Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Blackbird plc interim results investor presentation. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that is just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and will publish our responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we would just like to submit the following poll. I would now like to hand you over to the team from Blackbird plc. Ian, good morning, sir. Good morning, Jake, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Blackbird's interim results 2026. Before I kick off, I would just like to introduce my fellow team members. We have Ines, who I think you all met at the AGM. Ines is from Scaleup and is our fractional Chief Marketing Officer. Stephen Streater, Company Founder and Inventor of Blackbird. And here we have Sumit Rai, who is our Chief Product Officer and as of today, our new board member. Congrats, Sumit. Let's kick off. Before I start, I would just like to address a few things. Firstly, last time, we had some sound issues. I want to make sure that we do not have that again. We have actually got a volunteer developer/sound engineer here in the office with us to make sure that does not happen. We are monitoring this as we go through the presentation. If you are experiencing any sound problems, please let us know. The second elephant I will address is the cash situation. I know that a lot of you are concerned about that. Of course, we are monitoring the situation very carefully ourselves. But let me just remind you of our strategy around our revenue. We are building a revenue engine. With that, we want to make sure that our revenue engine is starting to make economic sense. That is that every user that we acquire, every subscriber we acquire, has a lifetime value that starts to be equal or greater, much greater, than that acquisition cost. Our focus really still is on marketing teams, and Ines will talk you through why marketing teams are incredibly valuable to us. Also product-led growth and virality often is kickstarted by the masses. Therefore we will continue to fill the funnel with those early graders and students, et cetera, at the top of the funnel. That is really important to note. As we go onto the first slide here, I think that we put some numbers out in August that now have been improved further on as we get to the end of September. This really tells you the story of how our conversion metric is improving. Our subscription growth in Q3 is going to be estimated around 235%. The key numbers here are the fact that this has improved from back in March, where we were converting at around 1% for every new user coming in, or every 100 users coming in, to 2.4% at the end of June. As we go to the end of September, at around 3.4%. Together with that, we have also reduced churn down to 11%. Of course, things are always moving around, but that is a really good number to look at. That has actually led to our ARR improving from June at around GBP 30,000 to end of September at around GBP 90,000. Again, these are really small numbers. We are very well aware of that. But you can see that we are starting to get that exponential growth and that revenue engine is starting to take shape. We are also seeing that in the sector that we are really focused on, as in the marketing teams, that a low virality and product-led growth is yet to be proven. We are seeing growth in the rate that people do share, and therefore the superior ARPU and retention in the group that we are focusing on. I will come back at the end of this presentation, but I am going to pass over to Sumit now to talk you through our product improvements. Okay, so everyone knows that this year has been a huge year for product development. We know that at the end of last year, whilst we were available obviously as a product to the market, we still had a lot of important things to add. A huge factor as to why our conversion ratios have moved this year, and you can see that massive growth from the 1% to 3.4%, is a lot to do with obviously product that is available. So people who then come into the product, there is all of a sudden more reason for them to actually convert, pay for the product because there are features which are often behind a paywall, but also features that are just generally available within the product. Some massive things that we have added already this year, obviously the Epidemic Sound work that we did in bringing a really best-of-class sound library to the market. We also improved our font support. So not only adding thousands of fonts, but also providing custom fonts available to users. We improved the AI side of the product with things like voice isolation, which is a really crucial tool for people producing any kind of content. We also introduced color grading, and this has become a really popular feature for the product, which was already on top of the existing LUTs and looks that we already had. We also began the beginning of our animation work, and this is a really important thing, which we will come onto a little bit later, because we have done a lot of work behind the scenes on the engine, and we will discuss this. We also added some really important features which you don't see very well or very often or done well even in NLEs, which is things like the project recovery. We think it's a best-of-class system. You being able to go back and look at where a product was, especially in a multiplayer environment, because one of the fears that people have about multiplayer is what happens if another user comes in and alters something which has already been done. Well, we have a great history in the product that you can roll back at any point. We also changed and tweaked the plans. We obviously learn as we're going along, and we're able to analyze what people are buying into, what levels. We've made little tweaks along the way, obviously with pricing, but also with what people can do. We're in a good position. We are definitely at a point, as we said in the summer, where this is a very, very usable product, and so that's why we're now experiencing our growth. Obviously it's only still the beginning of the longer story, and the things which are coming next are going to be really exciting. A major thing that we've done this year, and a lot of the work done through Stephen's team, also with the [Days Bay] elevate.io development team, is to really improve the way the engine is capable of handling more than just video. We're known for our ability to handle video, but we have added the ability to do graphics and text now at a much, much higher level. You saw a snippet of that earlier this year at the AGM, where we demoed some of our effects work, which is all going through our pipeline at the moment. By being GPU accelerated, we're able to bring desktop capability to our online experience, and that's a major advancement. We've always led the way with video, but now we're going to be able to actually also jump ahead and be on par with things like some of the bigger products in terms of how we can handle text and graphics. I'm going to give you a little demo in a minute of some of that, but that's only just part of it. We're also doing a whole bunch of work on integrations, so things like YouTube upgrade, some good quality of life features like view-only users, because we want organizations who use our product to be able to share amongst their own company, and have people who can come in and see the product. It's how we use other products. Not everyone is a creator, but a lot of people are stakeholders, so we want to introduce and make this a real team product. The other thing that we're doing is expanding the ability to get content into the system. At the moment, you can upload by file from the phone or from the desktop, but we do live in a wider ecosystem. We're expanding that the same way that we're expanding how you can output to things like YouTube, but also how you can get content into the system. The eventual goal for that goes down to cameras directly, but in the interim, there are other things that we will be able to support, other platforms we will be able to support to send video content directly to us. Then a really important feature, something which has been a growing market, something that I have spent a lot of time in the past working on, is things like webcam capture. So being able to allow people