Earnings call transcript: Blackbird PLC’s Q4 2025 sees market challenge

Blackbird PLC’s recent earnings call for the fourth quarter of 2025 revealed a mixed financial performance. The company’s earnings per share (EPS) came in at zero, missing expectations, while revenue reached 807,650 GBP. The stock reacted negatively to the results, dropping 7.32% during the open market session. Despite these challenges, Blackbird continues to innovate with its Elevate division, focusing on collaborative video editing solutions.

Key Takeaways

• Blackbird reported a profit of 380,000 GBP for its legacy business in 2025.
• The company has approximately 12 months of cash runway left.
• The Elevate division’s monetization metrics showed growth, with an increase in registered users and paid subscribers.
• New product features, such as AI-powered capabilities and stock content integration, were highlighted.
• The stock price fell by 7.32% following the earnings announcement.

Company Performance

Blackbird PLC’s overall performance in 2025 showed profitability in its legacy division, despite operating in a highly competitive market with limited pricing power. The Elevate division demonstrated growth in user engagement and product monetization, but challenges in achieving product-market fit remain. The company’s focus on innovation, particularly in the video editing space, positions it uniquely within the industry.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: 807,650 GBP
• Earnings per share: 0 GBP
• Profit for Blackbird legacy business: 380,000 GBP

Earnings vs. Forecast

Blackbird’s EPS of zero missed market expectations, contributing to a negative market reaction. The revenue achieved, while significant, did not offset the disappointment in earnings, reflecting the company’s ongoing challenges in its competitive landscape.

Market Reaction

Following the earnings release, Blackbird’s stock price decreased by 7.32%, closing at 1.9 GBP from a previous 2.05 GBP. This decline reflects investor concerns over the company’s ability to meet earnings expectations and the broader market’s response to its financial outlook.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking ahead, Blackbird plans to focus on expanding its product offerings within the Elevate division. Upcoming features include advanced audio tools and AI video generation, aiming to enhance user experience and drive growth. The company maintains a cautious approach to marketing spend, prioritizing product-market fit and sustainable financial metrics before scaling.

Executive Commentary

Blackbird’s management emphasized the importance of innovation and disciplined cost management during the earnings call. They highlighted the company’s strategic partnerships, such as with Epidemic Sound and OpenAI, as critical to enhancing product capabilities and market reach.

Risks and Challenges

• Intense competition in the video editing market may limit growth potential.
• Achieving sustainable product-market fit remains a challenge.
• Capital constraints could impact marketing and expansion efforts.
• The company’s reliance on partnerships for product enhancements introduces dependency risks.
• Economic uncertainties and market volatility may affect future performance.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about Blackbird’s strategies for achieving product-market fit and the timeline for expanding its user base. Management reiterated their focus on innovation and disciplined financial management, while acknowledging the challenges ahead in scaling the business effectively.

Full transcript - Blackbird PLC (BIRD) H2 2025:

Jake, Moderator/Presentation Coordinator, Blackbird plc: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Blackbird plc full year results investor presentation. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that’s just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press Send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and will publish those responses where it’s appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we would just like to submit the following poll, and if you could give that your kind attention, I’m sure the company would be most grateful. I would now like to hand you over to the executive management team from Blackbird plc. Ian, good morning, sir.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Good morning, Jake. Thank you very much. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to our Blackbird presentation, full year results for 2025. Before we start and get into our presentation, I just want to cover three topics. The first one being on Elevate, which is that Elevate is still in our product-market fit stage. We are therefore not spending huge amounts on direct marketing. We are spending money on some marketing, those long-term strategies, and we’ll talk about those through the presentation. Until we’re through the product-market fit stage, and we have product-led growth, and we have retention, et cetera, then we won’t be spending lots of money on direct marketing because that will be capital destructive.

Secondly, on the Blackbird side, because this presentation is really about Elevate, I just want to cover off Blackbird at the beginning. Very happily, we’re reporting a GBP 380,000 profit on Blackbird this year. We still retain some of our very high-value customers working at the very pinnacle of sports and news, including executing very recently the Winter Games in Cortina. Thirdly, I just want to address the cash situation. On current run rate, Blackbird plc has about 12 months worth of cash left, and we are a very disciplined company when it comes to our cost base, and we’ll continue to be so. Thank you very much. Before we start, I just want to cover those off.

I’m now going to show a video, which really explains and contextualizes the problem in the media supply chain and the video production process that Elevate is there to address. It’s a video that we shot very recently at a CreatorFest event in London. This is a very relevant and up-to-date problem.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: Can be a pretty slow process.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: That’s really the big bottleneck.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: Yeah.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: in what we do.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: Right now it is the process of whenever I want to get a video reviewed.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: You have to make something.

We’ll do the edits.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: Export it.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: You have to take it into another system and upload it to another system.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: Either WeTransfer or Google Drive, depending what the client likes.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: Send them a link.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: To share it, download it, watch it.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: It takes up a lot of data.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: The review process is quite hard, sending off videos to clients.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: They come back.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: I get all that feedback.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: I have to respond to that.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: There’s a back and forth bit.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: There’s, like, a lot of, like, uploading and downloading and re-uploading.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: That creates a lot of different versions.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: It can be a pretty slow process.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: That’s really the big bottleneck.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: Yeah.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: in what we do.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: I hope that helps to explain the archaic inefficiencies that exist, that Elevate is there to really do away with, to make sure that we can collapse those workflows and save creators and teams and brands up to 70% of their time in the video production process. Now, I’m gonna take you through some stats now, really to show the consistency that we update you on these stats every time. They’re still clearly indicating that we’re in the product-market fit stage. We now have 138,000 people signed up to the product with over 1,000 people that have paid for the product. We’ve retained around three hundred and eighty-eight, a little bit more than that now, of those customers.

This really goes to indicate that there’s still a product-market fit stage to be reached. When we look at that 1,000 versus the 388, it’s often that there’s features missing in the product that we are addressing, and Sumit is very well aware of that we’re addressing in order and a logical approach so that we can make sure that those people are retained in the future. The two that we’re really proud of in terms of these or more proud and encouraged by in this page is that since we introduced the new plans at the end of January, over 10% of new subscribers are taking annual plans. Obviously shows that they have faith and commitment to the product.

Also the customer lifetime has gone from 5.5 months up to 8.4 months. For a product that was only started to be paid for in February 2025, this is a very encouraging sign. Still quite a way to go, but very encouraging numbers. Also, the collaboration. The fact that you just saw in the video earlier, the collaboration is a real differentiator for us. It’s a new behavior. To get people to use this is, it’s a completely different way to use a video editor than ever before. You can see that since we introduced the review process at the end of August, that we’ve had nice steady increase in growth of collaboration through to the end of February.

