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 Ness, who I think you all met at the AGM.

Ness is from ScaleUp and is our fractional Chief Marketing Officer. Stephen Streater, company founder and inventor of of Blackbird.

Here we have Sumit Rai, who is our Chief Product Officer and as of today, our new board member. Congrats, Sumit.

Right, let's kick off. Before I before I start, I'd just like to to address a few things.

Firstly, last time we had some sound issues and I want to make sure that we don't have that again. We've actually got a volunteer developer/sound engineer here in the office with us in to make sure that that doesn't happen.

We are monitoring this as as we go through the 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. Let me just remind you of our strategy around around our our revenue.

We're building a revenue engine and with that, we want to make sure that our revenue engine is starting to make make economic sense. That is that we are putting that that every user that we acquire, every subscriber we acquire, has a lifetime value that starts to be equal or or greater, much greater, than that acquisition cost.

Our focus really still is on marketing teams, and Ness will talk you through why marketing teams are incredibly value to valuable to us, but also product product-led growth and and virality often is kick-started by the masses, and therefore, we will continue to fill the funnel with those early creators and students, etc., at the top of the funnel. That's really important to to to note.

As we go on to the first slide here, I think it's I think that it's we put some numbers out in August that are now have been improved further on as we get to the end of September. This really tells you the tells you the story of how our conversion metric is improving.

Our subscription growth in Q3 is around It's going to be estimated around 235%. The key numbers here are the fact that this has improved from back in back in March where we were converting at around 1% for every new user coming in every 100 users coming in to 2.4% at the end of June, and now as we go to the end of September, at around 3.4%.

Together with that, we've also reduced churn down to 11%. Of course, things are always moving around, but that's a really good number to to to look at.

That's actually led to our ARR improving from June at around £30,000 to end of September at around £90,000. Again, these are really small numbers.

We're very well aware of that, but it can be You can see that we're starting to get that that exponential growth, and that revenue engine is starting to take shape. We're also seeing that in the the sector that we're really focused on is as in the marketing teams, that although virality and product-led growth is yet to be proven, we're seeing we're seeing growth in the rate that people do share and that and therefore, the superior ARPU and retention in the group that we're we're focusing on.

I'll come back at the end of this presentation, but I'm going to pass over to Sumit now to talk you through our product improvements.

Okay. 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, and 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. People who come into the product, there's, 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've added already this year, obviously the Epidemic Sound's work that we did in bringing a really best-in-class sound library to the market. We also improved our font support, 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'll come onto a little bit later because we have done a lot of work behind the scenes on the engine, and we'll 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-in-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. 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, and 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.

That's why we're now experiencing our growth. Obviously, it's only still the beginning of a 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 work done through Stephen's team, also with the day-to-day elevator 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 in 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.

That's a major, 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 a little demo in a minute of some of that. That's only just part of it.

We're also doing a whole bunch of work on integrations, 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. 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 a phone or from the desktop, but we do live in a wider ecosystem, and 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, Other platforms 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've spent a lot of time in the past working on is things like webcam capture.

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 on to 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 sort of 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.

Also, it means that you can go in there and you can change any of the things. Let's just call this Nice, and then this one can change there to Easy, like that.

Things can be changed very easily. 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. 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 can 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. 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 After Effects to do their sort of more complex animations.

We're bringing that experience directly into the browser and, obviously, more available to people because our product is a 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 3 months. July kind of marks the period where we started to invest in acquisition again after a period of kind of research and understanding exactly how we want to position Elevate 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 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. Then 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 in 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, and 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, how we provide value, and how we can kind of 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 will be continuing to look at Q4.

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 re-establishing YouTube as a demand-gen channel.

Owning a much more deliberate content strategy over there. That YouTube is becoming an increasingly important channel for AI and LLM discovery, as well.

