Not by me, but by the senior management team that came to me and asked that we postpone our Christmas party until 2026 so they could, and I quote, smash their targets. Smash their targets they did.

Q3 was the single strongest quarter of organic growth in the company's history. What makes that even more powerful is Q3 is a tough quarter.

Like there's Thanksgiving, there's Christmas, there's peak retail spend, the end of the American financial year, I mean there's unprecedented uncertainty in the United States. It's tough, and yet, we know there's no excuses here at Blackpearl.

Like it's win or die, and this quarter we won. That growth that we got represents our venture strategy in action: three high-value products charging forward in unison.

This is a direct result of last year's hard work, and there was a lot of hard work. There were tough decisions, and there was relentless pressure we put on ourselves.

Of course, this has all been made possible from the tremendous support that we got from shareholders, and this victory is in part because of you. What I'm proudest of is how the team executed in in Q3, and it's it's not just the increase in revenue, it's about increasing quality.

We've continued our planned evolution from uncontracted monthly SaaS to contracted annual SaaS and and data as a service, we call DaaS. Now at this time last year, data as a service revenue was nil, zero, accounted for none of our ARR, and today it's approaching 40%, and after eight months, the churn is still nil.

If you could move a slide forward there for me, Tori? One further slide, thank you.

There we go. I don't think I've ever considered a financial graph sexy before.

There's a first time for everything, right? Q3, I'm going to get in trouble for that, no doubt.

Q3 growth is of course 100% organic. Last quarter we had, as you can see, a step trend a step-jump change as well, but part of that, a portion of that revenue was via acquisition.

It's important to note that we don't acquire companies for the revenue that they they had made, we acquire them for the revenue they will make as part of the Blackpearl Group. On that front, the B2B team delivered: Rocket by name, rocket by nature.

Just four months since since they became part of the group, in four months they've completed their first wave of integration into the group. They're bringing our valuable Pearl Engine data into their application, and that has radically increased the value of the service that they're now they are now providing customers.

Because of that, the average revenue per new customer they're bringing on board is annually contracted and at fivefold the average revenue per customer. Now, Bebop and Pearldiver, they did not miss the party either.

They both had massive contributions to revenue in both contracted SaaS and data as a service, and that is why data as a service is now such a meaningful part of our revenue composition. Now as we've previously communicated to the market, our strategy is focused on high-value revenue: that is contracted software as a service and data as a service today, and then ultimately in the future, platform as a service.

This strategy represents a fundamental reality. AI is radically lowering the barriers to entry for traditional SaaS.

This makes deeper customer integration, proprietary data, and relentless evolution your primary sources of defensibility in the modern world. Now, this isn't to say that our uncontracted SaaS revenue is without value for Blackpearl Group, far from it.

It's a big part of why we have such strong CAC payback periods, such efficient revenue per employee, and such proven success in acquiring data as a service clients. As always, I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'm now stealing some of Karen's thunder, over to you, Karen.

Thanks, Nick. ARR closed at $23.7 million, which was up 114% year-on-year and 22% quarter-on-quarter.

This is strong organic ARR growth, and what I'm most happy about is that this has been delivered through our seasonally toughest quarter. From my perspective, the most exciting part is the improving efficiency as we grow, and the quality of that growth as we scale.

This is shown in our ARR per employee increasing to $306,000 per employee, and our CAC payback period improving to 3.9 months. Both are clear signals of our improving operating leverage and continued discipline and efficiency as we scale higher-value customers and contracts, and integrate the platform across all the ventures.

On churn, data as a service churn remained at 0%. Data as a service has contracted data that is embedded into customer workflows.

SaaS churn was seasonally elevated in the December quarter, consistent with normal year-end patterns and the roll-off of our lower-tier customers. We expect churn to normalize next quarter.

As a reminder, last year's churn went from 9.4% in the third quarter to around 4% in each of the next three quarters. Overall, this quarter has shown strong organic ARR growth and improving efficiency, and we remain focused on scaling sustainably as we work towards our next major milestones.

My focus as CFO for the coming year is efficiency, execution, and being ruthless about cash utilization. I'm not an accountant called Karen for no reason!

On the next slide, I will briefly explain this diagram because it's central to how we think about revenue quality and lifetime value across the group. We do things a bit differently here at Blackpearl, which won't surprise people.

