Gaia at Small-Cap Virtual Conference: Strategic Growth and Expansion

On Wednesday, 17 September 2025, Gaia Inc. (NASDAQ:GAIA) presented at the Small-Cap Virtual Conference, outlining its strategic growth initiatives and financial performance. The company, known for its ad-free subscription video service in the wellness sector, highlighted both positive financial results and challenges in member base expansion. Gaia’s leadership emphasized international growth and innovative product lines as key drivers for future success.

Key Takeaways

• Gaia Inc. aims for revenue growth in the low teens, projecting $100 million for 2025.
• The company’s member base is recovering, with Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) reaching $107 annually.
• New product line "Igniton" offers significant growth and potential for future spin-off.
• Strategic investments in AI and community-building initiatives are underway.
• Leadership is optimistic about future growth, focusing on scalable operations and pricing strategies.

Financial Results

Gaia Inc. reported revenue of just over $90 million in 2024, with forecasts for approximately $100 million in 2025, reflecting an 11-12% growth rate. The company ended its last quarter with 878,000 members, marking a return to growth after a period of stagnation. The ARPU increased to $107 annually per member in 2024. Gross profit per employee reached over $800,000 in the most recent quarter, highlighting productivity.

The company maintained a gross margin of 86% and a cash contribution margin of 93% in 2024. Adjusted EBITDA margin was reported at 17%, with positive free cash flow for eight consecutive quarters, totaling over $2.7 million in 2024. Cash and cash equivalents stood at just under $14 million, with deferred revenue exceeding $21 million.

Operational Updates

Gaia Inc. is actively expanding internationally, with 40% of its members currently outside the U.S. The company aims to achieve a 50/50 international to domestic member ratio within three years. Its content library boasts over 10,000 titles, with 98% having worldwide rights.

AI initiatives include launching an AI companion to enhance retention and engagement. A community platform is planned for next year to connect members globally. The Igniton product line, featuring Cogni and Longevity supplements, has shown promising results in initial trials.

Future Outlook

Gaia’s growth strategy focuses on expanding its core subscription service and exploring the potential spin-off of the Igniton product line. The company is leveraging AI to improve product offerings and user experience, while also building a global community platform. Price increases are planned for March next year, expected to drive bottom-line growth.

Gaia aims to diversify revenue through licensing, AI-driven services, and e-commerce with Gaia Marketplace. The company targets break-even status and significant bottom-line growth, driven by increased revenue and scalable operations.

Q&A Highlights

During the Q&A session, CEO Kiersten Medvedich emphasized the growth potential of both the core subscription service and Igniton. CFO Ned Preston noted the impact of AI investments on retention and subscriber attraction. The planned community platform aims to foster global connections among members.

The company plans a price increase in March, supported by new content and AI-driven improvements, with expectations of maintaining high retention levels.

In conclusion, Gaia Inc. is executing a multi-faceted growth strategy, leveraging its strong financial position and unique market positioning to drive long-term value. For more details, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Small-Cap Virtual Conference:

Operator: Hi, good afternoon, and welcome to the last session for today at the September Sedona & Co. Small Cap Investor Conference. The next company to present is Gaia Inc. With us, we have their new CEO, Kiersten Medvedich, and their CFO, Ned Preston. This will be a presentation-style meeting. We’ll have about 30 minutes. The company will speak for about 20 minutes, and then we should have about 10 minutes for Q&A at the end. If you do have a question, you can type that into the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. With that out of the way, it’s all yours, Ned and Kiersten.

Kiersten Medvedich, CEO, Gaia Inc.: All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you. My name is Kiersten Medvedich, and I am the CEO of Gaia Inc. While I may be new in this role, I am not new to the company. For the past nine years, I’ve worked side by side with our Chairman and Founder, Jirka Rysavy. I’d like to say I graduated from the Jirka Rysavy School of Business. For those of you who may not be familiar with Jirka, he has a history of building successful companies like Corporate Express, which he sold for $2 billion and is now called Staples, Wild Oats, which is now called Whole Foods, and Gaia, which is now Gaia Inc. Who are we? Gaia is often called the spiritual Netflix. We are an ad-free subscription video on-demand service.