That’s a really encouraging sign. Sumit now gonna take you through the product progress and what’s coming next. Over to you, Sumit.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: Okay. Last time we spoke to you guys, we were at the point of quite a lot of key important new features that were coming to the platform. One of the first ones, which was just quite important for video in general was to fill things like B-roll, is that we integrated the Pexels stock video library, which gives all our users immediate access to a very vast library of free content. That went in, and that’s one of our obviously partner integrations.

We also did a lot of integrations on the AI space, so we included AI image generation, speech generation, and probably the most impactful thing for our target market was the subtitles, where we’re using AI to transcribe and produce subtitles, and we’ll show you a demo of that. Another few more important things were also added in this period. As Ian mentioned, we did change the plans, and we added three different plans for the product. We included the annualized plan, plans aimed at more, you know, sort of the broad range of the market, and we introduced tokens, which is a mechanism for people to pay for AI usage.

Above that, we also did a lot of foundational work in making the GPU on the computer, so the processing unit on the computer, capable of doing a lot more of the work within Elevate. Now, this is particularly important for when we’re using, when Elevate’s used on lower-end computers like Chromebooks because they do tend to have very good GPUs, and so it means that we’re just gonna get better performance. So we’re really happy. We did everything that we said we would do in that period. Everything’s been out there, it’s being used by customers, and we’re very happy with it. The next bit that we’re working on and the things that’s gonna happen in the next quarter is we’re on the cusp of releasing stock music with Epidemic Sound. We’ve got a demo for that as well.

Based on feedback that we’ve had from our business users, our marketing teams, we’re gonna be adding font management, so people will be able to upload their own custom fonts that brands use so that all of their text within their videos can be consistent with their brand. Also, we’re gonna leverage the work that we’ve done on the GPU previously with the transitions and actually apply that to things like effects and animations. We’re getting closer and closer to this being you know, very, very capable of competing with the higher-end video editors. Something that is really important for our customers is more audio tools.

At the moment, we have audio editing in levels, but we haven’t implemented things like noise reduction and dubbing and dynamics and EQ, and we’re gonna show some demos of that now as well, actually. If I jump straight into a demo, let’s go with the transcription first. Here’s a video of Caroline, one of our marketing team, and in this video

Caroline/Cal, Marketing Lead, Blackbird plc: The benefit that you can get.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: We’ve got audio from her.

Caroline/Cal, Marketing Lead, Blackbird plc: from marketing.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: What we can do is actually go down here, turn on the transcriptions, enable the transcriptions, and what happens is I’ve already done it pre, so we didn’t have to wait for it. But what it’s done is it’s gone away, it’s transcribed the video very, very accurately, and you can see it follows along on the right as we scrub through it. But not only are we able to get the transcriptions and put them directly onto the video, but we’re also able to go into those subtitles, go into the styles, and actually in real-time change the style with which the video or the transcriptions are played back as subtitles.

Caroline/Cal, Marketing Lead, Blackbird plc: Really-

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: This is really useful for when we’ve got users who are working in corporates and need a more formal look, and then obviously the social media, et cetera. All of that’s done with one of our partners, OpenAI, who’s providing the transcription services. Another key feature that you’ll notice is of course we’ve increased the collaboration. As I’m editing here on our timeline, you can also see that Cal is also in the project, so both of us can be here simultaneously at the same time. Now, what we did in the last quarter, and we were just heading into this, and if you remember the graph that Ian showed of the growth, a lot of that growth has come because of the review mode.

What that means is that users who are editing are able to actually go onto the invite and invite users, but rather than say that they can edit and could potentially get too involved in the project, but they can just be reviewers, so that can be clients or internal stakeholders, and then they can just go to any part of the video that they want, say, you know, "Please, please give this a look," like so. That goes immediately on the timeline, and it’s immediately available here to the editor. Cal could pick that up, for example, and as I’m not doing anything because I’m the one who’s got the comment, he says he’s on it. He can go to that particular video, and he can say, "Okay, fine, let me just apply a different look," and you’ve seen he’s already added that look in.

Our collaboration is really, really improving. We’ve got more that will come into that space, but for now, we are seeing, you know, really good growth in that space. The thing you’ll notice in this video as well is our new transitions. These are our GPU-accelerated transitions, which is the underpinning of all the animation work that we’ve done, which gives us a lot more capability.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: [audio distortion]

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: That covers those, but the really exciting things that are coming are Epidemic Sounds, as we mentioned. If, for example, I go into here and go into music alongside where we’ve had the audio, the video from Pexels, and I type in something like sport, for example, and I say, okay, this could be interesting. We’ll play back a track here.

I say, okay, that could be an interesting track that we could use. I can just drag this directly into the timeline. I can temporarily disable the previous track that was there. Then you can see, we can immediately, very, very quickly add audio to the project. That will be releasing in the next couple of weeks, and we’re really excited about that. Now, looking further forward into different audio tools, here’s an example of something that we’ve been working on with another partner, which is around dubbing and revoicing. Let’s do audio cleanup first. Here’s a clip of someone that we interviewed at a trade show.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: I wished someone could actually just take a look at my timeline or I could look at theirs and make the changes.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: You can probably hear in the background, there’s a lot of background noise, which is making it hard to hear. If we run it through the voice isolation, you’ll now be able to hear it much clearer. I’ll go right from the beginning.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: Wish someone could actually just take a look at my timeline, or I could look at theirs and make the changes and then make the process so much.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: That’s gonna really help people, especially if they’re shooting on things like mobile phones, and they don’t have a proper microphone setup, et cetera. Another really exciting thing is to be able to do the dubbing side of things. If I play this video back, you can hear the presenter speaking, but then I can change the language. We could even have it play back in Arabic as well. These are just a few of the exciting things that we are gonna be bringing to market, and of course, the product. These are just the key features. These are the highlights.

We’re constantly adding lots of little improvements because we know that users come for the big features, but they always stay for the little ones and the convenient day-to-day productivity that, you know, little snippets that we have that other products in our space don’t tend to do. We’ve never said that we’re gonna be pushing out to be as complicated as some of the higher-end tools, but the quality-of-life features that we’re adding are really important.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Great. Thank you, Sumit. Hugely exciting next three months ahead of us on the product side. Just a quick reminder about our addressable market. It really is a huge opportunity that we have globally. The creator economy is made up of 200 million creators worldwide, and as a reminder, the creator economy means people are actually making money from creating their content, which means they’re generally working with other people, whether it be other team members or brands are making that money. It’s really key for those people to be able to have a review tool that’s quick and easy to use.

