CTO, Sam Daish. Before I hand over to Nick to go through the presentation up on the screen, I'll just remind you that you can submit questions through the Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom screen, and we'll get to those post the end of the presentation.

With that, Nick, I'll hand it over to you. Thanks.

Thank you, Simon. What a wonderful world we live in.

In the past 12 months, the market's violently repriced application software, and I think there's been roughly $2 trillion in market cap wiped off since September 2025. It's because the market's in a weird paralysis.

On one hand, there's fears that traditional software is going to become irrelevant with AI, and on the other hand, there's fears there's an AI bubble. It's caused a hell of a lot of disruption, and caught up in that whitewash, as in pretty much every other technology company, is Blackpearl Group.

I'm asked by so many shareholders, what are we going to do about it? What, should we panic, pivot, lose our heads?

No. We just continue doing what we've always done, but faster.

We must accelerate. We have to accelerate our path to EBITDAF profitability.

We have to accelerate our innovation and extend our technology moat. We have to accelerate access to new revenue markets and accelerate our evolution.

Just like the boat that we're named after in Pirates of the Caribbean, Blackpearl is engineered to be the fastest. Let's start with how we're evolving the way that we're communicating to the market.

Now, it's my opinion, and it's one I know shared by many of the shareholders no doubt on this call, that there are now three key pillars for success that any technology company has to tick off in this modern world. One, still remains growth.

Two, is a clear technology moat. Three, is strong EBITDAF.

Now, to date, Blackpearl Group has been heavily biased towards annual recurring revenue growth. I guess it's been widely recognized in this pillar we're probably best-in-class.

I'd be the first to admit that the pace of our evolution has meant that clearly articulating our technology moat, well, it's been challenging. Obviously, as we've been investing in R&D and rapid growth, EBITDAF has not been where the market needs to be.

Cool. We need to adjust.

We need to bring all these three pillars into alignment. We're doing that by recalibrating our focus from just raw foot-to-the-floor growth on recurring revenue to EBITDAF growth.

It's about accelerating our investment in peer-reviewable benchmarking so we can cleanly articulate our technology advantage. Want to be precise what this means for us, because it's easy to read into this, oh, growth doesn't matter.

Of course it matters. It matters enormously.

It needs to be both top and bottom line. Accordingly, we're moving to reporting on three numbers that truly matter.

One, is our path to EBITDAF positivity and then eventually beyond. The next is a numerically defined technology advantage.

Then three, is growth. For this quarter, it's still going to remain annual recurring revenue, but we will still be layering and evolving beyond that.

As you can see from the numbers that we've attached, we've done this in spades. We are now demonstrating a clear line to EBITDAF positivity, and our technology advantage is transparent.

It's plain for all to see. Our data intelligence outperforms even the latest foundational models and incumbent technology by 26 times.

That means you're 26 times more likely to find the right buyer for your good and service today than you can with anyone else in the market. In the world of sales and marketing, that's profound.

Now, to discuss our path to EBITDAF profitability, I'd like to hand you over to our CFO, Karen Cargill.

Thanks, Nick. As you can see, we have an aggressive and deliverable path to profitability driven by levers that we have already committed to and are either now completed or will be executed on shortly.

EBITDAF for the first quarter was a loss of $4.5 million. We are guiding to a loss of $2.5 to $3 million in the second quarter and a $1 to $1.5 million in the third.

Each of those is a standalone quarter, not a cumulative position, and the ranges are the blue bands on this chart. This is the first time we have given quarterly EBITDAF guidance, and we are giving it for a period that we have real visibility over.

We would rather put two quarters in front of you that we stand behind than a forecast of full year that includes the PaaS revenue stream, which is still in beta. The first lever is the flow-through of ramped ARR.

Our DaaS contracts ramp before they reach full billing, there is a lag between what we contract and what we recognize. That lag is now unwinding.

We are retiring ramp deals for our Data-as-a-Service clients, new contracts bill from the outset, and we have tightened who we sell to, engaging further up the market with Tier 1 and Tier 2 prospects. That does lengthen the sales cycle in the near term, and you can see it in our CAC payback for this quarter.

It is a deliberate tradeoff. Those customers are large, they churn less, and they are worth a lot more over their life.

