All right, welcome inside our Vancouver Broadcast Center here at Proactive for another livestream event, and this time with Nextech3D.ai. Joining us is the CEO of the company, Evan Gappelberg.

Evan, it's great to see you again. How are you?

Oh, seems you're losing your audio there, Evan, for some reason. We got to get your audio taken care of.

We'll take care of that, and we'll tell you that we are here today to talk about Nextech3D.ai's financials that came out recently, and also about some of the things that they'll be doing in the future as they sort of transition the business a little bit into where they were in the last few years to where they are going to now. Evan's going to talk a lot about that.

Also, recent acquisitions as well, EventDex and also Crafty Labs. Evan will talk about how that changes things and what the next step is towards trying to put this all together.

Let's see if we can get Evan back on. Hear us now, Evan?

No, we're having some technical difficulties with your microphone, we're going to try to get that all taken care of, Evan. Modern technology, that's what happens when these things go.

I can see you attempting to put your microphone on, but, Evan, I'm going to ask you to-

How about now, Steve?

I can hear you now. Just turn it up a little bit and you should be good.

How are you?

I'm good. Sorry about that.

That's all right. No problem at all.

Good to see you again, as I mentioned, and welcome once again to another livestream event here at Proactive. Again, we are with CEO Evan Gappelberg of Nextech3D.ai.

Evan, first off, thought I'd give you an opportunity just to say hello to the people that are watching, and we always encourage questions from people as well if they want to log those questions on. We've had a number of them asked already, but just overall, your thoughts on where you're seeing as far as your financials are concerned.

We reported a very strong quarter, but Q3 wasn't just a strong quarter, it really was an inflection point for our company. We delivered 59% year-over-year revenue growth, 20% sequential growth.

That's our second quarter in a row of 20% sequential growth. Record 95% gross margins, all at the same time.

It's a pretty powerful combination. I don't know that we've ever been able to report a trifecta like that, where we've had the gross margins, sequential, and year-over-year growth all coming through at the same time.

What I'm seeing is the beginning of a new, sustainable growth curve as our event platform gains real traction with enterprise customers. I just want to stress that enterprise is the main event here.

We are doing business now with the largest companies on the planet, including Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, Deloitte, General Motors, and many, many, many others, Spotify, Dropbox, Pinterest. All those customers are customers that we're now talking to about enterprise contracts, and we have multiple enterprise contracts that are just literally waiting for the ink to dry, we expect them to come in in the next week or two.

Evan, let's take a step back here. I don't want to give a whole history lesson, but let's talk a little bit about last year, and really what happened last year and sort of led you to this.

This has been sort of a transition that you've been making with the company in order to get to a place where you think you could be sustainable and move forward. Why don't you sort of take us back through some of the vision that you saw and where you see things going now?

This is truly a story of a turnaround to takeoff, where a year ago, we were kind of left for dead by investors. Let's be honest, the stock was at the bottom of the barrel, and we were exiting out of our Amazon contract, which was, where we made 3D models for Amazon, that was a multimillion-dollar contract.

There was a lot of soul-searching that went on, and and what we realized is that we had AI, which is transformative technology, and we had a very, very strong position in the event space with Map Dynamics, and, they have 500-plus customers. What we decided to do was to build out that platform and add more features and more functionality, and then we decided, you know what, why build it when we can buy it?

We acquired EventDex in late 2025, and once we acquired EventDex, it gave us the ability- we basically acquired a portfolio of clients, plus a full tech stack, which includes badging, ticketing, tradeshow app, AI matchmaking, which is a very big deal, we could get into that in a minute. That plus our our Map Dynamics event floor plan gave us this end-to-end, one-stop shop solution that we never had before.

Then, we optimized and added AI into the mix so that, we can have very strong margins, and the business started to turn around. Then, Steve, as luck would have it, Crafty Labs showed up on our on my radar, and and we were able to acquire that business, and that's going to really put more wind in our sails for 2026.

That wasn't a 2025 acquisition, that was 2026. We're looking at acquisitions now quite differently because AI is really a game-changer.