to create content directly from the desktop as well. Things like that are coming. Audio effects, which we know that we have a need there that we haven't fulfilled yet. Coming onto some of that exciting stuff that we've done, I want to give a demo of the up and coming bit of product that we have within our system, which is the GPU accelerated graphics engine. This is something that you'll be seeing come to the platform soon. It's work that we're doing where we're actually going to not just take text, which we've had historically, and it's been capable, but it has been a simplified version. We're actually bringing a very, let's just say, desktop level capability to that. It doesn't just mean being able to do text in the way that you would expect to use text within a desktop publishing product or something like that. It also, and this is the exciting bit, also means that we're able to take text and be able to create a whole bunch of presets that people could use to get started with their content. If, for example, I take that, trumpet in, you'll see that it's a really nicely animated piece of text, but also it means that you can go in there and you can change any of the things. Let's just call this nice. Then this one can change there to easy like that. Things can be changed very easily, but also the controls and the very, very fine control that we have for every bit of how that animation works, its positioning, the color schemes that go with it, all of these can be easily adapted. Where they're best used is things like lower thirds. So we're allowing users to directly drop on a little lower third. Maybe there's another one we can add here, move that along. We could reposition that. Users will be able to go in, change things very simply, change things like backdrop colors, and then save them out as presets so they can use them within all of their own productions very, very easily. Now, the thing that you'll notice is that the whole experience is incredibly smooth. Everything that we're doing here has a very, very, very desktop-like feel, and all of that's been made possible. We've done it with video, but we're now doing it with graphics and text, and we believe that this is going to put us really not just on par with what happens with some of the bigger NLEs and desktop products. But actually, text is traditionally done quite badly, and it means that a lot of the time people have to rely on visual effects tools like Adobe After Effects to do their more complex animations. We're bringing that experience directly into the browser and obviously more available to people because our product is easier to use, more available product to the market. That's our roundup of product. Over to marketing. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Just to give you a bit of a snapshot overview. The top left graph on the left is just looking at the subscriber growth over the last three months. July kind of marks the period where we started to invest in acquisition again after a period of research and understanding exactly how we wanted to position elevate.io in the market. Mid-July was when we started to reinvest, and that also timed with some changes that were made to pricing and how we moved users from the free plan into the paid plan. That shift in growth over those months kind of reflects that period. August is significantly higher, most likely as a result of the combination of those things. Us changing the pricing as well as continuing to invest in marketing channels through that period. September is still coming up as we close out the month. Importantly, alongside that investment, when we look at the return on those efforts, when we compare our current levels of spend to earlier in the year of February, when we were previously investing from a marketing perspective, we've reduced CAC by almost two-thirds in that time through that work that's been done around really understanding the audience, aligning our proposition and messaging to align with that positioning in the market. We continue to do regular qualitative research cycles to continue sharpening that messaging, that positioning, and understanding the types of users that we're acquiring, what they're looking for in elevate.io, how we provide value, and how we can double down on that through our efforts ongoing. Whilst PPC at the moment remains our primary acquisition channel, we have, through this period, also been testing other paid channels, which we'll be continuing to look at Q4, but also on top of that, looking at how we actually really invest in our brand from an organic perspective. Moving into Q4, we're going to be focusing quite heavily on reestablishing YouTube as a demand gen channel, so owning a much more deliberate content strategy over there. YouTube is becoming increasingly important channel for AI and LLM discovery as well. We've improved the AI discovery over the last three months by quite some way, but it continues to be a really important aspect for us to focus on. We will be continuing to do so through the likes of digital PR, YouTube, as I have said, and looking for opportunities for us to develop real citations of those platforms, then use to make recommendations. Another big focus through all of the work that we are doing is, as Ian has already alluded to, is making sure that we are continuously looking at ways that we can improve that conversion from free users to paid plans. Some of the work that we are doing at the moment and moving into Q4 is really focused on remarketing, so making sure that once we bring new users into the platform on those free plans and they sign up to us for, that we continue to invest in them as users and encourage them to experience the value of elevate.io so much so that they go onto a paid plan. Through all of the interviews and research that we are doing, we hear some really interesting stories of the types of users coming in to use elevate.io. Whilst quite a lot of our user base is still solo editors, projects, a mix of hobbyists and creators and teams, we see a lot of those people talking about the fact that the collaborative potential of elevate.io is a big draw for all of those different types of users. The fact that they can bring other people into their projects, work with them, whether that be friends, colleagues, what have you. So we are continuing to look at those different mechanics of how we can get more people working together in the product over time as well. Great. Thank you, Ines. We have kept this one very short, so we have got lots of time for questions. Just really to summarize that we have really seen the momentum accelerate following the marketing freeze that we imposed from March to kind of halfway through July. Now with the features and UI experience, it is really in sync with the marketing that has come in. We would expect to see similar growth going forward. So we are seeing the machine really finely tuned now, and we will continue to fine-tune that further. So ladies and gentlemen, let me invite questions. Perfect. Guys, if I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much indeed for your presentation this morning. