humanity, which is to make sure that given that we could see the warning signs earlier, we basically need to be the ones that are actually putting their railways down as their train is coming at full speed.
So that's what I would say about that, which is very, very important. And I will be, you know, sharing a lot more. We have the AI Day. Like I said, tomorrow we'll be recording some of the elements and I'll be sharing with everyone. So if you're here as much as a student, as an investor, then I highly recommend you follow along. And when I was sharing this here with Peter Diamandis, who is the founder of the XPRIZE, that is, let me just make sure I have the sharing here. And I apologize. I know we have gone over the hour we thought we would be here. But hopefully this is good information. And obviously this is the Q&A section.
This here, basically, this video, how to reprogram your mind, become successful for Roger Hamilton, was Peter Diamandis interviewing me on how we need to change our mindsets to actually realize how quickly things are changing and how to then be in the right frame of mind to really see this as an opportunity rather than as a threat. Because it's all basically in our own consciousness, whether or not which way we get to see this and how we go about harnessing it as well. Let me come over to the next question. I'm going to go through a couple more and then we're going to wrap up as we go. This next one is, I'm going to skip the ones which are obviously the same question. Let me get onto. Yep, we've got some of the same questions here as well.
No, Austin did the timing of the note, no, that's also one on the share count. Would you consider accepting Dogecoin and Bitcoin for payment? Well, I got to tell you, after I watched the conversation between Peter Diamandis and Michael Saylor and seeing Michael Saylor basically go from a $600 million business to a $30 billion business by basically just going all in on Bitcoin, we're going to be watching very carefully how we go about really making sure that we are operating like a 3.0 business, which is an exponential business, which he clearly is doing right now. So big inspirations and those who actually have made these shifts already. In terms of upgraded analyst's question here, upgraded analyst targets post-merger. We do understand that there are some analysts who are actually providing new numbers. We'll wait for them to do it in their own time.
But, you know, once we have anything that we can share a report, of course, we'll do that. Questions there on the actual go-to-market strategy, which I think we've covered there as well. Philanthropic partnerships also, the answer is absolutely yes. There is one organization which is doing a very, very good job at basically like linking in with governments, with institutions to grow. And the person who runs that is Anthony Robbins. Some of you know Tony Robbins, you know, he runs the Billion Meals Initiative. And basically that's now become the 100 Billion Meals Initiative. And he's actually growing that together with some governments around the world as well. And also some of the biggest charities. And so that is one example where we built that into our World Game initiative. Anyone interested in that? Definitely connect with our team.
And then I think most of the, how about the subsidiary that manages travel properties? That's Entrepreneur Resorts. That's the, I think what people are referring to. Are you still? Yeah, that one. No, I think all of the rest of them we have actually covered. Oh, when are you releasing merger filings, audited financials? So we're a foreign filer. We're based in Singapore. So we have basically until the middle of May for our filing. And we have our auditors who are all working on that at the moment as well. So of course, when that comes out, we will be just like last year, you know, getting an earnings report out on our audited financials. And with that, let me just come over to Peter.
Peter, is there anything that you believe we might have missed at the moment that we want to cover, not just for our investors, but also for the FatBrain investors that are listening in right now?
I don't think so. I think the only thing I was going to point out, and I know there were some questions that came in is that, you know, how the share exchange would work and so on. I think we published that information, but I'll just reiterate and make it clear. So there are no questions. So for every three shares of LZGI, so if you're a shareholder of LZGI, and we've used FatBrain and LZGI kind of interchangeably because LZGI was a public company and so on. The shareholders of LZGI, all shareholders of LZGI of record will receive one share of GNS.
So that's kind of a, it's a very simple, straightforward thing. It's a three-to-one kind of transaction, a three-to-one share transaction. That's one thing that we wanted to clear up to make sure there was no confusion about that. Other than that, I think we're very excited about the prospects for both accretive, accelerated, and fun growth. There is tremendous opportunity in both the tailwinds and, you know, avoiding the headwinds of AGI. So I think all of those things are all par for the course and wonderful to be part of the team.
That's fantastic. All right. Thank you very much, Peter, for that. Also for everyone on the call, I know I've shared this with some of our investors in the past. I do want to share it again here as well.
Because all the investors we had at the time of the IPO, obviously we weren't public at that point. They had all come in as our students. They had come in as our partners. They all came in basically like having heard at one point or another, the origin story of Genius Group itself. You know, the whole concept of Genius Group, which is Ignite Your Own Genius, really comes from the whole basis of one moment which happened when I was at university in Cambridge. There was one of the mentors that we were learning about, Buckminster Fuller. Buckminster Fuller had this concept he called the final exam.
And he said the final exam is this moment in time that is going to happen as we move into the future where technology, which already can solve all the world's problems, but has not because we haven't actually solved all the world's problems. In fact, some problems are getting worse. He said that the reason it's getting worse isn't because technology isn't accelerating. It is accelerating. In fact, it's going to keep accelerating. And the issue is not the technology, it's human consciousness. He says it's only education that can change this and actually get us to pass the exam. And he says it is the exam, right? Because basically that's when you have a test. And this is a test for all of humanity where either we're going to fail or we're going to succeed.
Now, if we succeed, we're going to know it because all of the world's challenges will be solved, right? We would have actually like taken this technology, we would have harnessed it, and we would have made the world better for everybody. However, it's also possible to fail this exam. The way that happens is technology continues to accelerate beyond our ability to be able to harness it. In fact, we might actually be feeling less intelligent and more intelligent as time goes on. I know many of us are seeing around the world all these challenges that we ourselves are facing, which makes the world look very different from what it did like 10 or 20 years ago.
So what it looks like when you fail is humanity itself gets destroyed because it gets destroyed by the same technology that we actually could be using to be harnessing it. And this is a really important point because if that happens, there's no more exams after that because we're not here. And so that's why it's called the final exam. And so if that's a sobering thought, the question is, what are we doing about it? And I knew I had to move everything that I'm doing so that I'm not focusing at doing what I was doing. Architecture was building buildings. And instead, I should be focusing at building consciousness, right? And for us all to do it together. And the reason I'm sharing that is because, yes, we can go about building a business.
Yes, we can go about, you know, earning money, which we have to do as a public company, making sure investors are happy, making sure our partners are happy. We're doing all those things. We're focusing on all those things. But the big reason that I'm in this for the long term is because I want to be part of the right side of that exam and for the future of humanity. And if you feel that same way as well, then that would be incredible to have you on this journey long term. So thank you very much, everyone, for joining us. Look forward to seeing you in the coming months on our different calls. And I really appreciate you as our investor. Thanks very much, everyone. Thank you, Peter.
Thanks. Great, great stuff, Roger. Cheers.