90% of our content is exclusive with in-house production facilities, worldwide rights for 98% of our content, and over 10,000 titles spanning mindfulness, transformation, astrology, sound healing, plant medicine, and more. We are the world’s largest curated library of conscious media and the place people trust when they want to transform. The world is waking up. 74% of Americans now identify as spiritual rather than religious, and the wellness industry is projected to reach $9 trillion by 2028. Even the culture reflects this shift. Manifest was Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year in 2024, and astrology is one of the top searched topics on ChatGPT. It’s not just media. Just last month, I was at a popular hotel chain, and they were offering crystal chakra mats for your room and aromatherapy spray for your vagus nerve. That’s not fringe anymore. It’s actually mainstream hospitality.

Gaia has been building this space for years, and today we are in perfect resonance with this cultural awakening. Our mission is to evolve consciousness, and our mission is matched by disciplined financials, positive free cash flow for eight consecutive quarters, 86% gross margins, and strong CAC to LTV ratio. Gaia is evolving to a destination for consciousness. This year, we will launch our AI companion, offering personalized guidance to help members find answers faster and more deeply. Next year, we will launch our community platform, and it’ll be a place where members can connect with other like-minded people from around the world. Imagine not just watching content, but connecting with a global community guided by tools to make the journey personable. That is the future that Gaia is building. I would like to talk about Gaia’s next chapter, which I’m calling Quantum Wellness.

It’s our newest growth driver, and it’s called Igniton. Right now, there are subatomic quasi-particles from the sun passing through your body, giving you energy, and they are called Ignitons. Gaia has found a way to stabilize them in a way that can increase your memory by 80%. Ignitons were identified at a privately funded lab at CERN, and when embedded into organic matter, they naturally raise its energy state. It’s what ancient traditions called world spirit. Our embedding process is a trade secret, and the results are extraordinary. Our first product, the Cogni supplement, has demonstrated an 80% increase in memory in just 30 days. Our longevity supplement decreases inflammation age markers by 54% in two months. When we soft-launched our products at the Dave Asprey Biohacking Conference, we sold out with lines around the floor. Igniton is not just a product. It’s a quantum technology company.

In addition to selling products, we plan to license Igniton so other companies can naturally enhance their own products while using less material. Think about the cosmetic industry or sports supplements and agriculture. Gaia began as a pioneer in conscious content, and today we are a global company building a destination for consciousness, blending media, community, technology, and now quantum wellness. We are just getting started. To take you deeper into the business model, I’ll pass it to our CFO, Ned Preston.

Operator: Great. Thank you, Kiersten. There’s more information on, we just had a couple of press releases last week, which can take you to more information around Igniton. You can also hit the igniton.com website for more details around that. Back to the core business, I’ll run you through some financials and leave time for Q&A at the end here. We have a unique opportunity in front of us. We are growing our revenue at this point in low teens, as well as back to growth on our member base. In 2024, you can see on the slide, we were just over $90 million. Here in 2025, the latest forecasts are just around $100 million. We’ll grow 11% last year, and then again another 11% or 12% on revenue here in 2025. Our members over that time horizon are also growing.

You can kind of see it flattening out there on the members’ graph on the right in 2020 to 2022. That was really because of COVID. We had a big uptick in 2020 during the COVID pandemic. It flattened out in 2022 as people went back to the office. A lot of streaming companies lost or churned some of their members. We did as well, not to the same extent, but we really are back onto a growth trajectory around our members here over the last couple of years. We just finished our last quarter in September or in July at 878,000 members. From an ARPU standpoint, our average revenue per member is also growing. Here in 2024, we were at $107 on an annual per member. That was up considerably from previous years. Our gross profit per employee, or just productivity of our company, is quite scaled.