We’re really honing our guns on the marketeers and those adjacent marketing roles, of which there are 6.5 million marketeers worldwide, and the real reason for that is there are three reasons. One is that they make a lot of video, and that video has to be of a certain quality. Secondly is that just by the general definition, they work in teams, either with themselves or with brands. Thirdly, they pay. Those guys want to pay for their tools. They’re not gonna put free tools into their workflow. Really important for us to train our guns onto a workflow that works for the marketeers worldwide.

I’m now gonna share a quick video of some professional content creators who are using Elevate or have come very close to using Elevate and seen it in action, to give you a sense of the flavor of how they feel about the product that we’ve built.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: Quicker and far simpler. The UI as a whole was just really, really clean. It was really easy to understand.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: The fact that it’s in the browser.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: I’ve never seen anything like this.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: I love the fact that I’ve got all my files in one place. I don’t have to worry about taking hard drives or cards with me. Being able to collaborate on it together is a complete game changer. That’s given me the opportunity to actually outsource some of my edits.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: I love that the review piece is that it’s not an export.

Video Interviewee , Content Creator/Professional, Unknown: It prevents us, you know, from needing to do the whole export and send it, bring it back, export it again, making it five times faster than how I was doing it before. I would absolutely see Elevate being something we could use pretty expansively.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: I hope that gives a flavor of how excited we are about it because we feel we’re very close to achieving that product-market fit when you hear the guys talking there. We’re gonna continue that seeding work with those lighthouse users. You saw Studio71 there out of Los Angeles, also DCTUK out of the U.K. But we’re also working with AI companies, with Indian kids networks, et cetera. We’re getting lots of feedback from different range of customers about what they’re loving about Elevate but also what we need to work on to make sure that we have that fit. We’re gonna be adding to these people, these companies, through further events next year, or this year, of which we have a full program going through the spring and the summer.

The partnership side of things is hugely important. The fact that Epidemic brings such a high-quality library to us is amazing. What they also bring are millions of users that use Epidemic. Epidemic will make noise about us when we launch that product in the very near future. We think the partnerships are a really fantastic way for us to grow and accelerate route to market. We’re also building our PR presence. We recently were featured in Forbes with an article about our collaboration. Sumit and in fact Carol have been on numerous podcasts, including recently Primal Video out of Australia, which the guy that runs that has over a million followers.

We’re really building our presence in that market. We’ve just started something exciting as well with influencers. This is a real first, dip of our toe into this. We worked with Laura out of New York. Again, the U.S. is hugely important to us as a market, given that well over half of the content creator economy is in the States. Those videos will be launching very soon. Laura is a TikToker who has over 60,000 followers. Interestingly, when we started talking to Laura, she had 30,000 followers, so she’s very much a rising star. We’re working closely with her. She’ll have a series of videos that she’ll be talking about Elevate.

We’re looking for that product-led growth. When we achieve that product-led growth, then we’ll start to do more direct spend on the product in search engine marketing, et cetera, but we have to wait for that moment. In conclusion, we have a really sizable opportunity to build Elevate, addressing archaic, hugely archaic inefficiencies in the media supply chain. We are working hard to achieve product-market fit. It’s hopefully happening very soon. I think there’s a number of things that we can pick up in the questions around things that will accelerate us getting there. Thirdly, we’re still seeding with very high-profile customers. We’re really pressure testing this with some very demanding customers in the market.

I’m very happy to take your questions. We’ve actually had a record number of questions submitted. I think we had 35 questions pre-submitted, which I’m gonna answer a few of those up front. Over to you first of all, Jake, and then we’ll get into that.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: Thank you so much.

Jake, Moderator/Presentation Coordinator, Blackbird plc: Perfect, guys. If I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much for your presentation this morning. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab that’s situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. But just while the team take a few moments to review those questions that have been submitted already, just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can all be accessed via your investor dashboard. Guys, as you say, we have received a number of questions, so if I may just hand back to you to address those where appropriate to do so. If I pick up from you at the end, that’d be great. Thank you.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Thank you so much, Jake. Okay. Yes, there’s a number of quick questions that I think I’ll take up front because they were, yeah, they kind of do get repeated. The first one is, why do we have a low share price? I think that’s a good question. I think the key reason there is that the market doesn’t like the revenue being so low, and the revenue is not high because we haven’t spent a great deal on marketing, because we don’t have the product-led growth, and we don’t have the product-market fit. This is all a part of the process, and we’re working towards that fit, hopefully in the very near future.

However, I bought shares this morning, as you might have seen, and I did that on the reason that I believe hugely in the opportunity that we have. This is a massive opportunity that no one owns, no one else owns in this market. Why not us? We’ve had made a huge amount of progress in the product, as Sumit talked about. We’ve got in front of us a big partnership with Epidemic that I’m hugely excited about and that we talked about. We’ve got the potential for AI to be a real friend for us, and I think that’s important. It’s a friend for us on both sides. It’s a friend for us on the supply side.

We can get our features to the product faster through AI, and it’s a huge opportunity on the demand side because there is just much more video being created. That video needs to be assembled, and that video needs to be reviewed. That’s really where Elevate has some huge opportunities for a big market there. Thirdly, I bought because the price is very low, so I think it’s a huge opportunity for anyone buying. Right. Okay. I’m gonna go into the questions now that I’ve got here. The first question, and there’s a number of these, by the way, so I’m gonna answer it right up front, is about the role of Bill Roberts. Bill joined us, I think it was late last year.

He’s ex-Adobe, and he was very keen to come on board. Unfortunately, Bill has had some serious family health issues and has had to step back from us and other things. We’re not really working too closely with Bill at the moment. That answers a number of those questions, I think. The second question is on micro dramas. Over to you, Sumit. Does a micro dramas create on a budget? Sounds like Elevate would be a good fit.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: Yeah. We don’t currently support some of the demands that will come out of the televisual space because of their heavy reliance on color grading and audio tools. We do want to be able to operate in that space, but at the moment, it’s such a small market that it’s not worth it for us to push too much into that. We will eventually. You know, Elevate will be usable by almost everyone other than maybe right at the highest end.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Okay. The third question is on fundraising. And obviously you saw that we did a small fundraise just before Christmas. It’s important as Chair, and obviously with a very responsible board, that we have a fiduciary duty to make sure that the company is fully capitalized and that we have ample reserves or some reserves to market the product when fit is achieved. The question that I’m looking at right now is asking about do you think funds will be raised privately? Well, there’s certainly no plans for that. We’re very happy with our position on AIM and the fact that our AIM shareholders have always supported us. So that’s the way that one would go.

Yes, we’re very happy to be on AIM. Third question, it’s a share price question. I think I’ve addressed those. It’s interesting to see how many small agencies started to use CapCut’s Pro desktop over the last few years for various tasks. elevate.io, once it has market fit, will be a far better product for them to use, in my opinion, for many reasons. How do you plan to reach and educate those agencies using CapCut and any other inferior product with prosumer and pro-grade plans to help them transition to elevate.io and be more productive? Okay, do you want this one?