It does allow us to make acquisitions that are additive to to our company, where those companies might be struggling, we acquire them and we're able to streamline them, we're able to add AI. You might have 40 people that we can run a a business with four people, and instead of having, those other 36, we just use AI agents.

We have like an army of AI agents that that take the place, Steve. That's kind of, where we sit today, where we're using AI massively, and and it's going to be more and more and more a part of our story, and that's why we call ourselves an AI-first company, because without, the AI, we probably wouldn't even be here today.

Yeah. Talk to us about Crafty Lab, because for people not familiar with it, what did you see in Crafty Lab that you thought was a really nice fit to what you were trying to build with Nextech?

Crafty adds something that we didn't have. As I said, with EventDex and Map D, we had expo and live event tech.

We had the full end-to-end, one-stop shop solution. With Crafty, we now have virtual experiential events, as well as live kitted experiential events, essentially team building.

As it turns out, Steve, every single large corporation in America and the world has a budget for team building. It really goes down to employee retention, right?

How do you keep your employees engaged when they're spread out across the globe? How do you make them feel like they're part of a very big company?

Crafty offers team building, you have mixology, you're making cocktails with your coworkers, you have a chocolate-making class, you have a candle-making, you have trivia. We've done trivia here at Nextech, actually, virtual trivia.

It's a blast, it's fabulous, it's so much fun. Here's a good example on Crafty, and I've said this before, but I'll say it again.

Growing up, I used to love recess, who didn't love going out and playing with your friends? When you grow up, recess goes away, and so you go to the office just like you used to go to school, but there's no real interaction with your coworkers.

Think of Crafty Labs as that platform that allows you to have that recess, and that is a lot of fun, and it does build camaraderie and teamwork. That business, we see massive, massive upside, too, because it started out, Steve, just as I've described it, experiential, but we've recently announced a gifting component to that.

It's the same HR person that's now ordering gifts for their employees or for corporate customers, now they're doing that through the Crafty portal, and we're adding offsite events, which are potential multimillion-dollar offsites, where you have 50 or 100 of the top execs that travel to Hawaii or some other remote, exotic location, and they hire Crafty to put together the entire event, from the flight to the airfare to the hotel to the food, and all of that is something that we can do now. When you look at Crafty, it's a way bigger platform than when we acquired it just six weeks ago.

Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about companies you mentioned that you're working with.

Crafty had its own client list when it came to you, and these type of organizations are so big, widespread, around the world, that the type of events that you're talking about are something that it's not a if they want to, it's they have to, in essence, do these events.

It extends beyond these big companies. Our clients now are Google, Microsoft, Meta, Netflix, General Motors, BNP Paribas, Deloitte, just all the Fortune 1000 companies.

They're all doing these types of events on the Crafty platform, and we're talking to them now about enterprise contracts, and really getting a bigger share of their wallet. When you think about government organizations, Steve, we're also talking to them because they're spread out, they have massive size, just like a Google, right?

Google's basically the size of a government. Or governments the size of a Google, and so, we're talking to governments about the same thing.

Okay. You mentioned that you're looking at other acquisitions as well.

I know you can't get into too much details, but is it augmenting what you already have, or is it adding things that you think you need to have in order to move forward?

Amazingly, on the tech side, Steve, I think we're done pretty much. AI is going to be the only thing that we develop in-house, we don't need to acquire that, but we're looking at adding more and more, I'm just going to call them modules, or potentially customers to our base, right?

We just want to have a bigger slice of the pie. We're looking at companies in the same space, or companies that are just adjacent to us.

We have a lot of .orgs, associations, there might be a company that we're looking at that works with associations. The events industry is quite fragmented, and so it gives us an opportunity to kind of roll them up under the Nextech banner and integrate them into our ecosystem, and really just acquire more and more clients, more and more revenue, and then optimize that with our AI.

Okay. Just on clients, we've got a question here.

You mentioned actively engaging 200 enterprise customers. What's the realistic breakdown over the next 12 months, tier one, two, to three, and how does that sort of apply to revenue?

When you talk about tier one, two, and three, they're all tier one and two, I don't think there are any tier threes. Tier three, if if- I don't know if this investor is talking about tier one, two, and three as far as our pricing calculator, because if if you if he's talking about our pricing calculator, they're in all tiers, right?

