Gaia Inc at IAccess Alpha: Streaming Growth and Strategic Shifts

On Tuesday, 24 June 2025, Gaia Inc (NASDAQ:GAIA) presented at the IAccess Alpha Virtual Best Ideas Summer Investment Conference 2025, highlighting its robust financial performance and strategic initiatives. The company, a community-focused streaming platform, showcased its strengths while addressing challenges such as revenue fluctuations and leadership transitions.

Key Takeaways

• Gaia Inc reported an 11% revenue growth in 2024 and anticipates a 12% increase in 2025.
• The company maintains a strong cash contribution margin of 93% and a gross margin of 86%.
• A leadership change is set for 2026, with Kirsten Medvedich taking over as CEO.
• Gaia Inc is expanding internationally and diversifying revenue streams through new initiatives.
• The company plans to implement AI technologies to enhance member experiences and operational efficiency.

Financial Results

Gaia Inc reported a revenue of just over $90 million in 2024, marking an 11% year-over-year increase. Analysts expect revenue to exceed $100 million in 2025, indicating a 12% growth. The company maintains a stable gross margin of 86% and a cash contribution margin exceeding 93%. Free cash flow for 2025 is projected to be over $5 million, representing 6% of revenue, with expectations to triple as revenue scales.

Gaia Inc’s balance sheet remains strong, with over $13 million in cash and access to a $10 million line of credit. Deferred revenue has nearly doubled over the past two years, and the media library is valued at over $180 million. The membership base of 867,000 is valued at approximately $300 million.

Operational Updates

Gaia Inc announced a membership base of 867,000 in Q1 2025, with a target of 5 million subscribers. The company successfully increased ARPU through price hikes and alternate revenue streams, with a recent price increase leading to an 18% to 20% rise and a low churn rate of 7%.

Content production is a key focus, with 88% of content being exclusive and a content efficiency multiple of two times, outperforming competitors like Netflix. International expansion is underway, with operations in Spanish, German, and French, and members in 185 countries. The company anticipates international revenue to exceed 50% within three years.

Distribution channels include first-party, second-party, and third-party platforms like Amazon Prime and YouTube. Gaia Inc also launched a marketplace offering retreats and curated products, adopting a "Conscious Costco" model with a 20% take rate.

Future Outlook

Gaia Inc is set to implement AI to improve operational efficiencies and member experiences. A generative AI chatbot and community tech platform are scheduled for launch in March 2026. The company is also focusing on expanding its presence in high LTV territories such as the US and the DACH region.

Revenue is expected to grow by more than 11% year-over-year, with plans to expand into European and Latin American markets.

Q&A Highlights

During the Q&A session, Gaia Inc addressed revenue fluctuations, noting that Q1 2025 revenue was impacted by one-off business line items and a US travel advisory to Egypt. The company is taking steps to mitigate these fluctuations by expanding tour offerings in Peru.

The Ignatant subsidiary remains a focus, with no specific financial guidance provided until its official launch later this year. James Calhoun will transition from CEO to focus on content sales and licensing, with Kirsten Medvedich assuming the CEO role in 2026.

Subscriber growth is driven by alternative revenue streams, mainstreaming niche content, and AI and community initiatives, with a focus on retention and attracting new customers.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a more detailed account of the conference call.

Full transcript - IAccess Alpha Virtual Best Ideas Summer Investment Conference 2025:

Operator: Virtual best ideas summer investment conference two thousand twenty five. The next presenting company is Gaia Inc. If you’d like to ask a question during the webcast, you may do so at any point during the presentation by clicking the ask question button on the left side of your screen. Type your question into the box and hit send to submit. I’d now like to turn the call over to Ned Preston, CFO and James Calhoun, CEO at Gaia Inc.

Gentlemen, the floor is yours.

James Calhoun, CEO, Gaia Inc.: Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Apologies for our tardiness. I’m going to go over a few slides here to kick off. My name is James Calhoun, the CEO.

Ned Preston, CFO, Gaia Inc.: This is Ned Preston, the CFO for Gaia.