As you can see from the graph, in 2024, we were at $730,000 per employee, and that’s gross profit, not revenue. Even after this last quarter, we were up over $800,000 gross profit per employee, and we expect this to continue to grow. It’s a big reason I came to Gaia. We have just over 110 permanent employees here in Boulder, Colorado, and we’re generating $100 million. We’re an extremely efficient and productive company. Around international expansion, we get this question a lot, and Kiersten touched on the fact that we have international rights for 98% of our content library of over 10,000 titles. We’ve been adding languages. We have Spanish, German, and French, and we continue to use AI to elaborate in those areas and eventually move on to other languages. Currently, we’re only at 40% of our members coming from international, another 60% being domestic.

Moving to 50% within three years may sound like that’s taking more time than it needs to be, but it’s really because we feel as though there’s a lot of members to grow here in the U.S. As Kiersten commented earlier, we feel as though we’re becoming more mainstream. There’s a lot more people hearing about us, and a lot of the topics that we cover are kind of more relevant in this day and age. As you can see there, we have members in over 185 countries, actually, at this point. Our distribution or channel is extremely strong. We use iPhone, Android, iPad, Roku as second-party partners. You can see there our ratings and reviews for Apple and Amazon are quite positive with over 128,000 ratings on Apple on our 4.8 out of 5. On the Amazon App Store, almost 15,000 ratings and over 4.1 out of 5.

Great relationships with these channel partners. Taking a look at some specific financials. Here is our income statement or P&L from last year, 2024. We finished just over $90 million on revenue. You can see our very strong gross margin and cash contribution margin of 93%. We’re pretty stable in our marketing expenses, about 42% to 43% of revenue in our operating expenses. I’ll comment on that further in just a moment here. Our adjusted EBITDA margin is quite strong at 17%. As Kiersten said earlier, we’ve actually generated positive free cash flow for eight concurrent quarters. Last year, we finished the year at over $2.7 million in free cash flow or a 3% cash flow margin. Looking ahead, one of the benchmark scenarios pro forma that we put into our presentation is that we’re a quite scalable business model.

It’s a big reason why I came to Gaia after almost 30 years of working for high-tech and most recently SaaS companies. I interviewed with Kiersten and Jirka and saw a company that to me was like a SaaS-like company with 93% cash contribution margin, high gross margins, almost at the time $80 million, now $100 million recurring revenue stream, and a growing deferred revenue. We created this slide actually over the last couple of years, and it’s come to fruition where we’re nearing this $100 million example is really on a full-year average. We’ll be knocking on the door of almost $5 million in free cash flow this year. What’s more interesting is as we extrapolate ahead. Kiersten talked about some of our areas of expansion. That $100 million currently is really our core business. It’s really around our SVOD streaming business.

As we get into some of these other areas, leveraging AI, using community, moving into some licensing, as well as our subsidiaries like Igniton, we don’t have to ramp up and spend a lot more in fixed costs. You can see in the first column there, we’re at a 6% free cash flow margin at $100 million, but then that almost quadruples when we go over the next $100 million. That’s because we’ll continue to spend marketing of around 40% to 42%. We spend about 14% or 15% on content. The fact that our EBITDA margin is growing so quickly really comes back to the fact that we’re a SaaS-like model.

I like to talk about a rule of 40, where eventually you can see at that $150 million mark, we’ll be at the rule of 40, where our adjusted EBITDA percent at 26% and we’ll be growing our revenue in the high teens, we will be a rule of 40, which as many of you know is a best-in-class SaaS metric that many people look at. Lastly, can’t leave the presentation without showing a balance sheet, which has really strengthened in the last two years that I’ve been here. We’re now up just under $14 million in cash and cash equivalents as of the end of last quarter. Our total assets have strengthened. That cash bump does not include that we have not had to lean on our line of credit of an additional $10 million at the close of any quarter over the last eight quarters.