We've improved the AI discovery over the last 3 months by quite some way, but it continues to be a really important aspect for us to focus on, and we'll be continuing to do so through the likes of digital PR, YouTube, as I've said, and looking for opportunities for us to develop kind of real citations in these platforms then used to make recommendations. Another big focus through all of the work that we're doing is, as Ian has already alluded to, is making sure that we're continuously looking at ways that we can improve that conversion from free users to paid plans.

Some of the work that we're doing at the moment and moving into Q4 is really focused on remarketing, making sure that once we bring new users into the platform on those free plans, they sign up and so forth, that we continue to invest in them as users and encourage them to experience the value of Elevate much so that they go on to a paid plan. Through all of the interviews and research that we're doing, we hear some really interesting stories of the types of users coming in to use of Elevate, and 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 is a big draw for all of those different types of users, the fact that they can bring other people into the project, work with them, whether that be friends, colleagues, what have you.

We're 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, Ness.

We kept this one very short so we've 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 really in sync with the marketing that's come in, we would expect to see similar growth going forward. We're now seeing the machine really finely tuned now, and we'll continue to fine-tune that further.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me invite questions.

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 get through the main ones now. The first one is, "What happened with soundbites?

At a crucial time, you just created a void. I'm glad it's back, but what a poor response on the challenge on investor relations."

Stephen is Soundbites man.

Soundbites is back. We obviously needed a period where we actually had news and also when people were around.

The summer's always been very quiet for investors, as well. There were big gaps when people were on holidays.

Although the development continued and the advances in the company, people weren't around every day to put stories up. We are back, and there's a lot of things to not only to catch up on, but lots of new things happening.

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."

Said. I think that we would not rule anything out with regards to a raise, but I think that taking on debt would be top of our list.

I think that that would be a very unlikely. Third question.

"Will AI turbocharge elevate.io or eat our lunch, and why?"

I'd 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, use it for things like generation, or for tidying stuff up. We're able to add that into our product to make that available sort of 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, it doesn't mean that we have to do a great job implementing that. It's not for free.

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 process of video editing can be quite time-consuming. The good news is AI can remove a lot of that trouble.

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, etc.

have all dried up in recent months, and I'm hardly seeing the company anywhere. Is the business now relying entirely on paid advertising?"

Ness.

Hi, John. We still do all of those things.

I think the reality is we're a lot more deliberate now and purposeful with each of them, where we use them and specifically kind of what opportunities we say yes to. We still do a lot of email campaigns.

We're just much more highly segmented in the way that we do that now, we're delivering the right message to the right people at the right time rather than broadcast continuously. Digital PR is definitely something that we've pulled back on over recent months, but will be investing in as we move forward, particularly now as we double down on kind of product updates moving into Q4, particularly where we've got big announcements like text animation coming through.

In terms of events and conferences, again, we are doing those things, but on a smaller, more deliberate, and intimate level at this point. Over the last few months, we've been doing a lot of experimentation, as well, with different channels.

Kind of smaller experiments, smaller-scale budgets to test our way into different opportunities. It may not appear as broadcast perhaps as it has done in the past because we're following much more of a kind of test-and-learn approach into where we put our investments.

Great. Thank you, Ness.

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'm sure everyone does.

I think the other thing to note is that we also will be looking for a independent non-executive chair to join the board, as well. We're actively recruiting that position now.

I think there are some questions around my role as executive chair. Absolutely, I would agree with them.

I think that it is good that we have an independent non-exec chair, and so actively recruiting. "120,000 users, 3.4% conversion rate, that would be just over 4,000 converted paid numbers, yet subscriber numbers are in the 900s.

You mentioned a churn of approx 11%. Can you please explain the mismatch?"

Yes. The 3.4%, that's the snapshot of where we are now.

It's not where we've been since February 2025 when we launched the payment gateway. We've been increasing that conversion rate all the way up, and it's really starting to gain really some momentum now.

That explains the mismatch that you've got. Please let me know if there's 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, it depends on what it is, and remember, we're adding a lot more tools in the future. Some can be high profit, some obviously just slightly more commoditized.