James Calhoun, CEO, Gaia Inc.: And, by way of short introduction, I came to the company via an acquisition in 02/2019. I sold another streaming company into Gaia, became the second largest internal shareholder, was on the board for a number of years, and joined, around two years ago, the same day as Ned, as as CEO COO and then CEO. Yeah. Actually, we’re coming

Ned Preston, CFO, Gaia Inc.: up on our our two year anniversary. It was, June twenty sixth of twenty three. So, great to meet you all. I grew up in Boulder, Colorado. I’ve spent the last almost thirty years in, San Francisco, Chicago, and most recently in Boston.

So great to come back to Colorado and and be a part of Gaia.

James Calhoun, CEO, Gaia Inc.: So to kick off from the slides here, Gaia essentially serves an aggregate of niches that are historically underserved. And and the mission is to really create a transformational network that empowers a global conscious community. First and foremost, we consider ourselves a community company, and our main go to market right now is, streaming video on demand platform, which I’ll share some insights on here in the in the in the upcoming slide. Essentially, we have a monthly and annual subscription, which is, $13.99 a month and 119 a year. We also have a 299 a year premium membership tier, which includes live broadcasts.

So we conduct about six events a year from our headquarters here in Boulder, Colorado, which are able livestreams to the premium membership tier and available for replay. And, also, we have an in person audience of about 300 people that can attend. Just last weekend, we had a sold out event, the biogeometry with, Ibrahim Karim. So the content category is this, you know, aggregate of underserved niches I was I was talking about earlier encompass sort of three core areas. You know, the first being personal growth and transformation, the second being ancient wisdom and unexplained mysteries, and the final being wellness yoga and meditation.

You may be familiar with the company’s previous incarnation, Gai Am, which was a consumer packaged goods company that sold yoga mats and blocks and products. We sold that business off in 02/2016, and we used part of the proceeds from that sale to buy back stock and to invest in a pure digital play business, which is the core of what we what we are today. In terms of our demographic, we skew older, we skew female, we skew highly educated, and we skew higher household income. We call this market segment Avatar Celeste. She is a huge fan of Gaia, often attends our live events, and loves many of the experts and talent that we have have on our platform.

If we look here at some of the finance highlights, you know, what’s core and unique to our business, we believe, is is the high cash contribution and gross margin. So we operate on a 93% cash contribution and an 86 gross margin. We also have since Ned and I have joined, you know, as as we mentioned at the top of the call coming up for two years, operated on positive free cash flow, which we’ve announced also for for q four and the full year 2024. We operate on a negative working capital model business, which means that we’re generating cash flow while still negative p and l. And we’ll we’ll look at some more of the cash flow performer metrics in terms of forecasting as we get, you know, towards the end of the presentation.

But but one other point of note here on the finance highlights is that our acquisition costs for a customer have remained relatively steady over the past eight years, and yet our LTV, you know, has tripled. So what we’re seeing is that, you know, we’re able to continue to solidify the retention of our member cohorts to expand on ARPU through price increases and alternate revenue streams as we launch new initiatives, which I’ll talk a little bit about later in the presentation, all the while maintaining a relatively stable CAC or customer acquisition cost over this period. And this this speaks to the expanding health of the business as we as we grow, and we’re we’re very excited about this metric, which you can see in the chart there. In terms of TAM or total addressable market, obviously, global SVOD households has has ballooned dramatically, you know, with research showing that there’s an estimated 1,800,000,000 global SVOD SVOD households by 2029. You know, we then sort of chunk that down into buckets of those willing to pay a subscription and interested in at least one of our topics, then we go to our total addressable market, and then we go to our subscriber target.

So, you know, at the end of last year, you know, we published data that we were 860,000 subscribers. Mhmm. And right now, you know, we have a subscriber target of 5,000,000. In terms of subscribers and ARPU on this next slide here sorry. Revenue and members.

We’ll get to subscribers and ARPU in the next slide. You can see the step up in revenue here reasonably consummate with member growth.

Ned Preston, CFO, Gaia Inc.: And you

James Calhoun, CEO, Gaia Inc.: can see that in the first quarter of twenty five, we announced 867,000 members. So we’re continuing to grow not only net members, but also revenue in line there. If we go to the next slide, you’ll start to see that underneath the hood, we’re not only growing those two mid metrics side by side, but we’re also expanding upon ARPU and GP per employee. So ARPU is going to be relative to price increases plus also alternate revenue streams. For the first time in the company’s history, we did a price increase for existing members in q four of last year.