That jives with our free cash flow. We’re generating cash, not needing cash each quarter. I mentioned this earlier, our deferred revenue and the liabilities have continued to grow. We’re over $21 million now, which is really helpful as we forecast the future-looking quarters and years. What’s not on our balance sheet, one thing we do like to highlight, because some companies do include things like their member base in their balance sheet, but we do not. Not included in our balance sheet are things like our media library is valued at over $180 million. Our member base of our current 878,000 members, with a pretty conservative estimate there, is over $300 million. We have about $18 million to $19 million of NOLs. With regards to the Igniton valuation, that is something that is not on our balance sheet, but will be valued at north of $50 million of value.

With that, Jim, I think I’m going to turn it back over to you, and we’ll take some questions.

Jim, Unidentified speaker: Great. We’ll start with Kiersten. You’re new to the CEO role, but you’re not new to Gaia. It’s not like you need to learn the business. Seeing the potential of some of the things you talked about now, where do you think the company should go in terms of growing revenue? Is it expanding the core business, adding some of these new businesses? Which one is the highest potential in your opinion?

Kiersten Medvedich, CEO, Gaia Inc.: That’s hard to say. I would say it’s our core business, but our Igniton growth driver actually performed much better than expected, right? We will always grow our core business. Our mission is to evolve consciousness and create a global conscious community. I see potentially Igniton being big enough that we could potentially maybe spin it off and take it public. I would say in the short term, it’s our subscription service, but Igniton has tremendous potential, has a lot of upside that we’re very excited about.

Operator: Yeah, we’re in a great situation. Just to elaborate a little bit, Jim, because Kiersten and I benefit from the fact that a lot of what I just spoke about, and I touched on this, was around our core business is growing. We’ve done things around adding some additional content, and we’ve improved our product. Our core business is growing revenue, like I said, low double digits, and our member base. That feels great to have that. A lot of these things like Igniton and the other new revenue drivers, like licensing and things like that, are almost like call values to upside. We don’t have to fix a lot of what’s going on, and we can concentrate on some of these upside elements.

Kiersten Medvedich, CEO, Gaia Inc.: It’s like icing on the cupcake.

Operator: That’s right.

Jim, Unidentified speaker: I’m a Gaia subscriber. I’m one of close to 900,000 subscribers. I can speak firsthand to the launch of Igniton to the subscribers. Is that the strategy in the near term to launch to the people you know, or do you think at some point you start launching Igniton to those who aren’t subscribers as well?

Operator: I’ll start, and I’ll let Kiersten elaborate because the two press releases I mentioned last week kind of answer the question. We had a press release that went out from Igniton that talked about the fact that we did that soft launch back at the Biohacking Conference at the end of May, but now we’re open for business. It was such a big result that for a while there, we had to make sure we had enough inventory. With regards to Igniton, it’s launching itself. People can go to the Igniton web page, and they can buy the cognition and longevity supplements directly from Igniton. With that being said, obviously some of the synergies that Gaia has is that at that Biohacking Conference, our founder, Jirka Rysavy, spoke for the first time in a long time, and a lot of the Gaians took note of his connection to Igniton.

The second announcement that went out a day later—I think the Igniton announcement went out on Tuesday, and then the Gaia announcement went out last Wednesday—is we talk about the fact that you can buy Igniton on Gaia Marketplace. To your question, Jim, we are starting to go out to Gaia members and just making sure that they saw the video of Jirka presenting, and they’re aware of the connection between Gaia and Igniton supplements. We really are going on both avenues.

Kiersten Medvedich, CEO, Gaia Inc.: Yeah, I would say lucky us that we get to test the messaging and get to test the product, not testing the product, but what messaging would really resonate with a larger audience, and we get to do that with our current members and past members.

