CuriosityStream Inc. ($CURI)

Greetings, and welcome to the CuriosityStream Fourth Quarter and Year-end 2025 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Tia Cudahy, Chief Operating Officer. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, and welcome to CuriosityStream's discussion of its fourth quarter and full year 2025 financial results. Leading the discussion today are Clint Stinchcomb, CuriosityStream's Chief Executive Officer; and Brady Hayden, CuriosityStream's Chief Financial Officer. Following management's prepared remarks, we will be happy to take your questions. But first, I'll review the safe harbor statement. During this call, we may make statements related to our business that are forward-looking statements under the federal securities laws. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, but rather are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Our actual results could differ materially from expectations reflected in any forward-looking statements. Please be aware that any forward-looking statements reflect management's current views only, and the company undertakes no obligation to revise or update these statements nor to make additional forward-looking statements in the future. For a discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our SEC filings available on the SEC website and on our Investor Relations website as well as the risks and factors discussed in today's press release. Additional information will also be set forth in our annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025, when filed. In addition, reference will be made to non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to comparable GAAP measures can be found on our website at investors.curiositystream.com. Unless otherwise stated, all comparisons will be against our results for the comparable 2024 period. Now I'll turn the call over to Clint.

Thank you, Tia, and good evening, everyone. CuriosityStream was built on one timeless idea. Curiosity changes the world, that every breakthrough begins with a question. 1,000 years ago, Leif Ericsson sailed West into the unknown and discovered a new world. Nearly a millennium later, Neil Armstrong stepped on to the lunar surface, carrying the same enduring message across time. Discovery belongs to the bold and curiosity is our compass. Promotion waves to moon dust, that spirit propels us forward today. In that same spirit of bold exploration, we delivered strong full year 2025 results. Revenue grew 40% to $71.7 million from $51.1 million in '24, while adjusted free cash flow increased 46%, $13.9 million from $9.5 million in '24. Q4 revenue rose 36% year-over-year to $19.2 million from $14.1 million and adjusted free cash flow climbed 33% to $4.3 million. These gains reflect the strength of our complementary revenue pillars, licensing, driven by high-volume and heavily structured video fulfillments for AI model training, subscription sturdiness through operational execution and new partnerships, amplified by cost discipline that expanded gross margins to 60% in Q4 from 52% a year ago and reduced nondiscretionary G&A expenses by 33% year-over-year. In 2026, we believe our annual licensing revenue will exceed our overall subscription revenue. We believe we will grow our subscription revenue by low to mid-single-digit percentages because of three key drivers: new pricing, which we began rolling out March 1, new wholesale and retail partnerships and organic growth from existing partnerships. The recurring, reliable and predictable revenue from our subscription services cements our foundation. Why do we believe we will see licensing revenue eclipse subscription revenue in 2026? Why do we believe licensing will be robust and durable for the foreseeable future? What is the impact to top line, bottom line and margin expansion? Well, we've covered some of this before, many investors, analysts and commercial partners tell us it bears repeating. CuriosityStream's licensing business is durable because it's built on assets that are durable, that are scarce, rights-aware, difficult to replicate and increasingly valuable across multiple end markets. We're not talking about a single opportunistic window. We're talking about a monetization model anchored in premium unscripted and scripted media, enriched structured metadata, flexible rights and growing demand from AI developers and traditional media companies. CuriosityStream has built a large differentiated content library of rights to nearly 3 million hours of premium factual content plus sports, plus news, plus general entertainment, animation and film, finished and raw supported by more than 200 content and data partners and flexible licensing rights. This is not commodity inventory. It is scaled, unscrapable, curated, a corpus that took years of capital relationships, editorial focus and dense work to assemble. Enduring revenue streams are almost always rooted in assets that are hard to replace and expensive to rebuild. Demand is broadening, not narrowing. Beyond repeat business from existing customers, we expect our overall roster of partners to more than double in 2026 and potentially increase 5 to 6x in 2027 as the fine-tuning of open source and certain proprietary models opens opportunities for thousands of companies. Historically, licensing meant selling finished programs or package rights to broadcasters, streamers