In traditional sales funnels, there are leads and opportunities that are filtered out through the sales process to eventually become paying customers. At Blackpearl, the top stage of our funnel contains paying customers, labeled here as uncontracted SaaS.

These are typically customers engaging with us through shorter-duration marketing campaigns. Importantly, this layer is not loss-leading.

It has really attractive economics in its own right, with a 3.9-month CAC payback and approximately 1.5 to 2 times ROI. This segment is cash-generating and effectively funds itself.

The key point that this is not the end state. The purpose of this funnel is ascension.

Uncontracted SaaS gives us a highly efficient entry point to identify the highest-potential customers and graduate them into more durable and highly valuable revenue streams, i.e. contracted SaaS, data as a service, and eventually platform as a service.

As customers ascend through the funnel, contract sizes increase, our products become more embedded into their workflows, retention strengthens, and lifetime value increases. The unit economics improve as we remove from our lower-price-point activation into higher price and much longer lifetime value contracted platform relationships.

What this graph illustrates is disciplined, repeatable pathways, where we acquire customers efficiently at the top and we scale through deeper integration over time. In short, we are building a highly efficient model designed to convert early engagement into high-quality, longer-term recurring revenue, finding customers that can ultimately be worth up to 100 times more than their original price point.

Back to you, Nick.

Thank you, Karen. I'm not going to be able to beat that line.

That sound bite's amazing: I'm not called Karen the accountant for nothing. All right.

Thank you. $30 mil ARR for Blackpearl Group now is no longer a target, it's an outcome.

What will matter and what will define our success from now is how we achieve it. Each venture is now driving hard towards positive EBITDA growth, right?

Not just top line, EBITDA growth. In fact, Pearldiver as a venture is so close you can almost smell it.

We have that re-energized focus on bottom-line growth, and in fact, that's where our key leadership's KPIs lie. Now, of course, we're going to continue to invest and build on our proven track record of innovation.

Of course, we've released two products in the last 24 months, and we can see how much revenue they've been able to generate in a comparatively short period of time. The great thing for us is everyday our core asset, the Pearl Engine, it grows in value.

It's now ingesting 25 billion sales and marketing data signals daily. That is the key to our future successes, because as I mentioned earlier, relentless innovation is one of the pillars of longevity.

Right now, our immediate focus is on lethal execution. Our key imperatives, as you heard from Karen, is cash efficiency and quality: cash, quality, cash, quality, cash, quality, and well, of course, hypergrowth, because, after all, we did still post 114% year-on-year growth.

Thank you. Over to you, Simon, for questions.

Right, thanks, Nick. Thanks, Karen.

First question: could you please provide a breakdown on the ARR growth across the product group, and has the Bebop run rate continued?

All products contributed. We haven't presented to the market a breakdown by product, but one of the things that we are moving to start giving better visibility over on the quarterly updates is a breakdown in revenue by class of revenue.

As Karen was talking about before, that is uncontracted SaaS, contracted SaaS, data as a service, and eventually platform as a service. I can tell you Bebop had a awesome contribution, all three ventures contributed to that result.

Thanks, Nick. Along the same lines of that question, what part of the growth in the quarter was driven by DaaS, and what does the pipeline look like now?

Pipeline looks awesome. They actually finished on the data as a platform like the pipeline, I'd argue they were probably unlucky not to get a few more on the other side, but the result was good enough as it was.

It looks really good. It continues to grow, and I'd love to actually go back and see comparatively last quarter, I don't have the number, but, obviously we've laid in several data as a service deals last quarter, and you can see now that percentage of group recurring revenue now is, yeah, 36%.

That's quite an impressive growth trajectory, and that will continue to be a growing part of the mix of our revenue composition.

Thanks, Nick. What was the organic ARR year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter, if you have it top of your head, Karen?

I don't have that on hand, but obviously this whole quarter was all organic growth. Last quarter we had a lot of acquisition ARR from the purchase of B2B Rocket.

No, we're definitely now focused on organic growth for the coming year.

It's probably something that's reasonably easy to work out in the sense the only quarter we've had non-organic growth was last quarter, Q2, sorry, Q2, not last quarter, that was Q3, Q2, and it was about 60% of that step jump you saw there was I think it was about 60% was acquired through bringing in B2B Rocket, but we still actually had pretty good organic growth Q2 as well. Our bias, to be clear, we're heavily, heavily biased to organic growth.