Caroline/Cal, Marketing Lead, Blackbird plc: Sure. Agencies are definitely a really important target for us. Obviously, Elevate is just such an amazing fit because of the collaboration and because they work so much with clients. I think Ian already hinted at it during the presentation. We have a pretty exciting events pipeline for Q2, and some of these events will be more targeting teams, but there are also those events that target these types of agencies more. From last year, for those who followed along, we obviously attended quite a few events. The product was obviously at a much earlier stage, but what we did learn was that events are very effective in terms of seeding it amongst people.

At that time, we got a lot of really valuable feedback. Now where the product is, we feel a whole lot better about attending these events and getting Elevate into these types of agencies’ hands.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Thank you so much, Carol. Next one’s a product question, Sam. Figma offer a desktop wrapper providing semi-offline model that targets the needs of professionals who travel or have unstable connections. Is this something you would consider? Over to you.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: Yeah. The wrapper for Figma doesn’t help you if you don’t have an internet connection. You still need to have an internet connection. We will be doing something very similar, and it does give us better ability to, for example, cache larger amounts of the video or process some of it into the Blackbird codec locally. We’ve always wanted to do that, for sure, and it is going to be just a wrapped version of the product. Yeah.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Thank you. I understand the five-year EVS license is due to expire in 2026. Can you confirm renewals are being discussed, and would you expect improved terms? I can’t go into details about the terms, but I would say that we have an excellent relationship with EVS, including having just executed the Winter Games, as a partner with them. Of course, we’ll be looking to renew that contract. Over the last 12-18 months, the core Blackbird business has lost a number of customers. For example, Arsenal, NRL. Is this a conscious decision to focus on higher-margin customers, or have these customers moved on to other solutions? If it is the latter, why are people moving away from Blackbird Enterprise? What I would say is that it’s a highly competitive market.

We are very happy to have our sticky customers, some of the largest customers and discerning customers in the world. There is some natural movement away sometimes from products. But we’re very happy with what we’re doing there. As I said, we’ve made a GBP 380,000 profit out this year. Have you seen any evidence of organic growth in usage of elevate.io growth not dependent upon active marketing, but via word of mouth recommendations, et cetera? Yes, absolutely. Carol, do you wanna pick that one up?

Caroline/Cal, Marketing Lead, Blackbird plc: Yeah, yeah, sure. Obviously, we have organic growth, and then I think the other thing that you’re referring to is more like product-led growth, so not active marketing, as you mentioned. We’re seeing both on the organic marketing side. We’re seeing a really good uptick. Also, on the product-led growth side, I think we are. Like the two main mechanisms in the product right now are the team invites and the project invites. Since September, we have seen a very nice steady uptick in those being used and inviting people into the product. Also some of the subscribers that we acquire now, because obviously we have such good analytic systems and we can measure everything, they do come through these team and project invites.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Anything to add to that, Sam?

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: No.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: No. Yeah, I think that’s a good answer, Carol. I think that, you know, we are looking for high standard there in terms of product-led growth. We want to see that growth really start to steepen. There’s a general definition of what product-market fit is, and it’s when 40% of your market can’t do without you. You know, we’re aiming at that. We’re not there yet, but that’s really our target. Okay. When will you be adding AI vid gen?

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: We’ve been looking at two types of video generation, one just free form and the other one with avatars. Both will be with partners. It was just one of the next things that will happen after we’ve finished Epidemic. Yeah, we’ll be reviewing it, but we will be adding it soon.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Thank you very much. One for you, Steve. A few months back, a few other channels reported that Blackbird, that’s elevate.io, was being used by some professional guy on LinkedIn. Is there anything you can add to that?

Steve, Finance/Disclosure Officer, Blackbird plc: Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah, thank you for contacting us. Yes, we were aware of it, and it is causing a bit of confusion. We’ve been in touch with this other brand, and he’s promised to rebrand. It takes a little bit of time, but I’ve been in touch with him recently, and it’s in progress. He’ll be moving away from the elevate.io brand shortly.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: How close are you to providing forecasts? We were getting close a few years back. Can you give an indication in weeks or months? I think our indication would be when the revenue engine makes sense, and we start to get a repeatable route to market through marketing. Then we’ll feel more confident to give a forecast. We’re not at that stage yet. At the interims presentation, you mentioned that two ads would soon air on YouTube. Would these be shown as part of your presentation? Did this ever happen? Cal.

Caroline/Cal, Marketing Lead, Blackbird plc: Yeah. Yeah, no. The good news is yes, both of these ads are currently live and running with obviously a conservative budget. They are live and running, so yes, they are being used with very specific targeting. You know, even if you don’t happen to come across them, then you know, it just means our targeting is working essentially. We obviously want to make sure the right people see the ads because that’s what we’re paying for.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: The broker notes released on Monday included some analysis of collaboration, which we went through earlier in the presentation. Do you think this is an important driver of both usage and adoption in Elevate? Yeah, it’s really one of a number of different value propositions that we have in Elevate. It’s a big differentiator for us. We see it as a big driver, a big lever, yes.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: It’s worth stating actually that that chart was all based around non-ad spend, so through organic means. Yeah, we’ve actually saw higher figures if we add in the ad spend.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: That’s a really good point. Yeah, we cleaned out all the or any Google ad spend because that has that could pollute the data. That what you saw in that chart is pure organic. Has elevate.io entered scale up? If not, why not? I’ll finish that question there because we haven’t achieved product-market fit yet, and when we do, we will certainly let you know. Given the presentation at the time of the GBP 2 million placing last year and the talk of increasing subscriptions and early hockey sticks, were you surprised by the subsequent churn immediately thereafter? The presentation provided a very bullish view that almost immediately appeared to stop. Cal, do you want to go on?

Caroline/Cal, Marketing Lead, Blackbird plc: Yeah, yeah, sure. I think at that time, you know, for those that remember, we obviously had our 50% early bird discount, which made it very attractive for people to subscribe to a product that is a lot obviously nowhere near where it is today. Obviously when we went full price, we saw that impact, and I think that’s what you’re referring to. As was mentioned during the presentation, in response to that, we have completely redesigned our plans and yeah, we’re seeing some positive results from that.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Thank you very much. Well, the product might never be finished. How do you see development costs once the features referred to in the Elevate notes have been realized? Do you see that a lot of the main features needed to scale up are there and development costs can be reined in? Or do you think such costs will remain the same? It’s probably a Steve and Sumit question, that one.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: Yeah.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Do you want to talk about the product roadmap?