We did some tests previous to that in some other markets that were very successful. We had previously grandfathered members on existing pricing, and this was something that was uncommon in the industry. And we decided to sort of bite the bullet and increase prices for existing members that had been on these legacy prices. We had a very good result in that. We had, I would say, on average, around an 18 to 20% price increase.

It was about 18% in The US. We go from $11.99 to $13.99 monthly. And, you know, we had a low 7% churn on that cohort in total, not monthly churn, but a total churn event, which means we’re making a 11% margin on average. And the price increase was even higher in some other territories. So this has given us the confidence to schedule another price increase in March 2026, which has been approved by the board, and we’re we’re working towards that.

Additionally, on GP per employee, in q one twenty five, we were over 800,000. We anticipate this being north of a million and and continuing to expand as the business grows. We wanna keep this metric in here to prove that we can grow OpEx, including payroll and related, at a fraction of the rate at which we increase top line revenue growth and continue to prove out leverage in the model. And AI will continue to help us do that as we improve upon efficiencies in in in operations and also in in other areas of the business. One of the sort of unique points of difference that we have if you comp us to other streamers is that we have our own facility and campus here in Colorado.

So we have a 150,000 square foot, 13 acre campus about thirty minutes from DIA and just outside of Boulder. We produce primarily on-site, which gives us an an enormous strategic advantage. You know, I I have a media background. I’ve produced five different movies. Two went to Netflix, and all of them are now on on Gaia.

The most recent one had Joaquin Phoenix as executive producer. And when you travel and produce and if you’re outsourcing your production to a production house, which most streamers do, it can really accelerate the expenses of a production. And so we’re able to produce much more efficiently as we have all of our production team on staff. We’re also we also sit outside of any constraints that that might happen in relation to labor strikes or so forth. And so over the years, as we continue to expand upon our exclusive and owned content library, we have 88% exclusive content.

And like I said, no dependence on outside studios. Additionally, the way that consumers watch our content is unique in the streaming space. Often, you know, streaming subscribers tend to oscillate between platforms based on the latest series or show, and they’ll subscribe in and out. Our members tend to consume quite a lot of legacy content. One way we measure that is we look at the $2,000,000 of content we produced in the first year of our operation in 02/2014.

That has returned over 23,000,000 in gross profit over the lifetime of that content, and we’re seeing the highest return in that content cohort actually in more recent years. And so that shows that people, you know, tend to view a broad array of content regardless of release date. Additionally, we did some calculations at the end of last year comparing our gross profit to the amortized value of the content on our balance sheet to create a content efficiency multiple of sorts. You can see here for last year, we had 78,800,000 in GP. Content was 39,000,000 on our balance sheet.

So we had two times efficiency multiple. If you compare it to Netflix who spends more on their content on a per hour basis, you know, that $18,000,000,000 in GP, 32,500,000,000 in content, which was a point six efficiency multiple. So this is something we wanna continue to do in order to to sort of keep check about efficiency and production. When it comes to distribution, we are a distributor of all major platforms. Sorry.

There’s an additional slide here on on international. So we have international rights for almost a 100% of our library, 98%, and we’re also able to expand into foreign languages without the need for foreign operations. So we have all of our foreign language teams here at our Boulder campus. Currently, we’re live in Spanish, German, and French, including native language titles. So we’ve we we sub and dub our our English content library, but we also have a localization content strategy so that we’re acquiring and producing content in these markets in their native languages.

We’re currently 44 international. We do anticipate it’ll be north of 50% within three years, consummate with the industry standards, and we have the members in a 185 countries. When we look at distribution, we are distributor of all the major platforms. So we see our distribution in three buckets. We see the first party, second party, and third party.

So first party is web direct. Second party is wholly owned apps, things like iPhone, Android, Apple TV, Roku, iPad, Fire TV, etcetera. And I’m not sure if you can see there, but the ratings and reviews on our App Stores are, you know, quite impressive. On the iOS store, have a 128,000 ratings with 4.8 stars. Amazon App Store, nearly 15,000 ratings, 4.1, and Trustpilot, over 10,000 ratings at 4.3.

So quite a lot of social proof in our category. Additionally, when it comes to third party distribution, we have, you know, channel stores within the Amazon Prime infrastructure, YouTube, Fios, Xfinity, and Comcast. Amazon has noted that we’re one of their fastest growing specialty channels in The US. We also have Amazon Prime distribution in The UK, Mexico, and more recently, Australia, New Zealand. And we have one of our team going to meet with them this week in LA with an eye to expanding into some European territories and further into LatAm.