The second and largest lever is the permanent cost savings from the B2B Rocket integration. We flagged those at the full year, and they are now coming through.

Where we have been running overlapping activity within the group, we are moving to running it once. Each product keeps its own proposition and its own customers.

It is the duplication behind them that comes out, and once it is gone, it does not come back. Please note that you are yet to see these fully feature in the first quarter.

The third lever is streaming our marketing spend in funnels. Having run B2B Rocket and Bebop alongside each other, we now understand which customers come through which flow well enough to bring that marketing together, rather than spending twice to reach the same market.

The fourth lever is self-service for SaaS customers through B2B Rocket and Bebop, which means less onboarding required on every new customer. The fifth lever is AI automation and infrastructure optimization.

The platform is in beta ahead of schedule, and Sam will talk you through that later. Financially, it moves our infrastructure from a build phase into an optimized phase.

Alongside that, we are applying AI automation to our own operations, an area we know well. As a reminder, underneath all of these five new levers, our data supply cost remains fixed.

We've spoken about that before. As revenue scales, our costs does not scale with it, and that flows straight through to EBITDAF.

These actions are already in motion, not intentions, and that is why we are comfortable putting forward these quarterly EBITDAF guidance in front of you for the next two quarters. Now I'll pass you back to Nick, who will talk about the technology moat.

Awesome. Thank you, Karen.

At Blackpearl Group, the undisputed crown jewel is the Pearl Engine. It's our moat, it's the heart of our revenue generation, and is where the true value of this company lies.

The Pearl Engine solves one of the most commercially important problems in business, which is finding genuine buyers for a given product or service at the moment they're ready to transact. It starts with the data, as we all know, is what, 36 billion-- Sam will glare at me-- data signals every day.

That data is then processed on an individual customer basis by the Pearl Engine's proprietary vertical AI models. It's this combination of unique data and genuine GTM, go-to-market intelligence that creates stronger revenue-generating opportunities at a lower cost than any alternative approaches or foundational models on the market today.

Now, to date, that was a really hard competitive advantage to clearly articulate with a beer in hand round a barbecue, it's quite a mouthful. It's been really challenging for us to communicate to the market precisely just how much better our technology is.

Now, thanks to recent benchmarking, which is publicly available, fully transparent, fully open for anyone to peer review, we can now communicate our advantage with simple numbers. When it comes to figuring out what company to sell to, what the seller sells, and finding real businesses or real people that actually want to buy that today, Blackpearl Group outperforms the market by 2,600%.

That's not a marginal increase. That's that's everything.

That's the difference between making sales and burning money. Now our benchmarking shows that that is how superior we are.

The benchmarking also shows that while proprietary data is a moat, and I think we've just seen a little bit of that with the benchmarking that came out from ZoomInfo, the bigger moat and the most important moat and what separates Blackpearl from everyone else is the moat created from genuine proprietary intelligence specific to go-to-market. Now, it's Blackpearl Group's commitment that we'll be updating this benchmarking reporting to the market each and every quarter.

That's going to show the efficacy of the Pearl Engine in relation to the latest foundational models, any other publicly available applications, and anyone else that chooses to use the peer review as a bench. That will provide the market a clear understanding of Blackpearl Group's technological moat.

Now, let's get on to growth. Now, while ARR of $12.2 million appears to be modest relative to the group's historical quarterly growth rates, want to be clear, it's very deliberate transition towards higher-quality, more profitable revenue.

There are key two drivers behind this. The first is that for our Data-as-a-Service contracts, which move the needle significantly, we've retired ramp deals as standard.

Because we're in a position we've established ourselves, we can do that now. The natural flow-on effect from that is that it's going to extend sales cycles, and you see that lag represented in this quarter.

There's really good reason behind that, and that is because it makes the deals more profitable overall, and this has been a decision that we've made to support the bottom-line growth, i.e. bringing it in up to the same level as our top line.

Additionally, the group has engaged with some pretty significant first, second-tier customer prospects. Some genuinely impressive names.

While these opportunities have potential to generate significant ARR revenue, and if we are able to disclose those names, they would bring significant kudos, but they also come with significantly larger sales cycles. You see those two effects coming in.

It's just part of our deliberate strategy, I say to anyone looking at that, don't worry, we know what we're doing. Metrics, right.