and pay-TV partners. That business remains alive and healthy. And in 2025, we announced new licensing agreements with linear broadcasters, educational platforms, digital-first outlets, global streaming services and, of course, next-generation AI training developers. This diversification makes licensing more durable and cycle resilient. Traditional media licensing is healthy and not going away, but AI licensing is accelerating much faster and driving the bulk of our growth here. Over the next 5 years, AI model development, model refresh cycles, geographic expansion, enterprise fine-tuning, education applications, agentic systems and multimodal search should all support continued appetite for premium licensed corporate. For AI license partners, as their model sophistication grows, so does the need for more video inputs. Developers require large volumes of high-integrity rights-aware training inputs. Premium broadcast video, clean audio, scripts, captions, study guides, metadata and derivative assets have utility well beyond entertainment viewing. They help train, tune, evaluate, ground and improve multimodal systems. The more advanced models become, the more they need high-quality structured, legally licensable data rather than undifferentiated scraped material. So key to note that rights cleared, structured content will become more valuable over time, not less. There's plenty of media on the open web, but much of it is noisy, duplicative, poorly labeled, low-quality or legally ambiguous. By contrast, CuriosityStream's corpus is assembled, curated and increasingly productized for commercial use cases. The premium quality of our video also helps us stand out as we have video captured with top-tier equipment like red cameras, HDR formats and Blackmagic workflows, delivering cinematic excellence with real-world visual depth. This means sharp high-resolution footage that captures subtle details from the textures of ancient ruins in history to the fluid motions and wildlife sequences. For AI training, this translates to superior data for tasks like object recognition, scene understanding and generative video. Said plainly, we generate competitive escape velocity through our expanded data structuring and metadata capabilities that are designed to meet partner volume requirements and bespoke specifications. We're not merely selling files, we're not merely selling clips, we are selling usable data sets. That distinction is critical. In AI, a rights cleared file has value. Our rights cleared file with strong metadata, taxonomy, providence, segmentation and packaging has much more value. That creates pricing power and maintenance. Further, our licensing model benefits from operating leverage and the fact that the standard industry licensing practice in the AI space is one of non-exclusivity. I cannot emphasize enough the value of this dynamic. As our critical mass corpus is now assembled and the infrastructure is largely in place, each new partnership carries attractive incremental economics as our hard cost to create a license in content are largely de minimis. We have, and we will continue to increase our volume through a rev share construct that minimizes cost and risk. We can now monetize the same video multiple times in multiple forms across multiple geographies and buyer classes. Of course, durability does not mean inevitability. We have to execute. We have to move the ball forward every day. We need to continue acquiring, negotiating sufficient scopes of rights, enriching metadata, the data segmenting our corpus intelligently, protecting quality and packaging assets in ways that map directly to buyer workflows. We need to stay disciplined on pricing and avoid treating the library like an undifferentiated commodity supply. We also need to manage legal and policy developments thoughtfully. But all of these are execution challenges. These are not reasons to doubt the model. In fact, a market that increasingly values providence, trust and rights discipline should favor CuriosityStream, not hurt it. Our view is informed. Our view is straightforward. CuriosityStream's licensing of video, audio, images, scripts and related data products is durable because it rests on scarce assets, diversified demand, strong reuse economics and a market shift toward high-quality licensable content. It can continue to grow significantly because we are still early in the monetization curve. It will be lumpy over 3- and 6-month tranches. But as Warren Buffett often said, we'd rather have a lumpy 15% than a smooth 12%. Traditional licensing is meaningful. AI licensing is scaling rapidly. And the strategic value of curated, rights-aware, metadata-rich premium media compounds over time. This is why we believe licensing will remain a critical and durable growth engine for the long-term foreseeable future. In summary, we believe that we will continue double-digit growth in both revenue and cash flow driven by subscriptions and licensing expansion. We intend to pay 2026 dividends from cash generated by operations as we did in 2024. Our balance sheet remains strong with over $27 million in liquidity and no debt, which we believe gives us substantial flexibility. I'll now hand the call over to our CFO, Brady Hayden, who I'm sure will emphasize that among other attributes, at today's share price, we're a growth company that also offers a dividend yield of 10%.