There's no point us being able to offer a service if they can buy it elsewhere a lot cheaper. 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 £525,000 trade payables, payment for?" I'll take this question off and we can reply to you in writing where we're able to.

As you can tell, we don't have a CFO sitting at the table right now, we'll get back to you on that one, Gerard. 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?"

I've just addressed that just before. No, we're actually looking for an independent non-exec chair as we speak, John.

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.

As the higher-end NLEs are more and more demanding, and 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. We very closely work on 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?"

Because we share such common DNA at the back end, I think that's always going to be a challenge. Stephen, would you want to comment on that anyway?

I think both sides benefit from sharing the technology, but it'd be very hard to split off one, and also with Elevate now starting to grow quite strongly, I think that's 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. We've just pointed out that the revenue engine is improving dramatically and we're working hard to improve that further.

Continuing our strategy. At this point in time, we're monitoring the cash position.

We've talked about changes at the board level. I think we've answered that question.

"Hi. Since bringing on board the Chief Marketing Officer, what data information have you observed about the awareness of Elevate 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?"

The conversion rates, as we've already spoken about, have been improving month on month over the last few months as we've been kind of implementing some of the insights from the research that we did at the beginning and continue to do ongoing. From that perspective, that's 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 on month, we can see that that is also developing as well, and we'll only continue to do so as we start to expand into more channels and kind of 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 kind of new pockets of the market.

Being very kind of 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 kind of too thin, which would ultimately damage our conversion rates.

Thanks, Ness. "Ian, could you tell us how instrumental the ScaleUp Collective have been?

Is the recent growth largely down to their marketing work?" I'll refer back to the slide I did at the beginning, 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, we've reduced the number of exports you can have from 3 down to 2, which has definitely had an impact, as well.

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.

"How out of the paid new users, are these mainly marketing customers being targeted or creators?"

It's a combination. From where the majority of our active spend at the moment goes on PPC, we see kind of a broad spectrum of different segments coming through those channels.

That's based on lots of active intent in the market. 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 kind of continue monitoring. We're actively targeting marketing teams through some of the other activities that we do.

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 targets those groups that started last quarter and will continue into this quarter.

Thanks, Ness. Question from Waseem on the exact chair role again, which we've answered.

"Have you considered alternatives to shareholder dilution? If so, what?"

At this stage, we're looking to fundraise with equity, and 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."

Yeah. All of the interviews that we do, we've rotated some of the interview processes between product and marketing so that we can kind of take a little bit of a different kind of spin on that each time, but also we always share the findings collectively between us because, ultimately, the learnings we take, they have implications for both sides in terms of understanding why people come to Elevate, what they're looking for, what problem they were trying to solve, and what they were searching for it, and ultimately what value they're getting out of the product.

Yes, Sumit, you can

I think it's also important to remember that the idea for Elevate 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, and we continue to check in often with those same people as the products developed. Some people have been on this journey with us for 4 years from before we began.

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 hard to see that often when we're so all involved in it day to day, and even with the quarterly updates that you guys get.

If you actually look back at where it was a year ago, its capabilities are completely different. We keep that loop going, and we will continue to do that.

Good. Thank you.

Question from Rhys. "The EVS contract is up for renewal.

Can we expect a significant increase in the minimum guarantee contract of £2 million or €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. Discussions will continue.

"How far behind your closest competitors is Elevate in terms of subscribers and revenue base?"

Financially or how far

How far behind your closest competitors is Elevate in terms of subscribers and revenue base? Oh,

I think it's how far are you behind of your closest competitors.

That's what I

said. There is a very large player in the market in VEED, and they have slightly more public numbers.

They started before us and, obviously, have been around a little bit longer. I don't think we know the answer to how many subscribers others have.

It is still such a beginning of a new market that we're off to the races, but it's still all to play for.