We've shown we've also, for consistency, still showing our established ARR metrics, and the one that will really jump out to you here, obviously, really supports what Karen talked about as far as consolidation and optimization of costs, is ARR per employee is now just a hair under half a million dollars, which is pretty phenomenal, really. Again, it just reflects that sort of consolidation of duplicated functions and just just tightening things up.

Now, you'll see churn's relatively stable. Yes, we finally lost one DaaS client.

It's going to happen sooner or later. The main I think the main one that's sort of jumped out here is probably CAC payback period.

Still, obviously, a tremendous a tremendous number, but not what you're used to seeing from us. Again, that's really just down to the timing of those DaaS deals.

A couple of those DaaS deals had fallen on the right side of the right side of the calendar, that would have changed those numbers. Again, we're still confident around our group sort of normalized CAC being, 3.5 to 4 months.

Now, most of you know that I love stealing Sam's thunder, keeping with that tradition, I am very excited to say that Blackpearl Group now has its Platform-as-a-Service, known as PaaS. We've got-- whoop, lost my AirPod there.

iPad, AirPad, iPod. It's been a long Tuesday.

Lost my earpiece. It's back.

Anyway, it's PaaS. Platform-as-a-Service, we said we're starting at DaaS, layering on-- oh, shit.

I'm having a day here. Starting with SaaS, layering on DaaS, and then moving to PaaS.

As we promised, we execute, and we're bringing that to market. Now, it's a very exciting opportunity, but it is just that, an opportunity.

It's early stages, and it also changes our revenue composition moving forward. Recurring revenue still remains a really important pillar of our business.

I love recurring revenue. I love starting the month knowing that you've already got X amount of money coming into your bank.

It's every business's dream. Platform-as-a-Service pricing is consumption-based, with customers purchasing tokens as they use the platform, rather than, annual contracted recurring subscriptions.

It, by definition, is not annual recurring revenue. Now, variable consumption is one of the main ways that companies like AWS, Azure, OpenAI, Snowflake, Anthropic, you name it, that's how they generate revenue.

We believe that this is going to become a significant contributor to our revenue over the coming year. We have a track record to support that, because remember just a year ago, Data-as-a-Service revenue, it was didn't exist, and now it's 40% with some significant opportunities lined up.

It shows just how quickly that this business changes and evolves and grows in line with market demand. As the group's revenue composition evolves further and includes more consumption-based pricing, we think that the existing revenue metrics will provide I guess an incomplete representation of the business.

Accordingly, over the coming quarters, we're going to introduce additional reporting metrics that I think better reflect the overall revenue and growth of the business. Ultimately, our goal is to is to provide the best of both worlds.

Like you want that consistent, steady, recurring revenue, but now we're introducing that explosive greenfields revenue that's associated with the current token-based consumption. I think that's a a a perfect blend.

There you go, Sam. I didn't steal too much of your thunder.

With that, I'll hand you over to our Chief Technology Officer, Sam Daish, and he'll give you a very, very brief sneak peek at our upcoming Platform-as-a-Service.

Thank you, Nick. Definitely my favourite CEO.

All right. Hey, everyone.

It's great to be able to talk with you again. As Nick alluded to, one of the reasons that close to $2 trillion has been wiped off technology stocks since late last year is the belief that AI allows you to build any software you want for cheaper than you can buy it.

You can build it cheaper than you can buy it. Rather than buying software that has been made for one-size-fits-all, you can build something that is completely tailored to your business.

Software and systems that are made to work perfectly for you, and that you own, and that you can use as much as you want, and that you don't pay any license for. This is the rise of the builder economy.

Now, the challenge for the builder economy in sales and marketing is that software is not enough. Software's not enough because sales and marketing runs on data and intelligence.

Regardless of how good your CRM is, it's going to be useless if it's sending messages to the wrong people at the wrong time or saying the wrong thing. The quality of data and intelligence is such a critical factor, because as Nick often says, bad quality intelligence is worse than nothing.

It burns sales time. It wastes marketing dollars on people that were never going to buy from you.

Now, our go-to-market bench shows this very clearly in scientific and quantitative terms, 26 times, and if you ask anyone in sales and marketing about how they feel about bad data, I think you'll get some very visceral and emotional case studies that you can reference as well. We'll talk through one of those where I give you a specific example.