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab that is situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the team take a few moments to review those questions that have been submitted already, just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can all be accessed via your dashboards. Guys, we have received a number of questions, so if I may now hand over to you to just read out those questions and give your responses where appropriate to do so. If I pick up from you at the end, that would be great. Thank you. Thank you very much, Jake. I think most of the questions are quite short this time, which is a blessing for me. I will try and now get through the main ones now. So the first one is, "What happened with Soundbites? At a crucial time, you just created a void. I'm glad it's back, but I got a poor response from the challenge on investor relations." Stephen is— Yeah. —our Soundbites man. Soundbites is back. So we obviously needed a period where we actually had news and also when people were around, and the summer's always been very quiet for investors as well. There were big gaps when people were on holidays. So although the development continued and the advances in the company, people weren't around every day to put stories up. But we're back, and there's a lot of things to not only to catch up on, but lots of new things happening. So, I think you will enjoy Soundbites if you follow it now. Thank you, Stephen. Second question: "Will you consider taking on a small loan instead of a placing if the share price is too low? I understand you will need to show the wheels turning quicker on revenue from elevate.io, but if the metrics are good, it will become a sausage machine, cash in one end and beautiful subscribers out of the other." Yeah, well said. I think that we would not rule anything out with regards to a raise, but I don't think that taking on debt would be top of our list. So I think that that would be very unlikely. Third question: "Will AI turbocharge elevate.io or eat our lunch, and why? I'm going to say it's a perfect complement for what we're doing. It's something that we use in both helping us produce the tool, but also we're perfectly placed to take advantage of all the disparate engines that are out there. People who are using AI either for things like generation or for tidying stuff up, we're able to add that into our product and make that available from the platform itself. There's no evidence at all that AI is replacing the way that tools like ours work. If anything, it's giving just more strength to tools like us. Of course, our competitors have the same advantage as well, so it does mean that we have to do a great job implementing that. It's not for free. But we see it as a net advantage and another thing that will help bring more people to video editing, because traditionally, a lot of the processes of video editing can be quite time-consuming. The good news is AI can remove a lot of that trouble, so it's a net advantage across the board for helping us build stuff and helping our customers get value from what we build. Thanks, Sumit. I think you covered every base there. Marketing seems to have gone quiet. Emails, videos, PR, podcasts, conferences, et cetera, have all dried up in recent months, and I'm hardly seeing the company anywhere. Is the business now relying entirely on paid advertising, Ines? Hi, John. We still do all of those things. I think the reality is we are a lot more deliberate now and purposeful with each of them, where we use them, and specifically what opportunities we do, we say yes to. We still do a lot of email campaigns, we are just much more highly segmented in the way that we do that now. So we are delivering the right message to the right people at the right time rather than broadcast continuously. Digital PR is definitely something that we have pulled back on over the recent months, but we will be investing in as we move forward, particularly now as we double down on product updates moving into Q4, particularly where we have got a big announcement like text information coming through. In terms of events and conferences, again, we are doing these things, but on a smaller, more deliberate, and intimate level at this point. Over the last few months, we have been doing a lot of experimentation as well with different channels, so smaller experiments, smaller scale budgets to test our way into different opportunities. It may not appear as broadcast as perhaps it has done in the past, because we are following much more of a test and learn approach into where we put our investments. Great. Thank you, Ines. Question from Nick C. Sumit, not so much a question, just a congratulations on your appointment to the board. It gives investors exactly the confidence they need. I would offer my congratulations, too. I am sure everyone does. I think the other thing to note is that we also will be looking for an independent non-executive chair to join the board as well. We are actively recruiting that position now. I think there are some questions around my role as the executive chair, and I think that is absolutely I would agree with them. I think that it is good that we have an independent non-exec chair, so actively recruiting. 120,000 users, 3.4% conversion rate. That will be just over 4,000 converted paid numbers, yet subscriber numbers are in the 900s. You mentioned a churn of approximately 11%. Can you please explain the mismatch? Yes. The 3.4%, that is the snapshot of where we are now. It is not where we have been since February 2025 when we launched the payment gateway. We have been increasing that conversion rate all the way up, and it has really started to gain some recent momentum now. So yeah, that explains the calculation, the mismatch that you have got. Please let me know if there is any more questions on that. Does the company generate any margin on third-party tokenized sales, such as music, or is the cost simply an actual cost we pay to the provider? No, there's margin on it. It depends on what it is. And remember, we're adding a lot more tools in the future. So some can be high profit, some obviously which are slightly more commoditized. There's no point us being able to offer a service if they can buy it elsewhere a lot cheaper. So we make money where we can, and where it's value to the end user. Please break down the operating costs in corporate and elevate. Highlight any non-cash amounts in both. What is the GBP 525,000 trade payables payment for? I'll take this question off, and we can reply to you in writing, where we are able to. As you can tell, we don't have a CFO sitting at the table right now. So we'll get back to you on that one, Jared. Question from John. Ian, the share price has fallen sharply for years, yet you've been chairman since Anne left 18 months ago. Do you think this is appropriate? Well, I've just addressed that just before. So no, we're actually looking for an independent non-exec chair as we speak, John. So yes, I agree that there's a requirement for that. Will the new Google Book be supported? Yes, it will. Yes. Another important part actually of the work that we've done on the engine is to ensure that the product works well on low-powered machines, because we know it's a great opportunity for us. And as the higher end NLEs work more, become more and more demanding, they require more and more memory, more and more GPU support. We're at the point where we're actually being able to fulfill people who have lower spec machines. So, we very closely work with any of the Google Chromebooks or any of the lower end, including Ian's reading the questions off an Apple Neo. We're constantly testing, for example, the performance on that as well. Good. There's a few more board questions about me doubling as chairman, which I think we've answered now. We will move on from that one. As Blackbird is EBITDA positive and forecast to be for the rest of 2026, is it possible to sell a share in this entity to fund elevate.io? Because we share such common DNA at the back end, I think that's always going to be a challenge. So Stephen, would you want to comment on that any more deeply? Yes. I think both sides benefit From the sharing the technology, but it would be very hard to split off one. Also with elevate.io now starting to grow quite strongly, I think that is where the focus of investment will be from our external people. Lots of us are worried about the runway, which is nearly used up. The share price has fallen as low as 1p. Under Ian, investors backed people. Why would anyone invest now given the company's performance?" Thank you very much, Paul. Well, I have just pointed out that the revenue engine is improving dramatically, and we are working hard to improve that further, and continuing our strategy. At this point in time, we are monitoring the cash position. We have talked about changes at the board level. Yeah, I think we have answered that question. "Hi. Since bringing on board the Chief Marketing Officer, what data information have you observed about the awareness of elevate.io as a product in the marketplace, the competition, and the slowness of trial-to-conversion rate users? Is there any way to improve the awareness and conversion rates? Well, the conversion rates, as we have already spoken about, have been improving month-to-month over the last few months as we have been implementing some of the insights from the research we did at the beginning and continue to do ongoing. From that perspective, that is a constant work in progress and something that we are always looking at and looking for ways to improve. From