The only reason, again, sort of mentioned before, we go through acquiring a business is for collapsing time, like B2B Rocket had great technology, but it's not technology we couldn't have engineered, but that would have taken time and money and distraction off getting into DaaS. Then the other advantage, of course, when you're bringing in a company like B2B Rocket is the team: just a ultra-aggressive, fast-moving, hyper-fast-moving team.

That's why you do these acquisitions. The little bit of revenue that comes with it is nice, but it's not why we do these things.

We haven't given any projections on this, just be careful how you answer it, but when are you expecting to hit free cash flow break-even?

Obviously a super important question. You can see probably from what Karen and I reiterated, a major driving initiative within the group at the moment.

The way that we've always thought about cash break-even, cash neutrality, is based on milestone investing. That, weirdly, the first time we could have done that is when we got to around $3 million ARR, again around $10 million ARR, and then we decided to go into a lost-making cycle because we think we can achieve stellar growth in an efficient way, and that's what we're moving through at the moment.

Realistically, anyone can do the napkin math, it's around, sort of around that $30 mil mark if we continue to be efficient, if we don't do any other acquisitions or don't launch new products into market, it lands around there. The key thing for us is that we need to be doing great with the cash we've got.

We know that if we come back to the market and want more cash, it's just going to negatively impact the stock price. One of the things I think of all the great things in Blackpearl at the moment, one thing is not great is the stock price.

No CEO should never complain, it's just an observation. Obviously, part of that is we've been raising capital lately, and so this is now using that capital to grow and use it very wisely.

Thanks, Nick. Answered.

Congratulations to the team, exceptional outcomes. How do you communicate value to your customers and create stickiness for retention?

That is awesome question, and it varies per product. I could go on for half an hour here, and everyone knows I'm not succinct with words, but I'm going to do my best.

We think about data as a service, that's actually a very interesting one because you've got kind of two customers under that: you've got the digital agency or marketing agency who are paying us, and then behind them you've got their clients. There's two magic numbers when you think about them.

The first is, and I'd argue the most important of the two is although Trinity, the CEO of Pearldiver, may argue this point, but the end customer, like the customer's customer, how you measure their success is the amount of conversions from marketing campaigns run by Pearldiver data times the average value of that campaign versus what the meta-algorithm number of conversions times the value of those conversions. It's like a quantity and quality, or quantity and value, versus the algorithm.

Secondly down, that is sometimes the partners aren't running any traditional algorithm campaigns, it's just Pearldiver, in which case you're looking at the value of ROI from our campaigns versus what the customer is paying our partner. They're both really easy to determine because, obviously we've got deep integrations in with Google, and provided the customer has put in custom conversion tracking, which obviously as marketing agencies, expert agencies they do, you get great visibility over that.

The second one is, is our customer making money? Is our partner making money?

That's a simple equation. It's we can see how many end customers they have on the Pearldiver service times the average value of the package they're selling.

When it comes to B2B Rocket, again, what they're solving for is people that need more demos. They need more inbound people to communicate with.

Simple thing is the average amount of demos that are coming in per month. You can see the positive replies, right?

You can do that at either the average value per demo divided by the amount of what their close rate is, or you can do it on the industry standard. Typically in the US, getting a booked demo will cost you around $1,000.

That's unit metrics down. You got B2B Rocket's package now at five grand.

Five demos out of what they're doing kind of meets industry standard, and obviously the team radically looks to radically smash that and provide phenomenal return on investment. Bebop is around integrating these leads into businesses' existing CRMs, and you can track attribution all the way down to closed.

I guess the point is, out of that long-winded response, it was tough without having those formulas in front of me, is everything's down to absolutely hard numbers. Now, when I talk about quality, that's a huge focus for us this year.

I think in past years, we've been guilty of not being deep enough or kind of brutal enough about seeing every customer in real time and knowing they're making money. One of the mantras for the venture team this year that I've laid upon them is I've said no customer cancels a service that's making them money.

Ultimately, we know that the world's going to get tougher, right? Make and you want to make sure that you're making customers money, and so we need to see that in real time.

Big focus, but also we're in a good position.

Nick, does the improvement in CAC payback period ahead of expectation partly reflect lower marketing spend than expected?