Thank you, Clint, and good evening, everyone. Our full financial results are presented in the back of the press release that we just issued a few minutes ago as well as the 10-K that we'll file in the next few days. But let me quickly go through some of the results that we want to highlight for the fourth quarter as well as full year 2025. In the fourth quarter, we reported revenue of $19.2 million at the high end of our guidance and a 36% increase compared to $14.1 million a year ago. For the full year, revenue was $71.7 million, a 40% increase from last year. Likewise, we reported another quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA, which came in at $1.1 million. This was an improvement of $3.1 million from a year ago, and also our fourth sequential quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA. For the full year, adjusted EBITDA was $8.2 million, a $14.3 million improvement from 2024. Adjusted free cash flow exceeded our guidance in the fourth quarter at $4.3 million, which is also our eighth consecutive quarter of positive operating cash. For the full year, adjusted free cash flow was $13.9 million, a 46% increase from $9.5 million in 2024. Licensing revenue was $9.8 million in the fourth quarter, an increase of $6.1 million from last year, while subscription revenue came in at $9.1 million. For the full year, subscriptions were $37 million, while licensing came in at $33.2 million. This was an increase of over $25 million from 2024 and driven by continued growth in AI training fulfillments. Fourth quarter and full year gross margins were 60% and 57%, respectively, each of these improving from last year. Within cost of revenue, storage and delivery costs increased during the year in light of the high volume of video we put into AI licensing agreements. For the full year, combined costs for advertising and marketing plus G&A were higher by 24% compared to last year, although this increase was the result of noncash charges for stock-based compensation of $14.4 million or about $0.24 on a per share basis. G&A also included an adjustment to payroll costs for incentive compensation as well as a number of onetime expenses associated with our August secondary stock offering. Were it not for the noncash SBC, the incentive comp adjustment and the common stock sale, G&A would have declined by over $1 million in 2025. For the full year, net loss was $6.4 million compared to a net loss of $12.9 million in 2024, representing an improvement of over 50% in net loss. While our revenue was up materially from last year, the 2025 net loss was driven by the onetime charges, incentive comp adjustment and noncash SBC. Were it not for these specific charges, we would have posted positive earnings for the year. And as we said earlier, adjusted EBITDA was $1.1 million in the fourth quarter compared to a loss of $1.9 million a year ago. And for the full year, adjusted EBITDA was $8.2 million compared to an adjusted EBITDA loss of $6 million in 2024. For the full year, adjusted free cash flow was $13.9 million, a 46% increase from $9.5 million in 2024. This totals well over $20 million in operating cash that we've generated over the last 2 years. On October 14, $6.7 million of our warrants expired unexercised. While these warrants have been trading well out of the money for some time, this expiration of all of the company's outstanding warrants reduces potential dilution and should eliminate any lingering share overhang associated with these instruments. In December, we paid $4.7 million for our fourth quarter dividend, including our $0.10 special dividend paid in June, this brings our total dividends paid to $22 million for all of 2025. We ended the year with total cash and securities of $27.3 million and no outstanding debt, and we believe our balance sheet remains in great shape. Based on yesterday's share price, CuriosityStream is generating an adjusted free cash flow yield of over 8% and a current dividend yield of over 10%. Given where our shares have recently been trading, we just announced that our Board has increased our share repurchase authorization to $6 million we plan to selectively resume our repurchase activity in the coming weeks and months. Moving to guidance. For the first half of 2026, we expect revenue in the range of $38 million to $42 million and adjusted free cash flow in the range of $6 million to $9 million. For the full year, we continue to believe we'll achieve double-digit growth in both revenue and cash flow in 2026 and that a full year of positive GAAP earnings is achievable. With that, we can hand it back to the operator and open the call to questions.

[Operator Instructions]

We're ready to take questions. Patrick Sholl from Barrington, you're up first. Go ahead. [Technical Difficulty] This is the CuriosityStream year-end 2025 conference call, experiencing some technical difficulties. Thank you for continuing to hold. We will be with you as soon as we can. Again, appreciate you continuing to hold. Thank you again for your patience. This is the CuriosityStream year-end 2025 earnings call. We are still having technical difficulty. If you are in the question queue right now, would you please e-mail your questions and reply to the e-mail that you are about to receive. And we will take questions over e-mail shortly. Thank you so much, and thank you for continuing to hold. Thank you for holding. This is the CuriosityStream 2025 year-end earnings report. Our first question today comes from Dan Medina from Needham. The first question is, could you please update us on whether LLM licensors are renewing their deals with you and how the nature of second contracts is different from the earliest LLM contracts you licensed.

Thank you, Dan, for that question. Really appreciate it. The answer is yes. Virtually everyone has renewed or will renew. And the beauty of the second agreement is it's always easier because you have the paper in place. Same thing with the third agreement, same thing with the fourth fulfillment. So without a doubt, we're seeing repeat business. At the same time, we're seeing a lot of new potential partners express interest and express very high volume and specific requirements that we're working aggressively to fulfill right now. Thank you, Dan.

A second question from Dan. Any change in the pace of adding other companies' libraries to your ability to license hours to the LLMs?

Yes. We're like the Golden Gate Bridge there, Dan. We are constantly in acquisition mode. We've built, in the mask, I think, an extraordinary library. We've been told, just told this week by the most valuable by market cap companies in the world that we have the best video corpus for AI training. So we have video in place. We have paper in place with the world's biggest companies. We've enhanced our human talent. We've done the necessary things to ensure the sturdiness of our subscription services and feel really, really good about the year, Dan.

And one final from Dan. Can you give us some cases of how LLMs are using the information you license to them in the market to make money, tools and apps?