an awareness perspective, again, I think when you look at the rates of growth month-to-month, we can see that that is also developing as well, and will only continue to do so as we start to expand into more channels for broader awareness channels. We've certainly been focused over the last couple of months on making sure that we're capturing as much of the active intent in the market as possible, and we'll continue to be broadening that out to new pockets of the market. But being very selective about where we place ourselves, so that we can be focused on fewer opportunities to create more awareness within communities or target groups, rather than spreading ourselves too thin, which would ultimately damage our conversion rates. Thanks, Ines. "Ian, could you tell us how instrumental The Scaleup Collective have been? Is the recent growth largely down to their marketing work?" Well, I'll refer back to the slide I did at the beginning, which is it's really about the improvement of the entire machine. We've got huge improvements, very impressive improvements to the product. A change and a step up, I think, in terms of marketing, so that's definitely had an impact. We've also made some changes to how the trigger points happen, so we reduced the number of exports you can have from three down to two, which definitely had an impact as well. So I think it's really about improving the machine, fine-tuning the machine, and we will continue to look at how we can do that. Question from Paul: "Out of the paid new users, are these mainly marketing customers being targeted or creators? It's a combination. Certainly from where the majority of our active spend at the moment goes on PPC, we see a broad spectrum of different segments coming through those channels. That's based on obvious active intent in the market, and we see that spread across hobbyists, creators, and teams. What we can see is that teams convert to paid plans at a higher rate than other segments, which is really interesting and something for us to continue monitoring. And we're actively targeting marketing teams through some of the other activities that we do. So we have a partnerships series at the moment, which is a combination of events, podcasts, panels, and speaking opportunities, that we're running that actively target those groups. That started last quarter and will continue into this quarter. Thanks, Ines. A question from Aasim on the exec chair role again, which we answered. "Have you considered alternatives to shareholder dilution? If so, what?" At this stage, we are looking to fundraise with equity. We have considered some options, but we haven't proceeded with those. Question from David: "Could you talk about how your interviews and market analysis dictate your product roadmap?" Maybe that's a question for both of you. Ines? Yeah. All of the interviews that we do, we've rotated some of the interview processes between product and marketing so that we can take a little bit of a different spin on that each time. We always share the findings collectively between us, because ultimately the learnings we take from those have implications for both sides in terms of understanding why people come to elevate.io, what they're looking for, what problem they were trying to solve, and they were searching for it, and ultimately what value they're getting out of the product. Perhaps you can— Yeah, I think it's also important to remember the idea for elevate.io wasn't just dreamt up within the four walls of Blackbird. The idea for it came from extensive research and conversations, and the market in general as well. We're not the only people with this idea. Other people also support the idea of an online video editor. We've always, throughout the process, from before we wrote the first line of code, we already did a round of interviews with different groups. We continued to check in often with those same people as the product's developed. Some people have been on this journey with us for four years, from before we began. So we've always had a healthy amount of feedback coming from the market in general. What's encouraging is how we're seeing people who saw it at the beginning, and how they're reacting to the different changes that we've made. It's wildly a different product than it was a year ago. It's h ard to see that often when we are all involved in it day to day and even with the quarterly updates that you guys get. But if you actually look back at where it was a year ago, it is just wildly different. Its capabilities are completely different. So we keep that loop going, and we will continue to do that. Good. Thank you. A question from Reece. "The EVS contract is up for renewal. Can we expect a significant increase in the minimum guarantee contract of GBP 2 million or EUR 2 million it was this time around? Has talks for renewal begun yet?" Early talks have begun. "Can we expect a significant increase?" I don't think so. I think if we get the same deal again, that will be amazing. I did talk to them at IBC recently, and they have had quite a lot of new interest in the product that Blackbird is a part of, which is encouraging. So yeah, discussions will continue. "How far behind your closest competitors is elevate.io in terms of subscribers and revenue base?" How far behind your closest? Is that— You mean financially or is it how far— How far behind your closest competitors is elevate.io in terms of subscribers and revenue base? I think it is how far are you behind your closest competitors? Well, yeah, definitely. Obviously, there is a very large player in the market in VEED, and they have some more slightly more public numbers there. They started before us and obviously have been around a little bit longer. I do not think we know the answer to how many subscribers others have, but it is still such a beginning of a new market that we are off to the races, but it is still all to play for. A curious one, the next question. "To Streater and the board, it appears that Ian's daughter did an internship at Allenby recently. Ethically, that leaves a bad taste, and from the outside looks like a conflict of interest in what is supposed to be an independent advisory role. Is the board aware?" Yes, my 17-year-old daughter did two days work experience at Allenby. Unpaid, obviously. I do not think that contravenes anything other than the fact that she was getting some experience. She had experience in cafes and elsewhere. I do not know whether you want to comment on that. It's not material when you look at the wider view. I would hate to say these questions just sink to a new low, but perhaps that's the moment. Okay, question from David: "Does your animated text development work across voice to text? Does it work across voice to t he caption? Yes, it will. Sorry. Yes. If it's to do with how it will work within subtitles, then subtitles will also be improved to support the animation capabilities. Ian, your salary of GBP 250,000 looks out of step with the company performance. Follow-up from a question at the AGM, could you please tell us on your day to day to justify it? Guys, I'm not going to continue to justify my position here. If you really feel that's what you need, then look, I got voted in 93% renewed in June. I refer back to that. Grant, congratulations on his appointment to the board. Yes. Congratulations. John, the AGM put a lot of weight on the move from Google to Meta. How many paying subscribers is Meta bringing in compared to Google? What's the difference in cost per acquired paying customer? We're still testing with Meta at the moment. We've been doing some comparisons when we have Meta running alongside Google. What we're seeing is that Meta is, as purchase journeys tend to go, people have multiple touch points before they make a purchase. Meta does play an active role in that journey, as we're seeing. It's one step in the journey and allows us to reach new audiences in different environments. What we're going to be focusing Meta on in the short term is remarketing, focusing on using Meta to target users that have signed up to use elevate.io but not yet subscribed, alongside a slightly broader audience as well, that we'll then be able to use lookalikes to combine to appeal to the right audience. In terms of the difference in cost per acquisition, it's complicated because they often contribute to the same purchase journey. We