It's never been easier to build sales and marketing systems. You might want to build sequencing into your outbound campaign, or you might want to build your very own CRM system and pipeline management tailored to your sales process, or you might want to surface real-time account research to customer executives and support staff, or whatever.

You can just fire up Claude Code or OpenAI's Codex, whichever your favourite is, and you can build that system through prompts more easily than ever before. You still have the challenge of high-quality data and intelligence.

We're removing that challenge. We're going to enable the entrepreneurs, the engineers, the developers, the CMOs, and the CROs who are part of this shift to building, who are part of the rise of the builder economy.

The Blackpearl platform unlocks our industry-leading data and intelligence and makes this available. It adds high-quality data and intelligence, and it's as easy as chatting with Claude or ChatGPT.

We know there's strong demand, there's pent-up demand for this, because we have customers coming to us and asking for this. We've already got a beta program underway.

As Nick said, we're running slightly ahead of schedule, which is always nice, but we're still in beta at this point. As Nick said, over a year ago, we described our revenue layering strategy, and this is the third layer to that: subscription products, data products as a service, and finally Platform-as-a-Service.

All right. Let's take a look.

Tori, I'm going to need to share my screen. All right.

Here is the entry point to the Blackpearl platform. I'm going to continue as myself.

This is the management portal for the platform. You can see here that we've got usage and billing because Karen's my CFO and she'd knee-cap me if we didn't build that strongly into a system like this.

You also have a range of capabilities or tools which are available. Now, the shape and style of this platform is very familiar for anyone who is building with AI tools.

If you're part of the OpenAI community, you will recognize the look and feel, the operation, the way this works immediately. This is a very low-friction for the builders to get started.

Now, these capabilities, these tools, they're the building blocks, the Lego pieces of systems. If you want to build a system that automatically creates tailored pitch decks using real-time research, you would select offers so you understand what you're selling and properly positioned.

You'd have playbooks so that it builds the research in real time, and then you would have documents and brands to build that pitch deck in a brand that matches your way you message perfectly. That's just four pieces to plug and play, and you've got a highly intelligent, cost-effective automation for your sales team.

All of these capabilities, these tools, come with documentation, they're very easy to get started with. We've got the full range there.

You can add in additional connections. Usage is extremely closely monitored and can be managed, and costs likewise, including this one, which is a huge part of some of the tension around AI, is that tokens and costs on these systems can add up massively.

The platform is extremely token-efficient, you're not likely to run into that problem. Again, I listen to my CFO and she tells me that we've got to have these hard stops and these alerts.

All right. Let's go--

No, she didn't. She said remove that so there were blowouts and massive revenue spikes.

I was in that meeting, Sam. Sorry.

It aids profitability. It aids EBITDAF.

All right. Let's work through an example that has been driven by customer demand.

Tori, if we can jump back to the presentation. All right.

Any of you in sales or marketing or as entrepreneurs, you'll recognize this problem. You've got hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands dormant leads in your CRM system.

You've paid to win those as leads, you've done the marketing, you've done all the hard work, but for whatever reason, they've gone cold. With opportunities like this, you really only want to reach out to them when they're going to be receptive, when something's changed for them, they're now interested, they're up for a conversation now.

The timeliness element is very important here. For this, you need real-time research and scoring.

There has to be coherence between them, where they are, and what you are offering. Now, if you're doing this, you don't just want to do a one-shot review and have to do that time and time and time again.

You want this to be a system that runs autonomously and surfaces the best options weekly, daily, whatever your sales cadence is. Our customers they don't want to wait for us to build it, they want it today.

All they would need to do is make a one-off connection to the platform using the AI of their choice. Let me show you what that looks like, Tori, if we can jump on to the next shot.

Here I'm using Claude, but you could use Codex or Cursor or anything else. You just have to connect to the Blackpearl platform, and then you can get going.

On to the next one, Tori. Now, you can start coding using plain language, and this is the foundation of the builder economy, that it is this easy.

You can see here that I've asked for an interactive dashboard that shows the dormant leads from 2025 who are now ready to be reached out to again. I want that live dashboard to be branded Pearl Diver so our team recognize it, it looks slick, builds that confidence.