A little bit, but it's not the kind of main part. Part of the strategy the team did is actually open the funnel up a little bit more, which is what Karen was talking about before, I think's an interesting thing, and I'll probably have to keep touching that on a couple of future other webinars, because obviously people see a churn of 8.

whatever percent it was of that uncontracted SaaS and like, 'Oh, it's terrible.' I don't care about those clients as much as I care about the data as a service clients, but how we find those data as a service clients is through that.

The bigger you open that funnel, the more data as a service will pop out the bottom. What the team did is actually open that up.

What that successfully did is actually lowered cost of advertising a little bit because we're having to be a little less niche, and then we can see all those data as a service falling out underneath. That's probably a little bit why the CAC was so efficient on that particular month.

The other part of it as well, just to kind of set some expectations moving forward, is obviously in some areas we've taken the investment money that we've just raised last year and we're scaling up operations and in a few areas. Probably the full costs haven't quite hit in on that comparative to some of the value that got shaken out of the pipe, but we're always around four, 4.5 months, always have been any which way, so that's a huge strength of our business model and the products.

We eat our own dog food in big, in big portions.

Thanks, Nick. Are you seeing any change in competition in the US, and do you compete with Zeta Global?

Zeta Global I'm aware of as a name. I think that was Sculley, the ex-Apple guy that was Pepsi or Coke before that.

No, haven't competed with them. It's a bit fragmented market.

Again, like I kind of mentioned before, is AI radically reduces barriers of software creation. There's all these other areas that you compete in.

I don't feel like we're ever in a dogfight in a sale. What our big competition is, is lethargy or people that haven't experimented outside of sales as status quo.

For example, with Bebop, it's essentially vibe prospecting, it's a very different way of prospecting. If you're used to a traditional way of prospecting, that can take a bit to get your head around, so that's probably your biggest competitor is doing nothing.

With data as a service, what we often get is people that have tried unprocessed data in the past. They've gone to a data supplier and all those ones that you read about, and they've absolutely just burned their money because they don't have the processing chops or anything in the middle to fish through that ocean of data to find where the value is.

That's a huge part of what we do. We have unique data, absolutely.

The key part is obviously processing through that in real time to find the actual people that are buying, and that's a real art form. Not too many people that I'm aware of are doing that as well.

Competition not a big thing, but that's means you don't take your position for granted. You've just got to keep innovating and keep getting better each month.

Great. Last question: three to five years is quite a gap between where Blackpearl is now and $50 million ARR.

Is there an expectation of nominal month-on-month growth in dollar terms slowing down across the next three to five years?

We've never ever gone to the market and said something that we haven't hit. The reason why I guess some people today would be hearing a little bit about that sales funnel for the first time is we've been working on that for a year, but until we've actually got the data and everything through and you can, hand on heart, know what you're doing, then it doesn't come out of our mouths, which is why if you go back and look at everything we say, we end up doing everything we say we're going to do.

What I have said is that we feel obviously massively confident about getting through to that $30 million mark in a what I think is a reasonably short period of time in the business world, that we know that getting there gets us around that cash neutrality point of view, which is super important. We know that that kind of velocity just continues through.

It's not a full stop. It's barely even a drinks break during the first innings of a test match.

We're just going to blast through that. I don't want to go and say to someone, 'Oh, we'll be at $50 million in two years,' or anything like that until I know 130% that we're there.

There won't be a slowing down in velocity in a material way. We've got a great machine, and we're confident in our ability of maintaining that.

Thanks so much for that, Nick. That concludes the Q&A segment.

I might just hand it back to you for closing remarks.

Oh, man, I don't know, I think you did this

to me last time as well, mate.

I just want to thank everyone. Firstly, just want to say happy New Year to everyone, and secondly, I just wanted to thank everyone for the amazing support we got last year.

I've tried to thank everyone on an individual basis, but we have so many shareholders now, and these results, sort of received so much great feedback in from so many people, which we appreciate. This is only made possible because of the support and the investment capital and the whole kind of, they say it takes a village to raise someone, or in this case with Blackpearl, it's not just the team in here, it's the wider cohort of everyone that's made this possible.

I just wanted to thank everyone. We are massively looking forward to this year.

I've never ever looked forward to a business year more than I have on this one. The team is really charged up.

We've got great capital behind us, great momentum, and, as I said before, it's now just all about execution, and we're looking forward to it. Ad astra.

Thank you very much. Great.

Thanks all for joining. Thanks, Karen.