look at Meta as a contributed attribution in terms of the role that it plays in acquiring customers. Generally speaking, we look at blended customer acquisition costs to give us an overall view of how all of the channels we're running work together, and to make sure that they're working efficiently as a system and not cannibalizing each other. Thank you. AI question. There seems to be a trend of connecting Claude/ChatGPT to video editors, whether they're an MCP. What are your thoughts on elevate.io doing this? We do have some developments that are happening in that space that we're working through in terms of how we use agents to actually operate and influence the edit for things like removal of ums and ahs and recutting things. We've got some good experimentation going on in that space. Of course, it's going to be very useful, as I mentioned earlier, for helping speed up the production process. We definitely will embrace that, no question. You've recently written some elevate.io blog posts about CapCut and Descript. Why have you chosen at that moment now? A couple of reasons, really. One, that we have a big focus on increasing and driving our organic share of traffic volume to the site, and that lower down the funnel conversion type content helps us support that. We can also see that people are looking for comparison content. That blog content is also useful for feeding AI and LLM discovery, again, where there are often comparisons, or we are providing those systems with useful comparisons for them to draw on in their citations of elevate.io. Thanks, Ines. Why did Steve White leave so suddenly? A CFO and director departing now with a runway running out signals a lack of confidence. Steve had been here seven years. He had been here a long time. It was not actually that suddenly, and he decided he wanted to do new things. We are actively recruiting a new interim CFO who, we are not actively, we have actually confirmed one who will be starting on Thursday. We will put the news out about that when the ink is dry. We will be getting a new person on very soon. The share price is down 90% over the last five years. Where is the accountability for this happening? Rhys, thank you very much. We are building a brand new product from a more or less greenfield site out in the open market. It is an unusual thing to do. It is a difficult thing to do. These products are generally built behind closed doors in Silicon Valley in a VC fund, as I have actually said this before, and I think it is still very much true. The market does not often give a lot of patience for those kind of things. But the happy news is that we have got ourselves to a point now where we are growing quickly, where the revenue engine is starting to take shape, where growth is starting to be exponential, and I think that is a happy thing to be that we should be celebrating. We have got to get to the point now where that is a positive increment rather than just getting closer to being parity. But we are in good shape. What is the current average income per subscriber? Are you getting increased numbers of teams at GBP 100 a month? I think the majority of subscribers at the moment are on the Creator plan, with more and more moving up to the Creator plan. I think Pro at the moment, the top-end GBP 100 per month. We see quite a lot of people who are particularly working in teams using the Creator plan and the limits within that at the moment as they are experimenting with products and deciding whether it is going to formally come into their tool set. Really that is the point at which we see those commitments at the higher monthly cost. That is still very much a work in progress. Thank you very much. EVS is now also using AI to further enhance its product offering to customers. Is Enterprise adding AI capabilities to the Veo Create app in order for it to be competitive with customers' changing needs? Yes, well, we talked about this when I met them recently. They are using some AI capabilities to do highlights editing. But for the fine editing within Veo Create, they are using Blackbird-based codec tools. So we are a blend with them. We do not have any plans at this stage to add AI. We won't be doing it directly, but remember that EVS have written their own editor, bit like we've written elevate. So they will control how they implement that interface and the external integrations, and we provide the base platform that they build on. Thank you very much. Is AI a threat to elevate.io now or in the near future? No. As answered before, it's a great complement. Adrian Wilding appears to have left another interim CFO role after only three weeks, yet Dinara said he moved to a permanent position. Why would an interim leave one interim role for another? Can we please be honest with investors? Adrian got a great offer from another company. Without divulging too much about the other company's situation, something very unfortunate happened over there. I don't want to be the one to talk about that, but we'll be as honest as we can. If we said that it was a permanent position, and it's an interim one, my bad, I didn't realize that was the case. But I'm glad that he's got a great role. How many marketing teams have we signed based on the current increase of subscribers, apart from shows how we are directly infiltrating this TAM? I will have to dig out the exact numbers. I believe for August, about 10% of subscribers fell into that category, and we have been doing quite a lot of work, or we are working closely with a small number of outfits within that space. For example, The Marketing Meetup, we did an event with them last week. We have got a partnership series in plan with them. A couple of other outfits like those where we have syndicated partnerships with them that involve podcasts and panels, like speaking opportunities where we actually get an opportunity to sit at the table and talk about industry-related topics and how elevate.io fits into those. We are also doing in-person events where we can demo the product and get it in the hands of users, as well as doing more long evergreen pieces, content around newsletters and things that will be discoverable over time. There is a wave of activity aligned to that, but these things take time to build. Great. Thank you very much. This gentleman says, "I have searched for browser-based video editor in all the major AI, and everyone is mentioned except, but never volunteers elevate.io, even when I ask specifically about frame-accurate video editors. This lack of visibility is probably not going to help users' numbers. Are you aware of this? Do you know the reason and why? It is, again, something we are working on all the time. I think we are seeing about three times the number of sign-ups coming through AI discovery now since June. It is building month on month. I think we rank for about 41 keywords in AI search at the moment. It is never going to show up in every single search. You would need a huge amount of coverage for that to be the case, but it is something that we are constantly working on and building. The thing that is important for us is to focus on trusted citation sources. That is why a big part of our Q4 investment is going to be going into YouTube, which is increasingly important for AI, kind of LLM discovery, as well as things like podcast, digital PR, other kind of areas where we can be cited and resourced from. That continues to be a focus point. Thank you very much. From David, "914 subscribers as of 24th of September is a good improvement in the quarter, along with lower CAC, higher conversion, better retention. The growth engine is improving." Yes, it absolutely is improving, David. Thank you. "Given that our ICP is corporate teams and they are a profitable segment, how is growth in corporate teams going?" I think that you've kind of answered that. Yeah. Exactly. It's something that we have where we have a dedicated kind of work stream against. A lot of our organic content plays into those groups as well. It's not sales-led strategy, it's a marketing-led motion. We're looking to capture those through capturing individual users who will then bring it into the organization. We see that reflected in a lot of the customer interviews that we're doing, where we have an individual person starting to use elevate.io for their specific use case, and are then starting to share content