I think it's a great question, Dan. And I think that if you look at sort of the evolution of what our technology partners are looking for and are working toward, I think you'll -- if you start sort of 2020 with large language models, there was a lot of text that started there, and that was designed to help teach the models to read, to help create document summarizers, knowledge Q&A, support bots, act as coding copilots. I think we transition up the scale to kind of multimodal AI, which is text, which is images, which is audio, which is video. And that led to sort of video summarization, camera assistance, text to image, text to video sort of in the agentic AI, obviously, sort of part of the spectrum now. And that's where systems that plan, use tools and act autonomously. And the sort of use cases there are research agents, travel booking assistants, code agents, DataOps agents, CRM bots. There's almost an infinite number of use cases. And then I think certainly an exciting stage that we're early stages of right now is physical AI, where the content is being used to kind of embed AI into robots, into cars, into drones, into devices. And similarly, I think, an infinite number of use cases here, warehouse robots, self-driving cars, home robots, delivery drones, factory arms, all kinds of things. So extraordinarily exciting, difficult to stay up with all of the use cases. But the good news is we have such a variety, such a strong scope of video and data that we're able to fill a large scope and scale of requirements.

Thank you, Clint. Our next question is from Jason Kreyer from Craig-Hallum. He says, Clint, you called out 2026 as the greatest year in company history. Can you unpack that from a metrics standpoint, perhaps with some more clarity on your goals for the base streaming business and then the licensing opportunity?

Yes. Thank you for that question, Jason. So we made a lot of progress in 2025. We talked about the increases in cash flow and top line revenue in the size of our library and the quality of our library. And so as it relates -- as our subscription business is concerned, and that's -- that includes wholesale and retail subscriptions, we're confident that we're going to grow that at low to mid-single digits, and we're really confident in that because we have new partnerships coming on every month with channel stores around the world for Curiosity for Curiosity, you and even for Catholic Stream. We have new wholesale relationships that are rolling out over the next several months and even now. And we took a price increase March 1, and that's going to take a while to roll through our financials. But with those 3 things and with the marketing money that we're spending, like, we're very confident that we'll grow our subscription business in the low to mid-single digits. And so based on, I think, what Brady shared, that's off a base of $36 million, $37 million a year. On the subscription side, we're confident -- I'm sorry, on the licensing side, we're confident that we're going to eclipse our subscription revenue because of the work that we've done to date. We are experiencing and anticipating a lot of repeat business or business from existing partners and customers. And at the same time, I think that our new Chief Commercial Officer, John Vilade, has brought an extraordinary amount of velocity to our efforts right now. And so in working with our key people here, our ops team, we're going sort of way beyond the obvious top 6, 8 companies that are in the space and anticipate expanding our roster really significantly this year. Now again, that's going to be -- that will be choppy, but the opportunities are big. I think one of the most exciting -- I'm glad that I lived or to kind of work through this period of time because we've got the goods. We have really unique advantages. We need to execute, but I've never in my career been so close to so many big opportunities at the same time. Thank you, Jason.

And thank you, Clint. Some questions now from Dave Marsh from Singular Research. On the subscription front, how many new platforms are you expecting to launch during FY '26? And how many new countries do you think you could launch with existing partners?

Yes. Great question, Dave. Thank you. Well, I think, in just this year alone, we've already launched with Apple in Canada, as one of many examples. And we anticipate that over the course of this year, probably 12 to 20 new platforms. Some of these are -- they're not all created equal. Some are larger than others, some deliver more opportunity than others, but certainly 12 to 20 over the course of this year. And the beauty of all of that is the partners that we're working with are good at growing subscribers. So we feel really confident about our ability to grow that side of the business, and it's sturdy.

And the second question from Dave Marsh from Singular Research. If I heard you correctly, it sounded like SG&A would have been down $1 million year-over-year without the nonrecurring charges. So would mid-$20 million be a good expected run rate for fiscal year '26?

You can take that?

Yes, I can take that. And good question, Dave. We -- yes. We don't provide guidance on the expense side, but I think those are fair numbers. Obviously, with stock-based comp, that's a little bit of a wildcard because of the way we -- and we -- I got into this in the last call, but the way we award our grants and the way the accounting treatment is applied to those, it can be somewhat difficult to predict. But I think if you take out stock-based comp, we're actually looking at G&A other than SBC below 20%. So I think your range is certainly fair.

And one final question from Dave Marsh. Any M&A opportunities you might consider?