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: Yeah.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: I can talk about the costs.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: There’s a couple of things that are happening. We’re getting faster. We spend a lot of time, as everyone knows, building the infrastructure for Elevate, and now we’re actually able to develop things faster and faster. That’s also been added as something that you mentioned earlier, that, AI is being used quite extensively within the product development phase now because it’s at the stage where it is actually useful, but also because we’ve done a lot of that foundational work, it’s very easy for us to now sort of add self-contained bits of work. What we expect is the acceleration of the product to increase. It may feel like, "Oh, we’re nearly there, we’re nearly there." What we are is we’re very nearly there, and if not already there for many customers as a very usable product.

What is now gonna help is that we’re just gonna be able to accelerate faster and faster and actually just widen the use to how many people we’re able to.

Steve, Finance/Disclosure Officer, Blackbird plc: Yeah. On the cost side of things, I’d say on the short term, you’ll probably see a little bit of a dip, but due to some changes that we’ve made within the team, over the last few months or so. Yeah, going forwards or whatever like that, as Sumit said, you know, we’ve got a list as long as our arms that we want to achieve. I’d imagine that development costs will stabilize.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Thanks, guys. There’s a question, quite a long question, so I’m not gonna read it out fully. But it asks about the raise. First of all, why the raise and why no TR-1 came through? I’ll address why the raise. I mean, it’s really about fiduciary duty to the company. As I mentioned at the start of this presentation, we have a 12-month runway with Elevate or Blackbird. And that is in large part because we did a raise before Christmas. We want to make sure that we don’t run out of money, and we won’t have enough capitalization to market the product. In terms of TR-1, Steve, do you want to go?

Steve, Finance/Disclosure Officer, Blackbird plc: In terms of the TR-1, you know, we haven’t received anything. The company can only issue a TR-1 to the market when it receives that information itself. We haven’t received anything. I’m told from our broker, Allenby, that they contacted the individual. We’re not gonna speculate as to why they haven’t issued a TR-1, but nothing’s been forthcoming.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Okay. There’s a long question about product-market fit here. I’ll try and play it to you. Product-market fit and customer profile stages. I understand that product-market fit is important to ensure the product matches the market. I get that’s all great, but drawing out this process could also be used to delay accountability and justify a lack of growth in WAU and MAU and paid subscribers. Those metrics are the ultimate test of whether an Elevate is growing, succeeding, gaining traction, adoption and acceptance. You’re absolutely right. There’s a long caveat to this question, and you’re absolutely right. We want to make sure that we do have those WAUs and MAUs growing as in weekly active users, monthly active users growing.

We want to make sure that retention is there. We want to make sure that organic growth is there and turning into an exponential curve. Absolutely right. Anything that is gonna cloud those numbers, which means massive spend in search engine marketing, we’re not willing to do at this stage because that is a cloud the data. Also, you know, we have limited resources, we have limited reserves, and therefore we don’t want to destroy that, and we want to make sure that we wait until the appropriate time when the metrics are coming through that really show that we’ve got that momentum and that the revenue engine is really starting to make sense from a math point of view, then we’ll spend the money. I hope that answers the question.

Yeah, I’ve said several times that we haven’t reached that stage yet, and that we are working towards that stage as soon as we can. Blackbird division. Given the successful repeated renewals with global leaders in sports and entertainment, Blackbird is clearly the leader in its field. To what extent is our technology indispensable to these customers? If it is indispensable, is there any reason why our pricing is not significantly higher? Hypothetically, if we doubled our pricing, where would these global names go to? Do they have alternatives? As I mentioned before, it’s a competitive market. There’s a lot of people in that market, and actually it’s ever-shrinking or not, it’s certainly not growing very fast. The competition is ever intensified.

There are alternatives to using Blackbird, clearly because we’re only a very small part of the market that, you know, the market share. We have to work hard from a, you know, every perspective, from a communication perspective and sales perspective to make sure those contracts are always renewed. The research report suggests signups have increased from 111 to 138K since September, despite what appears to be much lower paid search. Have you therefore seen any improvements to signup and acquisition costs? Well, we’re not going to go into lots of detail about lots of different metrics. We’ve given you the metrics that we said we would every time. This is product-market fit stage. It’s a period of experimentation, and therefore metrics are moving around.

Therefore, it doesn’t make a great deal of sense to kind of keep talking about them. Sometimes we’ll do something that really works really well, and maybe we do something that works less well. At this stage, we really want to hone that route to market so that we can, when we start to spend the money in larger sums, it really works for us. Why has it taken two and a half years since unveiling elevate.io concept and features like pro audio, given that Blackbird already has a professional-grade editing features?

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: Yeah, I can’t deny that audio is at the moment a bit of a weakness for us, and it is something that is crucial. We can’t build everything at once. In some ways we’re gonna, by not doing audio, we’re in a better position because of the way in which audio is now being done with AI. Actually, if we’d have invested a huge amount of money into traditional audio editing capabilities, we would probably have wasted a lot of that because a lot of it is easily replaced now. It’s really important to us. We care about it. It’s crucial to video production, especially as you move into the higher-end users. You will be seeing some movement in the space. We did it in the demo today.

We showed some examples of that. Also just traditional audio filtering will be in the product.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Thank you very much. Competition question here. Good quality cloud-based video editing with collaboration is becoming widely available, given even on low-end Chromebooks via platforms like Flixy. How does management respond to the concern that we might have lost our first mover advantage and our core USP? I don’t think it’s that common, I have to say. It is certainly an aspect that people want to own. Nobody owns it currently. Anything you want to pick up on this?

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: Yeah, I do think we are much further ahead in the collaboration space than anybody. Not that others aren’t catching, or the market isn’t widening. Of course, evidence of more players in the market is a good thing. That’s a good thing for us in general because it helps spread the size of the market. The market’s infinitely big enough for multiple players. Yes, of course, it would be great if we were able to push ahead and get in front of more people, and then we would, you know, we would be able to add more awareness and then use our first mover advantage. Yeah.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: A related question here. While our primary USP is collaborative creation, the wider market seems to place a higher value on collaborative review, which is now ubiquitous. How will the commercial model be adapted if we discover that our main USP, collaborative creation, is viewed by the market as a nice to have rather than a key differentiator?

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: Yeah, we do both. I mean, review is very strong for us as well. The reason why review is a bigger part of the market is because review is the only thing that really exists. Co-creation isn’t something that’s ever existed, and it is a new part of the market. They both actually go perfectly hand in hand together. You know, we feel like we’re in a great position. Our review tools are strong, but we’re in a really good position in the co-creation space because it’s almost impossibility for the higher-end products to add it, and the lower-end products just haven’t done it well. Both can exist simultaneously, and that is part of our strategy. I can work with Cal on an edit, but then we can share it with Ian for review.