and share internally with their teams. That's the kind of loop that we want to try and take better hold of. A question from Michael, "On current progress obtaining paid users, you're scheduled to run out of cash before elevate.io breaks even. How do you plan to address this?" We've addressed this in the RNS, Michael, and we will keep investors abreast of any plans that we have to do any further raises of funds. At this stage, we don't have a plan. David, "My favorite metric is MAUs and WAUs, so monthly active users and weekly active users to see how intensively the product is being used, i.e. how valuable is it to users? I notice they are absent from today's update. Any reason why no reports of those?" Either one. Not sure why they're absent. I don't think, yeah. They're not intentionally absent. No. It's quite interesting actually. I think these are actually a good story and yeah, maybe we should have put them in. I did some calculations this morning, and in the month of September, which is, as we know, not yet finished, there are over 7,300 videos that have been made and exported out of the platform. That's just increasing really quickly. Last week alone there were 2,500. We don't have it in the numbers, but I would say that it's really showing its value to users. I think it's fair to say as well, those numbers are obviously sort of top-level KPIs, but we see the traffic in general on everything from storage used and processing power used and just general activity across the board. There's no question that the platform is getting busier and busier and busier. Definitely more is going on continually on a rising scale. Question about the realistic size of your revenue in the U.K. marketing professionals market, your ICP. "How many marketing pros are there in the U.K.? What is your target for percentage of this market signing up for free? What is the percentage of those converted to paid? We know from what we're seeing so far that the conversion to paid for that segment is about twice the rate of hobbyists and content creators. I think we gave the sizing for that in the annual AGM. We'll have to get back to the numbers in that deck. I think it was around 200,000. It was 200,000 teams. Yeah, 200,000 teams. We're, I guess, still working through exactly what is realistic for that in terms of the percentage uptake, but we do definitely see that they convert to paid at a higher rate. Thank you very much. Sumit, "Can you talk about the sector use of AI assistant agents in terms of what marketers are asking for on that front? Do you see elevate.io involved in AI assistants in 2027 to improve productivity? As said, we are going to be incorporating AI tools, both AI assist for just one-off little bits. Remember, AI has already been used for things like the subtitling tool, the voice reduction tool, but the most exciting bit is probably how AI can be used, not just there's these day-to-day sort of good housekeeping style useful uses but of course that slightly broader use, being able to take AI and have it generate something, whether that's graphics or other video content or actually do the assembly. All of that we're looking at and how do we do it from within our product or an agent on the outside sort of talking to our product. We obviously want to bring as much of the experience as we can in-house. We want it to be, if you look at some of the very early designs of elevate.io going back to 2002, we did have this sort of AI assist button that we believe would be a good thing to have in different parts of the product to actually help you just get by with day-to-day stuff. But of course, the world has changed and since then the LLMs have really grown in their capability and we definitely want to embrace that as well and have it so that, we haven't named our AI agent yet, but there will be an AI agent, Squires or someone else who's running alongside you during your edit and able to assist you in getting the whole thing together. Thanks, Sumit. "What is your target for CAC, ARPU, LTV and churn?" We're not publishing every single piece of data right now, Colin. But each time that we do a presentation, we'll try and give you a little bit more in terms of this, a bit more color. I think this time we've given a few new numbers, a few new types of numbers. And we'll continue to do that as we learn more ourselves. We very quickly acquired our first 100,000 users. Indeed, this was when the product was inferior. How do we acquire such a large number but have only had a modest increase in total users from that initial acquisition? I think most of this, Reece, is down to geography. When we very first started marketing the product, we did a lot of India and Philippines experimentation. We brought a lot of users on from there who didn't really convert to pay. Since then, we've really focused down, doubled down on the U.S. and the U.K., which is obviously a different price range in which to acquire, but obviously have a much higher propensity to pay. That's probably the main reason for that. This is a long one. Should you conduct another placing to raise growth capital in the coming months, would you consider using the recently introduced AIM Capital Access Window, where shares are temporarily suspended during the block booking process? This seems particularly suitable for volatile AIM-quoted stocks such as Blackbird, where the market price often falls due to the placing. During the placing process, the dampening demand for the placing and resale offer shares. Take a look at Reynold. Thank you very much. I'm not going to read the rest of it, Tim. That's a very interesting point. We'll absolutely take that into consideration. Thank you very much. William, have you had any affiliate success yet? Is there scope to make the offer more attractive? For example, three year instead of one year, to be able to make the offer their customers a more reduced rate, e.g., 10% off for the first year. Affiliates are not only useful to add users, but also to gain product exposure. I guess that's a question to one of us. Yeah. Affiliates is something we've experimented very early with so far, something that we're definitely looking at to move forward. We'll be looking at all of that in due course. Okay. Question from Gerard. Have you talked to private equity about taking a strategic stake in elevate.io? I think the market needs that vote of confidence. Why has this been delayed? Gerard, once we have more news about what we will do in terms of funds, we'll let you know. Don't think it's our time and place to talk about this. I would think that private equity would, like anything, we would keep our options open. What difference should we expect in terms of decision-making and the direction of the company with Sumit moving from his position of MD of elevate.io to being on the main board? I think some deep knowledge and sense at the board table will be much welcomed. Other than that, nothing else planned at this stage. Are you more focused on the U.K. team users rather than the U.S.A. team users? What is the marketing balance between the two geographical markets? The majority actually come from the U.S. at the moment. That's our bigger market strategy. Can you say more about what you're doing in terms of to appear in AI results? I think we've probably covered that one off. Yeah, I covered that a bit earlier. Another question on the share price. I think we've covered that one off. You have over 100,000 users, but very few people seem to discuss elevate.io online. Why is this? What do you think? It depends on who those users are, right? I suppose what their kind of circles of influence are. Often as well, discussion on my end isn't always positive, so not necessarily a bad thing. We do see increasing conversations happening on platforms like Reddit and within closed communities that we monitor, and are always looking at ways that we can contribute and influence those discussions. Ultimately, that kind of activity happens with time as people start to experience the product and start to talk about it, which I think as the product has developed out over the course of this year, we're expecting to see more and more of that happen. What does the team think the main thing or things that are holding back elevate.io's growth from [Thameslan]? Well, over the summer at [Thameslan], from kind of the April to middle of July, we were