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 2 days work experience at Allenby. I don't think that unpaid, obviously.

I don't think that contravenes anything other than the fact that she was getting some experience, as she has experience in cafes and elsewhere. I don't know whether you want to comment on that.

It's not material when you look at

I would hate to say these questions are sinks to a new low, but perhaps that's the moment. Okay.

Question from David. "Does the animated text element work across voice-to-text?"

Does it work across voice to text?

Yes, it will. If it's to do with how it will work within subtitles, then the subtitles will also be improved to support the animation capabilities soon.

"Ian, your salary of a quarter of a million pounds 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 that's what you need, then look, I got voted in 93% renewed in June. I'll refer back to that.

"Grant, congratulations, Sumit's 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, and what's the difference in cost for 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, as purchase journeys tend to go, people have multiple touchpoints before they make a purchase. Meta does play an active role in that journey as we're seeing.

It's kind of one step in the journey and allows us to reach new audiences in different environments. What we're going to be focusing on Meta in the short term is kind of remarketing, focusing on using Meta to target users that have signed up to use Elevate, but not yet subscribed alongside a slightly broader audience, as well, that will then be able to use lookalikes to kind of 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 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 with ethereal MCP. What are your thoughts on Elevate 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, 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 blog posts about CapCut and Descript. Why have you chosen to promote that moment now?"

A couple of reasons. Really one that we have a big focus on kind of increasing and driving our organic share of traffic flowing to the site.

That kind of lower down the funnel conversion-type content so 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 these systems with useful comparisons for them to draw on in their citations of Elevate.

Thanks, Ness. "Why does Steve White leave so suddenly?

A CFO and director departing now with the runway running out signals a lack of confidence." Steve has been here 7 years.

A long time. It wasn't actually that suddenly.

He decided he wants to do new things. We've actually confirmed one who will be starting on Thursday.

We'll put the news out about that when the ink is dry, but we'll be, yeah, getting a new person on very soon. "The share price is down 90% over the last 5 years.

Where's the accountability for this happening?" Rhys, thank you very much.

We're building a brand new product from a more or less greenfield site out in the open market. It's an unusual thing to do.

It's 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's still very, very much true.

The market doesn't often give a lot of patience for those kind of things. The happy news is that we've 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's a happy thing that we should be celebrating.

We've got to get to the point now where that's a positive increment rather than just getting closer to being parity. We're in good shape.

"What is the current average income per subscriber? Are you getting increased numbers of teams at $100 a month?"

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, the $100 a month, we see quite a lot of people who particularly working in teams using the Creator plan and the limits within that at the moment as they're kind of experimenting with the product and deciding whether it's going to kind of fully come into their tool sets.

Really, that's the point at which we see those commitments at the higher monthly cost. That's 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 VIA Create app in order for it to be competitive with customers' changing needs?" Yes.

We've talked about this when I met them recently. They are using some AI capabilities to do highlights editing.

For the fine editing within VIA Create, they're using Blackbird-based codec tools. We're kind of a blend with them.

We don't have any plans at this stage to add We've

helped them indirectly, but remember that EVS have written their own editor, a bit like we've written Elevate, they will control how they implement that interface and the external integrations. We provide the platform, the base platform that they build on.

Thank you very much. "Is AI a threat to Elevate now or in the near future?"

No. As answered before, it's a great complement.

"And

Adrian Wilding appeared to last in the interim CFO role after only 3 weeks, yet the RNS 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 their other company's situation, something very unfortunate happened over there. I don't want to be the one to talk about that, but we're as honest as we can.

If we said that 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 PAM?"

I'll have to dig out the exact numbers. I believe for August, about 10% of subscribers fell into that category, and we've 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've got a kind of partnership series in plan with them.

A couple of other outfits like those where we have syndicated partnerships with them that include 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 fits into those. Also doing in-person events where we can demo the products and get it in the hands of users, as well as doing kind of more long evergreen content around newsletters and things that will be discoverable over time.