It just makes real good sense for the. In fact, that’s exactly how it works if you think about how it works within our organization. Cal and Kiara make the bulk of our content, and a few external providers. All that content is created in Elevate, and they’ll work within a group, and they’ll share things, and we’ll occasionally jump in as some end users to add something. Then the final reviews go out to Ian and others and so on and so forth, and that’s in review mode. It’s exactly how we use it and both sides of that are very, very useful.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: I think it’s worth also referencing the video that we showed first today as well. No products were mentioned there on that video. WeTransfer was mentioned. The main competitor here, the company that owns the market for review is Frame.io. To use Frame.io together with an NLE, you have to download your video from the NLE and upload it again to Frame. That is a slow process. Second thing about that process is that the reviewer is only ever working on a render of the video. They’re working on either an out-of-date video or they’ve stopped the editor from working. One of the two things has happened. Again, it’s a big time sink, a big waste of time.

There might be. It might be a common product to use, and, you know, pretty much everyone we talk to says they use it, but it’s not a perfect product by any means, and Elevate is a huge improvement on that. Okay. There’s a couple of questions here on stats. What is your CAC? What is your annual contract value, annual churn rate? As I mentioned before, we’re not giving that out at this stage. They are actually able to be worked out from the numbers we’ve given you, I think. Again, while we’re in this product-market fit stage, it seems fairly meaningless to give out detailed numbers on that because we are in experimentation mode, and we will continue to be until we finish that phase.

According to the current visual for instance at the previous meetings, you have said you have been in scale-up for a while. No, sorry, I’m gonna stop that one there because we haven’t been in scale-up for a while. We’re definitely still in product-market fit stage. Okay. Ian, this week you’ve defined the target market as professional creators working within brands and in-house brand and marketing teams. What is the TAM value of the target market? Well, I’ve given you the numbers of people that are working in there, and we’ve previously given you a TAM of around $6.9 billion, as the market opportunity. We think that’s not an inaccurate number. It was a 2022 number, so we think that’s only grown.

It’s a huge number. Shareholder taking continuous pain in the share price and dilution, what is the tangible hope for them? Yes, I, as also a shareholder that’s had tangible pain, and as you know, my family and I have invested a lot of money into this company, over GBP 2 million into this company. I completely understand your pain. As you’ve also seen, I’ve invested again this morning, and I’ve given you the reasons for that. I think it’s a great investment, a great time to invest in this company. We think we’re getting toward the end of that product-market fit stage.

I’ve got huge amounts of faith in Sumit and the team in delivering that product-market fit, and so we’re excited about what happens next. Okay. How is EVS getting on with the codec? Any question, any updates there, Steve, do you want to?

Stephen, Technical Lead/Codec Development, Blackbird plc: Not really. Yeah, they’re using it. They’ve been selling it more widely. Well, you know, we can’t go into any details in terms of customers, et cetera, ’cause they’re not our customers. Yeah, we have a great relationship with them. Yeah, the dev teams as well have a really good relationship and enjoying working together.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Do you anticipate expanding Elevate to work on mobile devices, iPads? Sumit question.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: We will continue to expand the mobile coverage for things like upload, et cetera. It’s always on the cards that we will be able to become more mobile focused down the line.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Stephen, is a-

Stephen, Technical Lead/Codec Development, Blackbird plc: Yeah, we have a Safari version as well now for Elevate, and obviously, all the iPads run Safari. It’s getting a lot simpler to make that jump when we need to.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Question for you, Stephen, coming up here. How does CuttingRoom manage frame accurate multiplayer high-definition video editing without our codec? From a technical perspective, what’s to stop them producing a prosumer product like elevate.io?

Stephen, Technical Lead/Codec Development, Blackbird plc: You can run, if you have more processor and more bandwidth, you can do whatever you want on a modern system. It’s to do with the efficiency and the flexibility of it, and the responsiveness, and ultimately the cost. We haven’t emphasized cost yet because we’re product-market fit stage. Over time, as these products get to be used very widely, the profit margin is gonna be one of the major factors. You’ve seen from our original Blackbird cloud, we have 90% gross margin, up to 95% some years. That is way higher than any other web-based video product. That will, that technology, some of that’s used in Elevate, but we will be adding more of that to Elevate. That will give us a really big advantage in the market.

It’s just the margins that we have.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Yeah. I think it’s the infrastructure costs behind that, isn’t it? That’s really important.

Stephen, Technical Lead/Codec Development, Blackbird plc: Mm-hmm.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Okay, question about conversion. With a 0.28% conversion rate from registered to paying users, you’ve stated you’re nearing the end of product-market fit. Given the GBP 500,000 Raise for marketing, what specific feature gaps or friction points have you identified as the primary barriers to conversion and retention? And what specific percentage will you consider the product truly scale-up ready? The 0.28%, I don’t exactly know how that’s being calculated, but I presume that’s over the entire base of people that we have. Obviously, we’re in a curve where things are improving all the time and conversion is improving all the time. It’s definitely not 0.28% at the current stage. But where, which is, to answer the first of all, the friction points and the features.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: Yeah, it’s features. I mean, every time we add a new feature, we satisfy a slightly larger market, and we’ve got a number coming up. It will never end because there’ll always be, you know, we’ll always have to keep adding features to satisfy everybody, and they evolve even with the same users over time. But it has been historically the main reason, the main feedback we get is missing features.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Yeah. I think it’s absolutely missing features and having those features presented in such a way as to delight the user so that they’re used as well. That’s really key. For us, it’s also, you know, the second part of the question is, when do you think you’re scale-up ready? It’s when we’ve moved the revenue engine to a place where the math makes a lot more sense. It’s not necessarily gonna be a multiple of the CAC, but we just want to see the momentum, sustained momentum to that point, and then we feel that we’re in a place to apply more finances to the marketing.

Did you not consider the damage that would occur to your credibility when you undermine the share price by doing a secret deal and provide a credit to the buyer for the last tranche of shares and never disclosing who the buyer was? As Steve has said, we can only follow the rules that are given to us in terms of disclosure. Anything else you want to pick up on that one?

Steve, Finance/Disclosure Officer, Blackbird plc: There’s nothing else to add, really.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: We have a fiduciary duty to the company to make sure that we’re capitalized.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: Also under GDPR as well, we’re not allowed to give names of users if they don’t want it.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Great to see we signed a brand deal with Lara, the New York influencer specializing in video editing. Nice to see her endorse Elevate for those who like desktop. Although it seems odd that she says she edits all her videos on her phone, not desktop, but maybe this means we have a mobile editor launched, lined up for a launch in 2026. Well, I think she’s maybe changing the way that she edits. Sorry, anything on the mobile side?