Incredibly easy to get started. Then I worked with Claude to iterate and refine what I wanted to surface.

All in all, it took about an hour of elapsed time to work through. Half of that at least was Claude doing its thing, working away and building that.

I'm not going to make you sit through an hour of me working with Claude. Instead, I'm going to show you the output which has been updated today.

Have a look at the next one, Tori. You can see here this has been run today, and you can see it's scored some of the dormant leads that we had in the background of our CRM system.

We use HubSpot, and we detected the ones that are back in market, and crucially, why. Zero effort, zero marketing effort and spend to find them.

We've got some great sales conversations to bring these back to life. Now, the cost for us to build this and run it over the thousands of dormant leads, under $30.

If a lead usually costs, let's say, $300 to acquire, and we've just created 47 of those, 47 times 300, that's about $12,000 worth of value, and I can set this to run and update as often as I like. Oh, well, Nick's unmuted.

Here comes danger. Hopefully that's given you a little taste of the platform that is in beta.

It's with some customers at the moment, and we intend to be rolling out soon, and hopefully given you some really good examples of strong, practical use cases of systems that people are going to build with. Over to you, Nick.

Thing I love about Platform-as-a-Service is your revenue-generating opportunities are now really only restricted to your imagination. Really, if you can think it and you can type it, you can have it.

That was quite a near and dear demo to me, and if anyone was watching the faces there, you'd actually have seen I've never seen that up to this moment in time. I was peering in on what was happening.

This is actually very specifically to me a pet peeve. We have 42,000 leads in our HubSpot CRM which we haven't closed over the years.

For me, that's just felt like a graveyard of marketing spend. It would do my head in.

Sam, how many times have I asked, I call it back in market, I want to know when people are back in market. Hey, we've got the technology, we have the data intelligence, can we just get this done?

Yet, priorities, timing, everything not there, and you just told me now done it in half an hour to 1 hour, cost what, under $30? As you put, in my head, that was exactly what I thought, there is thousands of dollars of value that we have left on that table every single day in leads, let alone what that means into money, that the sales team has no excuse ever to not be on the phone again as far as I'm concerned.

That is why this, what do you call it, the build economy? Was a good name.

Was stick with that.

Builder economy.

Yeah. That's what I came up with.

Builder economy, right. That is why that is so powerful.

This is why I spoke to right at the start, there's this weird thing of people knowing that incumbent technologies are going to get disrupted, and yet, is AI a bubble? Where is it leaning?

Where is it going to lean? Here's a real example about how AI can absolutely create a phenomenal product for pennies on the dollar in minutes.

That's why I'm so excited about Platform-as-a-Service. As I was told to temper my enthusiasm by multiple individuals before this, including Simon, who's glaring at me furiously now, I would say it's still in beta.

Whether it sells a little or a lot, we don't know. I guess stay tuned.

Simon, over to you for questions. Can I anticipate first question, Simon?

Can I use my psychic ability?

No, you're not allowed to do that, Nick. That takes my thunder.

Let's do it anyway. In terms of Q3, Q2, Q3, and there's no Q4, and you spoke to that, Karen, around just the ability to forecast correctly, with PaaS being in beta.

We don't have cash in here, which I understand is something that the NZX doesn't require in terms of financial cash flows and whatnot, so that's a first sort of answer on that front. In terms of being able to fund the business to profitability or EBITDAF profitability, what's the sort of view there from the company?

We always cut our cloth to suit, Simon. You deal with what you've got and you go as hard as you can with what you've got.

I think we're always stuck in a delicate blend. On one side of things, we've always shown that with capital on hand, we do phenomenal things.

The growth is undisputable, that the tech moat is now undisputable, the opportunities and innovation are undisputable, right, we do great things with the capital. Yet, as the person that started off with 100% of this company and now, through dilution, into single digits, I'm acutely aware of dilution.

You're pedaling these two things all the time. We're trying to compete and dominate and continue to dominate in the largest and wealthiest market on planet Earth, and we're doing that with Australasian capital, right?

There's a real blend there. What I would say without kind of giving a politician's answer to it, because I felt like I'm going down that path is that we really don't intend to go to the market for a general placement.