There's a wave of activity aligned to that, but these things take time to build.

Great. Thank you very much.

This gentleman says, "I searched for browser-based video editor and all the major AI and everyone is mentioned 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's, again, something we're working on all the time. I think we're seeing it's about 3 times the number of sign-ups coming through AI discovery now since June.

It's building month on month. I think we rank for about 44 keywords in AI search at the moment.

It's never going to show up in every single search. You need a huge amount of coverage for that to be the case, but it's something that we are constantly working on and building.

The thing that's important for us is to focus on kind of trusted citation sources, so that's why a big part of our Q4 investment is going to be going into YouTube, YouTube and video is increasingly important for AI and kind of LLM discovery, as well as things like podcasts, 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, but

Yeah. It's exactly.

It's something that we have a dedicated kind of workstream against. A lot of our organic content plays into those groups, as well.

It's not sales-led strategy. It's 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 for their specific use case and are then starting to share content and share it internally with their teams. That's the kind of loop that we want to try and take better hold of.

Question from Michael. "On current progress obtaining paid users, you're scheduled to run out of cash before Elevate 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, 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 updates.

Any reason why no reports of those?" Either one?

Not sure why they're absent.

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 that 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 UK marketing professionals market to your ICP. "How many marketing pros are there in the UK?

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 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 go back to the numbers in that deck. I think it was around 200,000

It's 200,000 teams.

Yeah, 200,000 teams. We're I guess still working through exactly kind of what was 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 involved in AI assistants in 2027 to improve productivity?"

As I said, we are going to be incorporating AI tools, both AI assists for just one-off, little bits. Remember, AI is already being used for things like the subtitling tools, the voice reduction tool, but the most exciting bit is probably how AI can be used not just for these day-to-day sort of housekeeping style useful uses, but of course that slightly broader use, i.e., 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 that experience as we can in-house.

If you look at some of the very early designs of Elevate going back to 2002, we did have this sort of AI assist button that we believed 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. 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 a AI agent, Squiers 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 and as we learn more ourselves.

"We're 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, Rhys, 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 US and the UK, 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 during the placing process, thus dampening demand for the placing and resale offers. Take a look at Reynolds."

Thank you very much. I'm going to take a look and 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, 3-year instead of 1-year, and to be able to offer the customers a more reduced rate, i.e., 80%, 10% off for the first year?

Affiliates not only useful to add users, but also to gain product exposure." I guess that's a question to one of you.

Yeah. Affiliates is something we've kind of experimented very early with so far, and 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? I think the market needs that as the 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 place to talk about this, but 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 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 UK team users rather than the USA team users? What is the marketing balance between the two geographical markets?"

The majority actually come from the US at the moment. That's our bigger market of the two.

"Can you say more about what you're doing in terms of to appear in AI results?" I think we probably covered that one.

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 online. Why is this?

What do you think?"

It depends on who those users are, right, and I suppose what their kind of circles of influence are. Often, as well, discussion online isn't always positive, not necessarily a bad thing.

We do see increasing kind of conversations happening on platforms like Reddit and within kind of 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 products developed out over the course of this year, we're expect 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 Tamzin.

Over the summer, Tamzin, 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 in 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 that growth is looking really good. "Congrats to Sumit on his appointment to the board."

Thanks, Nick. "Will agents be able to access Elevate?"

I think you've

Yes,

probably mentioned that one. "Target CAC?"

As I say, we'll start to get 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.

What 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, but 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.

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, it's a great opportunity for us.

In in the spirit of this, I'll read this next question out. "Ian, please ignore the trolls.

You're doing a great job, but 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 of being diluted at lower and lower share point share price points.

Is it is revenue financing an opti- option for funding the next marketing push for elevate.io?" Thank you, Joseph.

I appreciate your comments. As I say, when we we will consider all options, and when we've got some news, we will let you know.