As I've mentioned, and I think that is what he's talking about, tier one is like $25,000 to $50,000, and then tier two is, $50,000 to, I think, $150,000, and, tier three is above that. As we've mentioned, the way that these clients work is they start at one tier and then they move up the ladder.

We're talking to all of them, but you got to keep it this in mind, these customers weren't in any tier. They were in no tier.

They were, spending a small dollars, relatively small dollars, multiple times a year. Now we're actually putting them into enterprise contracts.

That's the big news. Of course, we want, $250,000 contracts, but I'll take $25,000, $50,000 contracts all day long because I know we can grow those into six-figure contracts.

Evan, on that, these companies that you're talking to and talking about are, as we mentioned, they're always engaging their employees. There's so much demand for employees these days in certain companies, that companies are doing everything they can to hold on to employees, and especially the good ones they want to hold on to.

Now, as in the past, it used to be companies would say, "Okay, well, here's what we've got, and if we have any revenue left over, we'll do something with the employees, like we'll do a pizza night or something like that." Now they're budgeting in their budgets large amounts of money in order for simply employee retention and employee engagement.

I think that's the key to all this, isn't it, that these are not something that's just off the side of the desk, these are people who are specifically hired to make sure their employees stay where they are.

It's the HR department, and they're given budgets, annual budgets-

Big budgets.

Big companies have big budgets, even their pencil budget is big at Google, right? So-

Yeah. Fair enough.

Yeah. It's all big, but they're basically coming to us saying, "Hey, I have $50,000, I have $100,000.

How can I spend it with you guys? Give me a roadmap, show me what you guys have.

Let's have some fun, let's build some experiences that are memorable, let's do some team building." You couldn't ask for a better customer than that, right, where they're eager to buy, and they have a mandate to spend that money.

They're just looking for a company that can give them the ROI. Our whole thing is about data and analytics, and so in another week or two, Steve, we're going to come back on your show, and we're going to be announcing a new platform that has some very, very exciting data and analytics, and it's all AI, it's all on the Crafty platform play with the Crafty credits, et cetera, et cetera.

There's a lot happening at Nextech that's going to make all this turn into a reality. There's a lot going on behind the scenes with me and my team, and we're going to be showcasing some of that the next couple of weeks.

We have the clients.

Yeah.

We're rolling out the platform, we have the product, we're really just executing at this point. The 59% growth, Steve, is a clear sign that it's happening, it's not just talk.

Okay. Another question from an investor wanted to know about ticketing and contracts, big players.

Somebody else asked a similar question about Ticketmaster, StubHub, people like that. I know that we've talked about ticketing in the past, and in your brand of ticketing and how you do it is very different than what you're seeing there.

Can you talk to us a bit about the ticketing part of the company?

Yeah. What we're going to be doing, we can't just launch me-too ticketing, let's be clear on that.

We will not win. We're launching blockchain ticketing, as we've mentioned many times.

Blockchain ticketing is our hero product in the ticketing market, and so we're beginning conversations. It is going to take a little bit of time, but we're starting to have conversations with the big Ticketmasters and StubHubs, and reaching out to them and getting them engaged, and talking to, again, agencies, government agencies about blockchain and how we can use that for certification, not just for concerts, but beyond that.

There's a lot happening here. We're trying to do it all at once, it's definitely a bit of a challenge.

Fair enough. I get it.

More to come is what you're saying.

More to come. It's happening, it's just in motion.

Okay. A lot of questions, Evan, about total revenue for the year, guidance, all that.

From what I understand, I've interviewed many times, you have not set any guidance for the company, and that's not something you're prepared to do today, I don't think. You're happy with the sequential growth that you're seeing in the quarters, and you want to sort of build on that?

Look, I'm confident that we're going to show triple-digit growth in this year. I'm confident that there's going to be surprises to the upside, not to the downside.

It is a little early for me to project the numbers, but it's definitely going to be way better than last year, which was the trough, and we think that this is really just the first year of a multi-year growth curve, where it's that hockey stick and we're just at that bottom turning up, right? It starts to go like that.