on a marketing freeze. We didn't do any paid advertising during that time. Since we started advertising again mid-July, we can see that there's been a really sharp increase in growth. I think at this stage, I would simply say the fact that we didn't market in particular months. Now that we are, I think the growth is looking really good. Congrats to Sumit on his appointment to the board. Thanks, Nick. Will agents be able to access elevate.io? I think you've— Yes. —probably mentioned that one. Target CAC. As I say, we'll start to give more information out as we go through, but at this stage not. Sumit, you spoke about eventually being able to speak to a prompt, then create a graphic. Will that be in a forthcoming update? Not immediately. It's a really important piece of the work, though, because as ever, we know that the video generation market is quite saturated, and it's great, it's good for Hollywood, it's good for fun and games, but it doesn't necessarily help marketing teams necessarily. We know that the broader market that we're after will benefit more likely from AI to graphics, and that's something that we've been working quite a lot on, and it's an area that others aren't working so much on, so it's a great opportunity for us. Yeah. In the spirit of this, I will read this next question out. Ian, please ignore the trolls. You are doing a great job. Please genuinely consider other financing options other than dilution. I believe a lot of people are holding back from investing as they are fed up with being diluted at lower and lower share price points. Is revenue financing an option for funding the next marketing push for elevate.io? Well, thank you, Joseph. I appreciate your comments. As I say, we will consider all options, and when we have got some news, we will let you know. Can we consider any further board investment during the current open period? Very possibly. Yeah, very possibly. When can we expect the next feature drop? I am excited. We do feature drops every week. There are some really important ones which are coming through. The underpinnings of text are actually going through at the moment. You may not notice anything different, but there is actually quite a lot of major things going on under the hood. I actually think it is really important to also make the point that this time a year ago, we still had a lot of unknowns around how we were going to do things. Just like lots of companies, until you have done it, you do not know. What we are glad, and Steve and I talk about this a lot, what we are really glad about is we have solved a huge amount of the problems that we needed to be able to do the things we need to do. We still do not know what we do not know, but we can at least answer the things that we knew we did not know about. There was always confidence going into this that we can build an online video editor. What there were still unknowns around was exactly how we would handle some of the things which we knew we would need, like graphics, like better text, like animations, like other integrations. I am really pleased to say we definitely have a handle on all of the major aspects of what we are doing. Of course, when we started out, LLMs were not a major thing, for example. We know that the market is going to change. I am not saying that there are not things that will crop up that we will then, of course, need to go and figure out how to do. We are in a position where everything that we want to do, we know how to do, we just need to do it and do the cycles and keep improving. As I mentioned earlier, every time we add something, we do not expect an overnight flurry of huge boost of users. Everything is just an additive improvement that just widens that conversion number more than anything. Of course, with that, and especially with things like text, when there is more of a complete package, that is when we do expect more commentary around what we are as a tool, because at the moment, it is still just a little bit too niche. Of course, in due course, when we do make these future drops, there will be a real increase. Thanks, Sumit. Comment from GR. Ian, are you in awe at the ADVPN Warriors record of being unbeaten at hide and seek? Yes, indeed, I am in awe of it. It's amazing how hidden people can be sometimes. Right, okay, is the player ever going to be launched? Yes, it will be eventually, and I've discussed this with Sumit for many years. The elevate.io product is such a big product that we focused on that, on the editor specifically, but it's always in the elevate.io roadmap, always been to have distribution as part of the solution, and the player or technology from it will be a big part of that. Obviously, the whole of elevate.io is based on the player, so people are seeing it, but a specific thing that is further down the line. In the meantime, we use it for development. It's actually available in the product as a beta, and quite a few people use it for their own purposes. But it's not the thing that we're doing next in elevate.io as a standalone product. There's a couple of questions on targets here, which when we get to the point where we feel more confident, we will put those targets out, but we're not there yet. I'll read them all out, but yes, stand by for that. How is the infrastructure coping with the increased demand? No problem at all. We use AWS as our host. If we are saturating AWS, then that's a great problem to have. It won't happen. We're standing up really well. This product was designed to scale. We've obviously made sure that we had things in place, and we continue to improve. A big part of the improvement has had to go in ahead of the graphics work, which you're going to see drop is, for example, our move towards doing some of the processing in the server side of GPUs for things like export. So that's going to get faster for the end users. It will get cheaper for us. So that's actually an important one is that whilst our usage of the data center is going up and the amount of activity we have, the cost is actually going down. So we're getting more efficient. We are getting better able to handle the load that we have to do. Obviously, as time goes on, we will be continually tuning the way that we do things to make sure that our cost base goes down, even if the usage is just really going up. It is worth mentioning just a couple of things. When we did the original cloud, we would increase efficiency instead of increase capacity. We were pretty well on the same capacity as the usage doubled and doubled and doubled. Now we are starting to apply that principle and some of the technology into elevate. But it is not just a question of just paying twice as much to get twice as many users. There are dozens and dozens of incremental improvements to the efficiency. As Sumit says, more efficiency also means more responsive and better performance, better experience. I mean, AWS is not going to run out of capacity, but we have got a lot of efficiency improvements we can add, and we have been doing that as the usage has risen. Thanks, Stephen. It is a very good news story on that area, I have to say. Question from Dan. Ness, I am a big fan of your work. On the upcoming feature, Sumit has talked about which, based on your research, do you expect to have the most impact, what is the most in demand? I think the text animation work that is coming up is going to be really interesting. We talk a lot about the proposition of elevate, kind of one aspect of elevate's proposition being the fact that it brings a lot of the elements that you need to create great video into one user experience, one world. Text animation is a great example of that, of where currently people are using separate caption apps, a lot of which are completely really not as good as they look like they could be. Actually, what the team have built in elevate.io is amazing, and I think that gives us quite a good opportunity to really push on that part of the proposition. The other aspect that we know from the research that we have been doing with users, and this spans quite a lot of different types of user personas, is that the other great thing about elevate.io being browser-based, very easy and intuitive to use, and the combination of different parts of the tooling process for video creation, is that it gives people more freedom to be creative and to create content, rather than having