"Can we consider any further board investment during the open current open period?" Very possibly.

Very possibly. "When can we expect the next feature drop?

I'm 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.

Actually, 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've done it, you don't know.

Stephen and I talk about this a lot, what we're really glad about is we've solved a huge amount of the problems that we needed to be able to do the things we need to do. We still don't know what we don't know, but we at least answer the things that we knew we didn't 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, and I'm really pleased to say we definitely have a handle on all of the major aspects of what we're doing.

Now, of course, when we started out, LLMs weren't a major thing, for example. We know that the market is going to change, and I'm not saying that there aren't 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, and as I mentioned earlier, every time we add something, we don't 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's more of a complete package, that's when we do expect more commentary around what we are as a tool because at the moment, it's still just a little bit too niche.

Of course, in due course, when we do make a feature drops, there'll be a real increase.

Thanks, Sumit. Comment from GR.

"Ian, are you in awe at the ADVN Warriors record being unbeaten at hide-and-seek?" Yes, indeed, I am in awe of it.

It's amazing how hidden people can be sometimes. Right.

Is the player ever going to be launched?

Yes, it will be eventually, and I discussed this with Sumit for many years. The Elevate product is such a big product that we focused on the editor specifically, but it's always in our Elevate roadmap.

It's always been to have distribution as part of the solution, and the player, all technology from it, will be a big part of that. Obviously, the whole of Elevate is based on the player, 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 as a standalone product.

There's a couple of questions on targets here. When we get to the point where we're feeling more confident, we will put those targets out, but we're not there yet, I won't read them all out, but yes, stand by for that.

Oh yeah, "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 on GPUs for things like export.

That's going to get faster for the end users. It will get cheaper for us.

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. We're getting more efficient, we're getting better able to handle the load that we have to do, and obviously, as time goes on, we will be continually sort of 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's worth mentioning just a couple of things. When we did the original cloud, we would increase efficiency instead of increase capacity.

We were sort of fairly well on the same capacity as the usage doubled and doubled and doubled. Now we're starting to apply that principle and some of the technology into Elevate, but it's not just a question of just paying twice as much to get twice as many users.

There's dozens and dozens of incremental improvements to the efficiency. As Sumit says, more efficiency also means more responsive and better performance, better experience.

AWS isn't going to run out of capacity, but we've got a lot of efficiency improvements we can add, and we've been doing that as the usage has risen.

Thanks, Stephen. It's a very good news story in that area, I have to say.

Question from Dan. "Ness, I'm a big fan of your work.

On the upcoming features Sumit talked about, which, based on your research, do you expect to have the most impact, i.e., what is most in demand?"

I think the text animation work that's coming up is going to be really interesting. We talk a lot about the proposition of Elevate, well, 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 kind of user experience, kind of one world.

Text animation is a great example of that, of where currently people are using kind of separate caption apps, a lot of which are completely really not as good as they look like they could be. Actually what the team built in Elevate 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've been doing with users, and this spans quite a lot of different types of user personas, is that the other great thing about Elevate being browser-based, it's kind of very easy and intuitive to use, and the combination of different kind of parts of the tooling process for video creation, is that it gives people more kind of freedom to be creative and to create content rather than kind of having to manage tools and systems and clunky connections and things like that. Whilst there's the rise of the template-based editors like CapCut, and so forth, in the market, actually a big frustration with those is that you're kind of shoehorned into a particular way of creating video or working from templates, whereas Elevate gives you a way to create whatever you have in your mind easily and simply with the toolset available, but at the end of the day, you're building from scratch with whatever you have as your vision.

I think, again, text animation is another way that we can really extrapolate out that proposition. I think that's really exciting.

Thank you, Ness. Question from Tamzin.

"What are the NEDs doing? We never see them or hear anything about them."

I can assure you they're very much there. They attend all the board meetings, and they offer their expertise in the various areas that they have experience in.