We're just at that first year, and this is really the first quarter that we can really talk about that.

Yeah. Let's talk about margins, because that was a big part of your news release as well, talking about company margins.

I know there's been a lot of work put in by you and the team to try and get your margins to a certain point to where they are now, and it's significant. Can you talk to us about margins and where they're at, and are you at the point where you can't improve on them anymore because your margins are quite high?

I don't know that we can improve beyond 95%. We can't get to 100%, but we are a high-margin business because it's primarily been software that we're selling, software is the highest-margin business.

In the past, the 3D models, we were trying to get to pure software, we never actually made it there, we were 50% there. Because we're pure software, because we've reduced our expenses, those margins are very, very high, and we're very proud of that, that the finance team's done an amazing job.

I don't know if the question has come up, Steve, about the acquisition of ARway, has that been one of the questions?

Yes. Matter of fact, that was my next one in the next three to four months.

That one and 3D models as well, and just is the company sort of moving away from that. Let's talk about ARway first.

I will just grab that 3D model thing. We have some contracts that are ongoing with 3D models, but it's not big business.

It's not millions, it's hundreds of thousands, right? We're just not focused on that because we're chasing after the tens of millions, right?

We just don't see that in the 3D modeling space. It's still there.

If it does take off, we'll be able to take advantage of it, but we did have Amazon, and we weren't able to turn that into a sustainable business, I don't know what's bigger than that, right? As far as ARway, let's talk about that.

Sure.

The deal is done, but there's always a but. The deal's done, but in order to get the regulators to approve it, there's a process, and that process is we need to have audited financials for both companies.

Nextech is in its Q4 right now, we're going to be auditing our financials anyway. We don't want to do two audits because that would unfairly burden the company with additional costs, and this doesn't make any sense for us to do an audit today when we're going to be doing an audit in six weeks.

That was the calculus of the last couple of weeks that we've been going through. Do we do the audit or do we wait?

We've decided to wait, because we just don't want to burn our precious cash paying auditors twice, and that's really the bottom line. Once the audit is done for Nextech, we'll be able to quickly move that acquisition into the done deal, and so we're just waiting for our audit and then we move to close.

Okay. Let's talk about this year, and you mentioned the revenue in this particular financials is not related to Crafty Lab and only partially of EventDex as well.

What are sort of the things that investors should look for in 2026 as you continue to build the product out, and obviously really push sales?

There's a number of things. One is, keep a look out for M&A, because we are hunting for new deals that would help us to grow even faster.

That's kind of the turbo booster. Also, the enterprise deals are going to start to be announced soon, and then, for us, it's really just executing on the business that we have, landing and expanding.

We already landed through acquisitions the biggest companies, now we want to expand. There's a lot happening.

I could tell you that these government agencies are quite excited to be working with us, these large companies are quite excited to have a one-stop shop, these enterprise accounts. We think a little bit out of the box.

I'm not a techie, I think in terms of just solutions, and I'm trying to find solutions for our customers that maybe other people haven't thought of. I think there's some really good opportunities there where we're going to innovate and offer some solutions that is unique to us, is proprietary.

It's really, Steve, about mining the goldmine that we sit on. We have a goldmine, we really do, and now we're just mining it.

We're moving the equipment into place, we're moving the people into place, and the results are starting to show up in our quarterly reports.

Okay. Let's talk about the blockchain, because I want to just ask a question about that, because I'm just wondering in the process that you're building, and soon to roll out eventually, has it been easier than you thought it was going to be, more difficult, and what sort of the process involved in trying to put something like that together?

It's definitely a process, but it's a high-margin growth engine for investors. Global ticketing is a $100 billion industry.

Counterfeit and duplicate tickets, unauthorized reselling, scalping, all of that is a big issue, and these are not edge cases. This is a structural flaw in the system.

Blockchain ticketing really fixes this at the foundational level. Each ticket becomes unique, verifiable digital asset that can't be forged, duplicated, or altered.

There's trust, transparency, and security, all built into blockchain tickets. It's, again, not just tickets, it goes beyond ticketing.