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: Yeah, no, we won’t have that sort of 2026.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: You did a marketing push for Google Ads last month with the new landing page, and several new features since the last push. How were conversion metrics compared to the 2025 AdWords push? We’re not gonna give out detailed stats, as I mentioned earlier, but we were dipping our toe into certain areas during the experimentation phase of product-market fit, and we will continue to experiment. Do you have any feedback into why 99%+ of users who do not convert to subscribers decide not to pay for Elevate? I guess this features question is the-

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: Yeah. I mean, not everybody has an immediate need. The whole point behind a freemium platform is that these are users who may come, may use it within the realms of the free offer, and then may convert down the line. We have seen people who have converted after quite a long time of being in the free zone. It’s not that we expect that everybody will convert immediately, and it’s also acceptable that people come along, maybe sit in the free, then pay, and then go back into the free zone and come back later. Not everybody has an immediate project, that they need to work on or that they need all our tools for. We don’t see it.

You know, the whole point behind freemium is that we have this vast quantity of users that we can talk to, and over time, as we add things, it may become right for them.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: A question on when will you ramp up marketing spend. I refer to the revenue engine answer I just gave, which is we will know when we are further along to making those math work for us in terms of additional spend. Despite being a shareholder for over a dozen years and a YouTuber for over eight, I have only just started using elevate.io. I’m pleased to say that it is brilliant, and I wish I’d started using it earlier. However, were I not a shareholder, I can’t think of anything that would have persuaded me to try it. I was using iMovie, which worked perfectly fine, and I would have thought, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. Addressing this problem of inertia would unlock enormous amount of small collaborative YouTuber market. How can it be done?

Cal, I guess that’s kind of a question for you.

Caroline/Cal, Marketing Lead, Blackbird plc: Yeah. Yeah. Sure. I think there’s two things, right? In terms of why you were using iMovie. There’s two things that set us apart, and that’s the browser-based aspect of Elevate, and there’s the collaboration. If either one of those things is a good reason for somebody to come to Elevate, that would probably make sense to switch from iMovie. Also, we’re acquiring a lot of people that haven’t been using iMovie. In fact, they’re just starting their video editing journey, and they are looking for something, and then they find Elevate, and it just makes sense to them that it is online and in the browser, just like so many things are online and in the browser nowadays. Yeah, I think that answers that question.

We’re acquiring a lot of new people that don’t have prior kind of notions. In terms of the marketing teams and agencies, the collaboration is obviously such a unique USP that, like, it just makes sense to move, especially if you’re gonna be saving so much time when you’re collaborating and getting a review done.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Yeah. I think for us, it’s really a case of analyzing and identifying what the jobs to be done are. As we’ve said, we really see that the jobs to be done for marketing teams, they’re similar to the creators. There’s still work to be done there to make sure that we’re really answering those needs and really have a workflow that’s suitable for those needs, and that is part of the product-market fit stage. I think well then we can address the inertia that exists. Regarding the use of elevate.io, are there plans to be able to use two monitors? Obviously, you can already have a browser window on each monitor, but you can’t spread the interface between the two.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: We talked about it a lot. It’s not as easily done in a browser as you might imagine because it’s not really easy for a browser to communicate, a browser window to communicate independently. There is talk of plumbing off some of the aspects of onto a second browser and then essentially being able to use things like media management that way. It’s not easy. We definitely will or are looking at how do we support multiple video windows within the same interface. Yeah, more to come on that.

Stephen, Technical Lead/Codec Development, Blackbird plc: It’s worth mentioning, because it’s collaborative, you can actually run Elevate twice, one in each window, and you can have one with your media page and one with your timeline, and you could have one for reviewing, publishing, published videos as well. It is possible to use it with multiple windows. As Sumit, he’s a bit of a perfectionist, as you probably noticed, he’s looking for, you know, the perfect interface for it. I’m sure that will arrive at some point.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: I’m a fan believe of your product, and this is a question for you, Cal. I’m sure in the next five years it will take off. What other exhibitions do you want to attend this year?

Caroline/Cal, Marketing Lead, Blackbird plc: Yeah. We have our event pipeline prepared, as I mentioned earlier. I think the best way for you to kind of follow along is to follow our socials, and we’re always posting pictures and announcements of where we’re going to be. Yeah, follow us, and you’ll be the first to know.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: A question for you, Sumit, about Epidemic Sound. Can you tell us anything about the pricing of Epidemic Sound integration? Will free users get some access? Will tokens be involved?

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: Free users will get access to some tracks through tokens. Everything will be token-based. We haven’t set the price yet. There’ll be two types of license. There’ll be personal licenses and commercial. They will be very affordable for people, and we’ll set them at the price which is appropriate for the production that they’re making.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Yeah. It’s a big opportunity for us. Stephen, a question for you. Can you summarize where we are with the codec development in terms of versions and capabilities?

Stephen, Technical Lead/Codec Development, Blackbird plc: Yes. We’re quite well advanced on Blackbird 10, which is the new one. The existing version, we did improve a bit last year for Blackbird 9. Blackbird 10 is full 10-bit. The research we’ve had is that most people’s video windows are not actually 10-bit yet, but that will improve and particularly as we get more of the higher-end users, as we add these extra features.

We’ve had a lot of progress moving to the GPU, which was one of the big steps we’ve made, and also integrating with all the features of Elevate and the GPU. We have a version that seems to work completely reliably as of a couple of weeks ago, so that’s good. Now it’s a question of going through and optimizing the compression and improving the quality on the RAW videos. We’re broadening the range of videos.

I’ve done my first demonstration actually to Mike at a meeting, and I showed him Elevate running in Blackbird 10, and he was. You know, he just didn’t notice. I didn’t tell him it was Blackbird 10, but he could see the big pictures, and he didn’t criticize it, which is a good step, that someone just coming to it just accepts that it’s HD. That’s, you know, we’re starting to get to that point. Yes, it’s just a question of more and more testing. We’re very near the point where we’ll bring in outside users, people not in the company, to help put their content through and test it. Obviously we welcome anyone for that, and there’ll be a bit of publicity surrounding that just to get the people in.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Right. There’s three or four questions actually to you and Sumit on the player and capabilities around that, and I don’t know who wants to answer those questions, but there’s

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: I can start and then Stephen can.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Yeah. Any updates on the player? Yeah.

Stephen, Technical Lead/Codec Development, Blackbird plc: Okay. Well,

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Yeah.

Stephen, Technical Lead/Codec Development, Blackbird plc: Make some general points. You can actually access the player. It’s very well hidden in Elevate. Elevate is not yet at the point where we’re getting into distribution. Elevate’s focusing on the product, the post-production, the editing side of things. We use it for testing, and we use it for development still, as we have done. There have been from Elevate about 900 videos published and about 15,500 views, I think. It is there. It works. You can publish your links on Facebook and, you know, in comments in YouTube and things like that. It’s not the main thrust while we’re busy finishing off Elevate, completing Elevate, because the customers we have are using Elevate for editing and creation rather than for distribution at the moment.