Nick Leschly is currently the CMO at Nextdoor, a Nasdaq-listed company, and Yuri 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're around if you need to talk to them.

Many committees that need NEDs on them under AIM rules. They're not running the company.

Their job is to advise and to keep an eye on things. That's what they do, and that's probably why you don't see them so much because it's behind-the-scenes work.

Yeah. Okay.

There's another question about the board. No other changes are planned at this stage.

Question from Gerard. "If there are 200,000 used target teams in the UK, what is the equivalent of the US number?"

I don't have that number to hand, but we can follow up.

Yeah. Okay.

"Your slide mentioned a new YouTube channel. What will that do to create views?"

I assume that means what are we going to be doing with that channel? The idea is that we'll have a mixture of different content format and particularly kind of voices through 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. It'll be a combination of kind of interviews and content that we create with other kind of industry players.

We'll also be leveraging kind of customer case studies and stories on there and kind of opening up the window into how people create videos and content and kind of share their tips and advice and particularly in the use case of using Elevate. We'll be trying to find lots of different kind of niches and pockets of opportunities to capitalize on the active intent in YouTube.

As I said before, YouTube is quite a big contributor to our citations in kind of AI and LLM discovery, 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, to help retain new users, "What are we doing to ensure they're aware of the upcoming product features?"

We sort of have a bit of a playbook that we run through when we launch new product features, which includes kind of announcing directly to current users that we segments through email and in-product kind of notifications or feature discovery. Then we broaden that out into kind of more wider publication and broadcast news in terms of updating into our website, looking for any kind of search or keyword opportunities off the back of those, and also using our kind of primary and channel social, etc., to publish those announcements.

Yeah.

Thanks. Another one for you, Ness.

"Can please Ness talk about how we actively market to our large email list, e.g., upselling, not just sending occasional product updates?"

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're not just sending kind of blast broadcast comms to the whole list, which can actually damage deliverability and things like that, but starting to get smarter with who we email, what we communicate with them, and so every month we look at our strategies for that and kind of what we're going to prioritize next. Yeah.

Quite a lot going on there.

Great. Thanks.

There's another funding question there, which I think we've answered. "You talked about reducing staffing levels.

Have you reduced engineer numbers to save costs?" We've certainly taken a disciplined approach to our cost base over the last few years, which is resulted in a number of rounds of reduction.

We don't intend to reduce any further. We've right-sized the team, and and I think it's in a good place.

Okay. Anything more to add there?

No. Good.

"Great post from a video editing company founder out in LA if you didn't see it." Thanks, Grant.

You're always very good at these things and sending us these links. Really appreciate it.

"I've tried elevate.io before. It's by far the most impressive proxy codec I've ever experienced, and love the responsiveness of how it runs in the browser."

Thanks, Grant. 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?"

We are. We have kind of keywords and campaigns around competitors and CapCut is one of them.

We've run Google ads campaigns and probably one of our top performing ones probably for that reason.

Okay. Great.

Thank you. There's a question from Rhys.

"A barrier for smaller hobbyist creators in using Elevate against social sites such as Instagram is the real music catalog available? Epidemic has an excellent, if not mostly unknown, artists.

Will Elevate have access to mainstream artists, even it's just for 1 minute? These artists allow the same as Instagram does.

I've done testing on my own content, and well-known artists from Instagram's vast catalog compared to Epidemic's, in every case, engagement was higher." Question

We don't have a deal with any music library in order to do that. It works very differently within something like Instagram where they're able to reuse known music.

It's a bit of a harder one for us to do, actually, it's not possible without licensing known music, which is incredibly complicated to do. 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 time. People can also license that music from another library that has well-known music and bring it into Elevate and make it part of their edit, it's not prohibited to do that, but we're not a platform, 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 on to.

Maybe it was YouTube or maybe it was another platform. The fact is that we give complete freedom to our users to publish anywhere, 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.

Yeah. I think we've done a lot of wrapping up.

I will 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.