Thanks for that question, Dave. We'll always do what's in the best interest of our shareholders. I think that the M&A world environment will be exciting this year, will be ripe. I think if you look at some of the deals that have been done most recently with the big companies, those are a lot more around synergies. But we believe that if we continue to execute, continue to post good increases, continue to show the value of our subscription business, of our licensing business that we'll have the opportunity to consider whatever combinations, are in the best interest of our shareholders.

Clint, our next questions are from Pat Sholl, Barrington Research. Could you provide any additional color on the market for content to license for AI training and how your partnership with Versos, video training libraries, support these efforts?

Yes. So Versos is -- it's a really good company. They are a technology partner of ours. We've worked with them for a long time. I mean, they help us to organize our content for the most part, help to clip our content and just -- they help us manage an increasingly sort of large volume of content as we are organizing fulfillments there. Now we did a lot of licensing agreements before we started working with Versos, but I think they're helping us to -- help with -- by handling some of the work on the organization side, helping us to do even more. As far as the content that we offer today, I think a lot of people rightly think of CuriosityStream as a company focused in the factual media space. And certainly, we are. And certainly, we have a variety of content there. I mean we have a corpus today that is a collection of content from not just ourselves, but from over 200 partners. And so in addition to the full range of factual content, crime heist, historical crime, espionage, travel, food, culture, home. We also have a good corpus of scripted content, which is really hard to acquire for a variety of reasons. Dramas, comedies, Westerns action films, adventure films, mystery, family films, et cetera. And we also have a broad collection of sports. American football, soccer, surfing, tennis, basketball, billiards, boxing, drifting, lots of combat sports. So we have a full corpus there. So that's something that gives us a unique advantage and enables us to just engage with virtually everybody on the planet who has video licensing needs for training and other purposes.

And the second question from Pat Sholl, Barrington Research. With the price increase implemented March 1, what is the timing of it being fully implemented and expectations on churn?

Yes. It will take a year to fully implement just because we have so many people on annual subscriptions. I think what you'll see in the first month is probably 3% to 4% of all of our customers, 5% maybe who are -- who become part of that. And so that will roll out over time. With our pure direct customers, obviously, won't roll out fully until everyone has renewed their agreement. On the partner side, most of those subscribers are monthly. And there, it takes some of them a little bit longer to roll out the pricing increase, but we anticipate that over the next handful of months, everybody will. So we'll get significant benefit this year, and we'll continue to get benefit through February of next year.

And a final question from Pat Sholl. Any additional commentary on the cadence of guidance and expectations on the full year?

Yes. I'll speak to that for a minute, and then I'll hand over to Brady for his point of view as well. The -- we guided to the half year because the -- many of the partnerships that we're working on are just -- are large and have the potential to be very large. And they're a little bit lumpy. I mean the benefit to working with the biggest companies in the world is you know you're going to get paid. You're not chasing people to get paid. However, sometimes the payment schedules can be a little different than certain other companies. So the cash revenue can be a little bit lumpy as it relates to this in light of these big licensing opportunities. And so we're extremely confident in the year that we're going to have this year. Without giving specific year-end guidance, I think we said our intent is to pay our dividend from cash from operations. And our belief is that our licensing revenue will exceed our subscription revenue. So we feel good about where we're going to end up. We've said double-digit increases in both cash flow and top line revenue, and that's what we're working toward every day and confident that we'll achieve.

Yes. The only thing I'll add is the revenue cycle for these deals, and we've talked about this before, but it's generally between 4 and 6 months. We're delivering content. We're then recognizing the revenue. We go through an acceptance process. We will -- we're not issuing our POs until we're actually getting paid under most of the contracts that we're doing. So the entire cycle can last as long as 6 months, and it's just become very difficult for us to predict with much precision exactly when the numbers are going to hit. I will say as we get closer to the end of Q2, I think we'll probably -- I think there's a good chance we'll narrow our guidance and revise it. It's a little bit broad, having $38 million to $42 million and $6 million to $9 million on the cash flow side. But our plan would be to narrow that to the extent that we can during the second quarter.

Yes. And I know that it is March 11, and people are probably wondering like what are you going to do first quarter? And what I will say is the good news about much of what we're doing today is it's not seasonal. Our intent is to do the best deals that we can and obviously, for the company, but for our partners because we believe that those will lead to additional. We said double-digit increases in cash flow and top line revenue for the year. That may seem a little conservative to people or a little lukewarm in light of the fact that we did 40% and 46%. But our intention as we give guidance is to beat that guidance. And that's the approach that we're taking, and we believe that over the year, that will yield the best results for us. Thank you for that question, Chris.

Clint, Brady, thank you. This is the end of the CuriosityStream Q4 and Year-end 2025 Earnings Call. Thank you again to all of the participants on the line for staying with us through the technical difficulties. Have a nice evening.