It is very convenient if you want to share things, because it publishes almost instantly, and you don’t need a password to look at the videos. Whereas obviously elevate.io is very secure, so you’d need a password for that. I think it’s there, we keep it working, and it’s very useful for development, and its time will come.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Thanks, Stephen. There’s a really nice question here on annual sign-ups. Annual sign-ups are a huge endorsement. I’ve seen with another company where monthly subs were dropping out, but without dropping out, which would add friction and admin costs as well as fluctuating revenues. For how long have annual subs been available? That’s since the end of January, so it’s still very, very early in terms of that. And of the 388, roughly how many are now annual subs? Again, we’re not giving out all these detailed numbers at this stage. What we would say is over 10% of them have been annual subs, and that’s a really good sign. We’re really happy with it too. When will the product-market fit stage end? You must have an idea.

We’ll know. I’d say we feel that the metrics are starting to pick up for us and there are green shoots, but it’s too early to say that there’s gonna be a particular day, week, or month at this stage. You’ve created an amazing video editing technology and totally understand how complex it is to find an affordable, successful route to a rapid market growth within the shortest route. Well done for your efforts and determination. Thank you.

Thank you, Philip. A question. Have you done any work on what a sale or partnership with a large strategic might look like at this stage as a fiduciary exercise or organic solo rollout if the product is challenged? Well, at this stage, we’re capitalized. We’re working on a partnership strategy. We have a roadmap. At this stage, we’re not looking at any buyouts at this stage. I think you have a brilliant team and product. I’m a paid subscriber to Elevate and as a shareholder, I’m a bit surprised by the low regularity of mail blasts to your 138,000 subscriber list, which sounds like one of your questions, Caroline. I assume one of the roles of Elevate is to inspire its users to generate more and better video rather than just announce new features. Can you do more? Can more be done in this regard?

Caroline/Cal, Marketing Lead, Blackbird plc: Yeah. Yeah, sure. No, it’s a good question. We want to make sure that whenever we email our user base, that we have something, a valuable message to give them. Because from experience, if you’re spamming people, you’re gonna lead to a lot of unsubscribes. We don’t want that. The other thing is that we also have targeted email blasts. We also use our internal usage metrics to target specific groups of people. You might not be receiving all of them depending on how you use the product. Yeah, I mean, there’s always more that can be done. Obviously, we’re a marketing team of three people.

We’re doing a lot of things, and email is definitely part of that, and we think that consistency is really important, and we do believe that we’ve had that consistency going as the product launches new features and functionality.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Thanks, Caroline. Question, another ask on stats, which I’m not going to answer, but the Ian, you mentioned the Sean Ellis test of 40% threshold needed for product-market fit. How are we scoring on that? We’re improving every day, I think is the way we’re there, but we’re not at it. I think also that might be slightly, you know, maybe not the right metric for us, and I think 30% not being able to do with Elevate, you know, before we pressed the button on marketing is probably a bit too high. Yeah, we’re progressing well on it. Question. "The problem you have is the market is focused on paying customers.

Until there are significant increases, share price will go nowhere, and a need to raise more funds, you’re in a difficult situation. Would it be wise to have more frequent updates on uptake numbers which are hopefully good to encourage new investors? Yeah, it’s a good point and, you know, it may be some good advice that we should have more regular updates. As I said, we’re in an experimentation phase right now, and so those metrics do move about. You know, I would not want to commit to giving a number every week or every month, that may well change the following month.

We feel that when the revenue engine moves to a point where it’s the maths really makes sense, that will be a point where the money should follow. I mean, the sense is the money should follow. That’s what, yeah, I’ll say to that. Would Sumit answer, has he sold any shares? Has he purchased?

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: No, not since the last time you spoke, no.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: The "TR-1 and disclosure is clearly a pain point and could be seen as market abuse, as the market does not know if the individual is still a holder." Stephen, I’m gonna pass that one straight to you.

Steve, Finance/Disclosure Officer, Blackbird plc: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think I can say any more on that. We can only release information that we receive ourselves, and we’re abiding by all the rules.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Shout out for the player performance. The video, a 1-hour video export took 12 seconds compared to 16 minutes of conventional export. That’s a big deal." Thank you very much for that comment. Excellent. I’m on question number 65, by the way. I think we’re nearing the end. It’s near, yeah, it’s near the end, so if you’ve got any more questions now’s the chance. "Did you test your equipment prior to this important presentation? Your sound quality has been terrible throughout. Oops. It isn’t a good look bearing in mind our sector." Okay. Noted. "Is the marketplace still on for a Q2 launch?" Question, Sumit.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: Is it for a Q2 launch?

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Yeah. I guess it must have been in a previous product roadmap.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: For?

Stephen, Technical Lead/Codec Development, Blackbird plc: Marketplace.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Marketplace.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: Oh, sorry. For marketplace, no. We’ve never said it would be Q2, the marketplace. No, that’s never been stated as-

Stephen, Technical Lead/Codec Development, Blackbird plc: We do have the tokens there.

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: Yeah.

Stephen, Technical Lead/Codec Development, Blackbird plc: which allows you to spend your tokens on-

Sumit, Product Lead/Chief Product Officer, Blackbird plc: Yeah, but third parties, not for third parties.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: We’ve got third party integrations that are coming in now. We’ve already got, obviously the OpenAI integrations. Now we’ve got Epidemic Sound integrations, and Sumit talked you through the integrations that are gonna happen in the next three months. Yeah, that’s the start of it. Great. Jake, I believe it’s the end of the questions, I think.

Jake, Moderator/Presentation Coordinator, Blackbird plc: Thanks, guys. If I may just jump back in there. Thank you for addressing all of those questions that came in from investors this afternoon. Of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we’ll make these available to you afterwards. Ian, perhaps before really now just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company, if I could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, that’d be great. That’d be great.

Ian, Chair/Executive Management, Blackbird plc: Yeah, absolutely, Jake. I mean, I would say this is a very exciting time, as I’ve shown this morning, with further faith in the product, and the team, to deliver product-market fit. We’ve been very straightforward with you guys, very transparent, and I hope that’s appreciated. We will continue to be, and we’re really very excited about the opportunities ahead of us. Thank you very much.

Jake, Moderator/Presentation Coordinator, Blackbird plc: Perfect. That’s great. Thank you once again for updating investors, this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you’ll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback. On behalf of the management team of Blackbird plc, we would like to thank you for attending today’s presentation. That now concludes today’s session. Good afternoon to you all.

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