to manage tools and systems and clunky connections and things like that. Yeah. Whilst there is the rise of the template-based editors like CapCut and so forth on the market, actually, a big frustration with those is that you are shoehorned into a particular way of creating video or working from templates, whereas elevate.io gives you a way to create whatever you have in your mind, easy and simply with the tool set available. But at the end of the day, you are building from scratch, whatever you have as your vision. I think, again, text animations is another way that we can really extrapolate out that proposition. I think that is really exciting. Thank you, Ines. Question from Tamsin. "What are the NEDs doing? We never see them or hear anything about them." I can assure you they are very much there. They attend all the board meetings, and they offer their expertise in the various areas that they have experience in. Nick Lisher is currently the CMO at Nextdoor, a Nasdaq-listed company. Youri has had extensive experience at YouTube and Google. Both of them bring a fair amount of value at board meetings. Of course, their roles are not just purely as advisors, but also they have fiduciary duties as well, which they fulfill. Stephen, do you want to expand on that? Yeah. They are around if you need to talk to them. There are many committees that need NEDs on them under AIM rules. But they are not running the company. Their job is to advise and to keep an eye on things. That is what they do, and that is probably why you do not see them so much, because it is behind-the-scenes work. Yeah. Okay. Another question about the board with other changes. No other changes are planned at this stage. Question from Gerard. "If there are 200,000 target teams in the U.K., what is the equivalent of the U.S. number? I don't have that number to hand. Maybe we can follow up. Yeah. Okay. Your slide mentioned the new YouTube channel. What will that do to create views? I assume that means what are we going to be doing— Yeah. —with that channel. The idea is that we'll have a mixture of different content format and particularly voices to that channel. One of the key things that we want to do with that is to start to bring other names, faces, voices into our world to help us expand the reach of our content and the story of elevate. So, it'll be a combination of interviews and content that we create with other industry players. We'll also be leveraging customer case studies and stories on there and opening up the window into how people create videos and content and share their tips and advice, and particularly in the easiest of using elevate. So, we'll be trying to find lots of different niches and pockets of opportunities to capitalize on the active intent in YouTube. As I said before, YouTube is quite a big contributor to asset citations in AI and LLM discovery. So we'll be looking at opportunistic ways to do that as well in terms of what keywords we want to capitalize on, and therefore create content for that. Thank you very much. Another question for you, I think. In terms of to help retain new users, what are we doing to ensure they're aware of the upcoming product features? We have a couple of different. We sort of have a bit of a playbook that we run through when we launch new product features, which includes announcing directly to current users that we segment through email and in-product notifications or feature discovery. Then we broaden that out into more wider publication and broadcast news in terms of updating elements of our website, looking for any kind of search or keyword opportunities off the back of those, and also using our primary internal social, et cetera, to publish those announcements. Yeah. Thanks. Another one for you, Ines. Can please, Ines, talk about how we actively market to our large email list, e.g., upselling. Yeah Not just sending occasional product updates. Yeah, absolutely. We do quite a lot on email. A big push over the last few months has been around really understanding that user base and getting better with segmentation of those announcements and updates, so that we are not just sending blast broadcast comms to the whole list, which can actually damage deliverability and things like that. Starting to get smarter with who we email, what we communicate with them. Every month we look at our strategies for that, what we are going to prioritize next. So yeah, quite a lot going on there. Great. Thanks. There is another funding question there, which I think we have answered. You talked about reducing staffing levels. Have you reduced engineer numbers to save costs? We have certainly taken a disciplined approach to our cost base over the last few years, which has resulted in a number of rounds of reduction. We do not intend to reduce any further. We have right-sized the team, and I think it is in a good place. Okay, next. Any more to add there? No. No? It's good. Great post from our video editing company founder out in L.A., if you didn't see it. Thanks, Grant, you're always very good at these things, in terms of sending us these links. I really appreciate it. I've tried elevate.io before. It's by far the most impressive proxy codec I've ever experienced. I love the responsiveness of how it runs in the browser. Thanks, Grant. That's really good to hear that. Are the marketing team aware of elevate.io's key selling point, that the editors, owners of the footage, keep the copyright of their IP, as opposed to other offerings like CapCut? Yeah, we actually have seen several different spikes, and we have keywords and campaigns around competitors, and CapCut's one of them. Google Ads campaigns, and probably one of our top performing ones probably for that reason. Okay, great. Thank you. There's a question from Reece. A barrier for smaller hobbyist creators in using elevate.io against social sites such as Instagram is the real music catalog available. Epidemic Sound has excellent, if not mostly unknown artists. Will elevate.io have access to mainstream artists if it's just for one minute these artists allow the same way Instagram does? I've done testing on my own content and well-known artists from Instagram's vast catalog compared to Epidemic Sound's. In every case, the engagement was higher. Question. We don't have a deal with any music library able to do that. It works very differently within something like Instagram where they're able to reuse known music. So it's a bit of a harder one for us to do, actually. It's just not possible without licensing known music, which is incredibly complicated to do. So we are unlikely to introduce that. There are other libraries that we did talk to a while ago about that, but it's not necessarily something that's right for us at this stage. People can also license that music from another library that has well-known music and bring it into elevate.io and make it part of their edit. So it's not prohibitive to do that, but we're not a platform, so we don't have the ability to directly assign music. Yeah. We did explore it, and one of the platforms we talked to would do this on our behalf, but only for certain platforms that it would go onto. So maybe it was YouTube or maybe it was another platform. The fact is that we give complete freedom to our users to publish anywhere. So therefore, it's impossible to do that. Okay. That was a lot of fun. I think we're at the end of the questions. Over to you, Jake. Absolutely, guys, and thank you very much indeed for being so generous of your time then addressing all of those questions that came in this morning. But Ian, perhaps before, really now just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company. If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, that'd be great. Yeah. Well, I think we've done a lot of wrapping up, but I'll just say that we're just delighted with the way that the marketing and the product team are working together to deliver the growth that we've seen over the last few months, and long may it continue. Thank you very much. Ian, that's great, and thank you all once again for updating investors this afternoon. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you will now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback. On behalf of the management team of Blackbird plc, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session, so good afternoon to you all.