Some people think of it as just ticketing for concerts, but think of it in terms of certification as well, and there's a lot of certification that these big companies that we have as customers need to do better at in terms of preventing fraud. Anyway, we're going to do a demo of the blockchain ticketing, again, in the coming couple of weeks.

Get ready, Steve. It's going to be busy.

You and I are going to be busy doing demos, and I'm going to be bringing on my team to do screen shares and show how the tech works.

Okay. There's a lot of questions about obviously share price, because people always talk about that.

I know you've talked about that in the past. Share buyback programs, management buying more shares, a lot of things about sort of the corporate-y side of things.

I'm not sure how much detail you can get into, or I know you're bound by regulations of what you can and can't say, but I know you're the largest shareholder of the company, I believe, just for shareholders, you sort of want to talk to them directly and message-

Yeah. Let's just be clear.

It sucks when the share price is down. It really sucks, and I feel the pain.

I've been through this before, though, with Nextech. When we first launched Nextech as a public company, the stock sat for a year in that $0.25 to $0.50 range, and then it took off, went to $1.00, $1.50, $2.50, corrected hard, and then it had a massive move up to $10.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's not for the impatient investor, but for the patient investor, I think this is going to be a very, very rewarding journey. I hope we all live long enough [laughter], because it's been a bit of a roller coaster, it's been a while.

When I say I hope we I'm talking about rearview, people that have been in the stock since 2018, '19. Going forward, I think this is the year, the breakout year, for the stock.

I think that it's undervalued at the current share price. I don't just say that.

I bought 550,000 shares in November at $0.14 Canadian. I think it's around the same price today, you can buy at the same price that I bought in at.

I'm considering buying more because it's dirt cheap in my opinion, based on our growth trajectory and based on the fact that we're probably going to go cash flow positive this year, sooner than people think. I'm quite bullish.

I think this is just opportunity knocking. I know that when it comes to turnaround stories, everybody always, it's like, "Really?"

You do like that. You kind of look at it, you squint a little, you go, "Really?

Is it really turning around?" The numbers don't lie.

The numbers don't lie. When you have the kind of numbers that we showed today, and this is our second quarter of 20% sequential growth, it signals to me, and it should signal to you, to our investors, that this is real.

The turnaround has happened. We're just in that first quarter, and I think, as I mentioned, Q4, the next quarter, is going to be even better, you can take that and run with it.

Okay. Lastly, I thought this was a really good question that just popped up here a moment ago, and this is from, "Given your focus on disciplined growth, minimal dilution, do you expect the company can execute its plan with your existing resources?

You also mentioned M&A, but if M&A doesn't happen, do you feel confident that you've got the things in place to execute on that plan you just talked about?"

I do. The M&A is additive, it's like a turbo, right?

We're going fast, we're going very fast, but the M&A just catapults you forward even faster, because instead of it taking you a year to acquire customers and build that revenue, it happens in a day essentially, right? That's the benefit of M&A.

We do have the resources without M&A to continue, and that is the plan. If the right opportunity comes along, we are comfortable with M&A.

We just made two acquisitions, I'm bringing it up because it's not something that should be discounted, right? It's something that you should actually think about as likely at some point in the future.

Okay. Last word, Evan, last final thoughts.

Final thoughts are that opportunity comes along every once in a while, that, again, you've watched me, heard me, listened to me speak over the years. From where I'm sitting today, this is a tremendous, tremendous opportunity to get in at the very, very beginning of a new, multi-year growth curve that's driven by AI, that has blockchain wrapped around it, and that is in the event industry, which is a trillion-dollar global industry.

We're doing a couple million, when you think about the upside versus the total addressable market, and you start to realize there is no real limit to how fast and how far we can grow Nextech, it really does represent a tremendous, tremendous opportunity today for smart investors.

All right, Evan, we'll leave it there. Thanks so much once again for joining us on a livestream and to talk about your financials, and other things happening with the company, and a look ahead for the rest of 2026 as well.

Good to see you again.

Thank you.

All right, there is Evan Gappelberg. He is the CEO of Nextech3D.ai, and I'm Steve Darling here at the Worldwide Broadcast Center for Proactive in Vancouver.

Thank you once again for joining us for a livestream, and we'll see you next time.