Jim, Unidentified speaker: I know you’ve invested over the past couple of years to build up production. Do you have capacity in place now if you see that demand start to build?

Operator: Yeah, we do, Jim. I know you came out and visited us about eight or nine months ago, and you’ve seen the lab here. We are happy to say at this point that we are fully ready to fulfill all orders. There was such a demand back in May. Some people that are watching the Igniton website closely back in June were like, wow, it seems as though you’re on backlog. That won’t be the case going forward. Our production and distribution has been warmed up and is running off cylinders now to meet the demand. We do that both here on site, the majority, but we have the ability to outsource if needed.

Kiersten Medvedich, CEO, Gaia Inc.: It was a good test.

Operator: Yeah.

Kiersten Medvedich, CEO, Gaia Inc.: Yeah, it was a good test in the spring.

Jim, Unidentified speaker: If we look at the core business, you have three or four areas where you produce content. How do you decide where to invest and what content gives you the most bang for the buck?

Kiersten Medvedich, CEO, Gaia Inc.: A lot of our subscribers are under the transformation bucket. We have a calculation of how many subscribers were in each topic grouping. It’s not hard as far as what type of content to produce, but as far as how much to produce, I have a content background. I will always say we need more content, but we’re very disciplined as far as what % of revenue that we use towards content. Like I said, I would love more. I’m disciplined.

Operator: It’s an opportunity. We touched on it earlier because as Gaia becomes more mainstream and like Kiersten referenced the manifestation, we need to spend maybe a little more on content to meet that demand as people are looking for that bridge into our world. In the old days, it was yoga and some other areas. Now it’s these new areas that Kiersten just mentioned. We use data. As you know, Jim, we’re very data-driven. We’re looking at all kinds of data points around what people are watching to drive our decisions on what to invest in. We also are looking at the market around what new investors might want to watch.

Jim, Unidentified speaker: Does the content have a shelf life, or do you find that some of the production from several years ago is still being viewed?

Kiersten Medvedich, CEO, Gaia Inc.: It’s definitely evergreen. We see content that we created eight years ago still in the top 10 viewership ratings. If there’s any content that we feel needs a refresh, we have in-house production facilities, and it’s very easy to refresh anything that we have. We focus on evergreen content.

Jim, Unidentified speaker: Right. Earlier this year, you raised some money and you indicated that you were going to step up your investments with the AI. How does AI help you?

Kiersten Medvedich, CEO, Gaia Inc.: Right now, this year, we’re launching our AI companion, and the way we look at it is it is a retention and an engagement tool. A lot of our members are seekers. They’re looking for answers. They can find an answer to what happens when you die, asking our AI companion. Is there life after death, as opposed to watching a 20 to 30-minute video? I usually say sometimes our biggest competitor is people’s time. Our AI companion can help people find the answers faster or find exactly what video to watch if they want to go deeper. Also, with AI, just using it in our office for saving productivity or increasing productivity of our staff, AI has been a very large initiative here behind the scenes, and every department needs to report on what AI tools they are using in order to increase productivity.

Third, for AI licensing, we have tens of thousands of hours of content that we will be licensing for AI learning. That’s an extra, we see that as a short-term revenue stream because soon that will die out. We are talking to aggregators to license our content for AI learning.

Jim, Unidentified speaker: What do you think the net impact from AI is? Is it increased retention, increased subscribers, or a combination?

Operator: Yeah, I’ll answer that because we have to be careful. The raise that you mentioned earlier this year, we pointed to AI and to community as where we’re going to spend those dollars. The good news, as Kiersten just said, is AI is moving so quickly, as many of you know, that we’re able to kind of hit, you know, break some of that to bear here a little bit earlier than expected. I think this initial tranche will be more retention, a little bit of, you know, new people coming in and improvement of products and some of the other elements that Kiersten just said. We’re not really putting a number to that here this year. Looking ahead to 2026, it certainly is something, as you said, not only is AI moving quickly, but it’s evolving so fast into new opportunities.