If we need more capital along the way to explore opportunities and to smash PaaS up to the next level, I think that was one of those questions, right, we have options, but I just don't think a general market placement at this period of time is the right thing for the company or shareholders. Thanks,

Nick. Just on PaaS, maybe one for you, Sam.

When's the full launch, and what's the level of investment that's required to scale PaaS?

Full launch will be when we're very comfortable after the beta that we've got the right set up for the customers that are using it. I can't give you a firm date on that.

I would be surprised if it's more than a month, but we do want to work very closely with those beta customers. They are initially rolling it out to their customers, so that will give us very strong feedback.

All of the technology costs are baked into those forecasts, and we have a variety of options of how we take that to market. Agencies are a particular kind of force multiplier in that space because they build their platform and their business on the Blackpearl platform, and so you rapidly scale out that way.

Can I

just jump in

on that one, Sam? As far as the build costs, as Sam's already spoken to that, it's baked into those EBITDAF numbers you've seen.

As far as the scale cost is concerned, I think we've got some soft entry points that we do with our existing teams here, but obviously if things catch fire, you have to evaluate. Right, that's all I would say.

Again, it's a super unknown quantity at this point. We've had products we've thought amazing, take a little while to kick off, and some of them go bang.

We'll see. All

right, thanks, Nick. What was the ARR value of the DaaS customer that churned during the quarter?

Does the guided EBITDAF improvement assume any PaaS revenue, or does the path work without it?

I can answer the latter and not the former. The latter about PaaS revenue, we've assumed none.

That's why Karen was I

can provide that. The customer was worth $20,000 USD per month.

Cool. During the FY26 results webinar, Nick, you made the point that the real value sits in the Pearl Engine, and that if anyone ever made a takeover offer, that's what they'd be buying.

It stood out as it wasn't something that you'd raised before. Asking, has the board received any approach regarding a takeover of the group or an acquisition of the Pearl Engine, and how would the board deal with one if that came?

No, we haven't, and you'd deal with it based off the merit of the deal that came through. I just wanted to give context why I brought that up is because we're in a real opportunity at the moment with strategic partnerships, both distribution, a whole wide actually spectrum of opportunities, and the one comment coming back is that the technology we've got is pretty spectacular.

Again, when you stick your head up above the parapet, you've got to be prepared for things. We haven't had any yet, and that's good, because I don't think anyone wants to see takeover offers where we're at at the moment, right?

Makes every right. A question just around the revenue assumptions that you've made to support the EBITDAF forecast.

We talked about the three key measures for reporting now being growth, EBITDAF, and that technology advantage. For this quarter, the growth measure was ARR, and the subscription revenue will be available in the half-year fin stats like it always has been, you'll see that then.

The quarterly reported growth measures, I think, will evolve as the revenue model evolves with that new PaaS revenue stream. As I think Nick said earlier, we'll introduce new growth metrics for future quarterly reporting.

It was a tricky one this quarter, actually, so much to the frustration of our advisors, we took a little longer to get this into proof than normally we could, and it was because when we actually started dissecting the revenue that had come through last quarter, we saw actually a portion of this is not annual recurring, we have to strip that out, but then it wasn't a meaningful amount to then put in parallel. I guess actual revenue and ARR are apples and oranges.

Again, we wanted to sort of highlight that we want to keep evolving and making sure that we're giving as best transparency for where we are and now forward guidance for where we are without becoming sort of overly onerous with quarterly reporting. It's a bit of a blend there, and I think hopefully we're offering a lot more this quarter than we ever have before and given to market some comfort about the direction we're heading from a profitability standpoint, and we want to keep evolving as we can.

Next, probably last question. What's the main driver of improvement projected EBITDAF?

Is it revenue margin growth or cost-out?

Good question. Obviously in Q1 and the guidance for Q2, it's weighted slightly more towards the cost coming out.

As we move for the third, for the third quarter, it will be moved back to that revenue growth, because revenue growth is obviously the most important thing that we are still doing. Q1 has been cost-out, Q2 forecasted to be cost-out.

That concludes the Q&A segment and the webinar. Recording will be available via the same link.

Thanks, all, for joining. Thanks, Nick.

Thanks, Karen. Thanks, Sam.

Enjoy the rest of your day.

Thank you, all.