It’s something you will hear us talk about continually, probably on every call going forward in the foreseeable future.

Jim, Unidentified speaker: Could you just elaborate on what you mean by community?

Kiersten Medvedich, CEO, Gaia Inc.: We are in the process of creating our community platform, which will launch next year. A lot of our members, like our goal is to create a global conscious community, and our members create the ability to connect with other like-minded people. When we create this community platform, it is our members being able to talk with someone in France, having the language simultaneously translated, and connect on these different topics and create groups around our content. Think of watch parties, think of even meetups around the world where people can connect with other like-minded people to create our global conscious community. That’s always been our mission, to create a global conscious community. We finally will be launching the platform next year.

Operator: One of the products that we’ve been talking about for a little while just launched about 10 or 11 months ago is Gaia Marketplace. Gaia Marketplace is really a precursor to community. It provides an e-commerce site that, as the community launches and people want to go and do tours in Peru or Egypt and stuff like that, our members and community will be able to leverage from day one.

Kiersten Medvedich, CEO, Gaia Inc.: We had a Peru tour in the spring, and there’s a very large subset of that group of people who all came together and came to one of our live events. It’s creating community around these topics.

Jim, Unidentified speaker: Can you talk about your pricing power? I know you put in a price increase at the end of, or right around this time last year, a pretty significant one, and it seemed to hold. Do you feel confident you’d be able to continue to increase pricing? What impact will that have on the income statement?

Operator: Yeah, no, so we were very careful last year. I mean, as a company, Gaia Inc. had not done a price increase in over four years, and we’ve never increased the prices for grandfathered existing members. When we increased prices approximately 18% in late Q3, early Q4 of last year, you would anticipate some sort of churn event. The good news there is that we did a great job of customer retention, and that churn event was quite a bit lower than we were expecting. I think that tells you a couple of things, to use your words, Jim, of pricing power, is that people highly value our product, and they understand that we are maybe a little bit underpriced within the streaming space. We call ourselves kind of this conscious Netflix, but Netflix and Paramount, as a lot of you know, they seem to increase prices every 18 months.

We’re not saying that we ever need to be at those same levels, but it was past overdue for us to do that, and the proof was in the actual reaction and financials. That’s built into a bit of our success here in 2025. Looking ahead to 2026, though, we knew that we couldn’t come back and just increase by another 15% or so without doing something or improving our product, offering more content. That’s where people, when we do, our plan is, as we said earlier, to do a price increase in March of next year. We’ll have more content, we’ll have better product using AI, we’ll have new product using AI agents, and eventually community. We still feel quite confident that the pricing power and the value that our customers will, our retention levels will stay quite high.

Jim, Unidentified speaker: In terms of impact on the income statement, you know, it doesn’t seem like you have a lot of variable costs. Do you think that you’ll see accelerated bottom line growth as that price increase goes into effect?

Operator: We do. Yeah, I mean, we get this question quite often. The first step was to generate positive free cash flow. We look forward in the foreseeable future to eventually being a break-even company out in a couple of years. As I commented earlier on that benchmark scenario, a lot of this growth on the top line is going to fall directly to the bottom line and not only generate cash, but put us into the growing positive net income and into these things like Rule 40, you know, quite quickly.

Jim, Unidentified speaker: All right. We are at 4:30, so we are out of time, but I just want to say thank you both, Ned and Kiersten, for presenting today, for taking the meetings today and tomorrow. We really appreciate it. It seems like, you know, we’re always right around the corner from another quarter ending. In a couple of weeks, this third quarter will be in the books.

Operator: You said it, not I, not me, Jim. Absolutely. We look forward to talking to you all again in Q4 and talking about our Q3 results. Thanks for attending today’s session.

Jim, Unidentified speaker: All right. Thank you.

Kiersten Medvedich, CEO, Gaia Inc.: Thank you.

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