Ned Preston, CFO, Gaia Inc.: When we look at

James Calhoun, CEO, Gaia Inc.: alternate revenue streams, you know, I I think this is something that is a huge sort of growth lever for the business. We launched marketplace at the end of last year, which includes retreats, tours, and curated physical products for our members at member only discount prices. You could think of this as a conscious Costco model. We are essentially booking the keep from this initiative. So if we do a $11,000 tour, members get a 10% discount.

So it’s $10,000, and we keep about 20% give or take. So it’s about $2,000 we would book at a 100% gross margin. So keep an eye on if you look at some analyst projections, Our gross margin is not going to contract. It will actually continue to hold or expand slightly. Then we have price increase slated for March 26, which is another future driver there.

We’ve got two product initiatives. We raised some capital in q one of this year to fund some initiatives around AI and community where we are building our own generative wrapper to create a conscious AI chatbot experience within the product and within the apps, which will launch on or around the price increase on March 26. And then additionally, a community tech platform, which will launch around that time as well to help our members connect together and and and feel more part of a global community. And there’s one other bullet on here I’d add that’s sort of coming to prominence now, and that’s one of our subsidiaries, which is a private company of which we own 71%. Ignatant has been in development for some time.

We recently had a coming out party and did sort of a prelaunch at a biohacking conference in Austin, and we sold out within five hours and took some presales. We’ve got an incredible what many investors are calling an unvalued call option sitting within the business currently. And, we’re very excited about the prospect of that contributing to the expansion in our market cap over time. I’ll I’ll pass over to Ned now for some, finance highlights.

Ned Preston, CFO, Gaia Inc.: Yeah. I’ll just quickly go over about two or three slides here, we’ll make sure we leave ten minutes for, q and a here at the end. So a look back at our performance from, last fiscal year twenty twenty four. We finished just over $90,000,000, which represented, an 11% year on year revenue increase. Our gross profits and gross margins were stable at 86% and that continues to improve slightly the first over the first six months of this year.

And our cash contribution margin continued to be over 93%. Really, we we like to transition from this p and l slide to a milestone or or pro form a of looking ahead. So so really what’s nice is is is the is the stability or the leverage within our business model. So the current, analyst, estimate for for our company is just over a $100,000,000 here in 2025. So that’ll be up another 12%.

We have accelerating revenue growth. And so what that left hand column is approximately what we expect here in in 2025. So we’ll be generating, north of $5,000,000 in free cash flow, and that represents 6% of revenue. However, as we accelerate, in the years ahead to a 150,000,000 and 200,000, which, of course is very important to those alternative revenue stream that, James just mentioned, we, will be able to continue to do those levels without adding a lot of of, fixed costs. And so as you can see from a 100 to $200,000,000 on top line, our, free cash flow actually, more than than triples, almost quadruples.

And and so, this is

James Calhoun, CEO, Gaia Inc.: a slide that gets a

Ned Preston, CFO, Gaia Inc.: lot of, attention as we talk to investors and and, we’ve actually adjusted this over the two years that we’ve been here and then seen it, come to fruition thus far. Quick look at our balance sheet, and I’ll turn over to q and a. It’s just simply we have a strong balance sheet with over $13,000,000 in cash that does not include an additional $10,000,000 access to a line of credit that we have not had to lean into. At the end of any quarter since we’ve been here, although it’s good to have through operations during the quarter and going forward the potential of m and a. It it’s an opportunity there.

But but outside of our our balance sheet itself, which which is improving overall on assets and within our our liabilities and equity, we’re extremely happy with our deferred revenue, almost doubling in the couple years that James and I have been here. This this really kind of indicates that as as James and I like to say, we we are fierce defenders of margin and we think of our business as a SaaS like company because we have a growing, deferred revenue line. We have an increasing membership base or recurring revenue stream, and and a strong balance sheet. And what’s not included on the balance sheet is is our our our media library, which we value at just over a $180,000,000. Our our membership base of 867,000 members at the end of last quarter, which would be valued about 300,000,000.

And then our our NOL system, just south of $819,000,000. So that those are all interesting points to our balance sheet. And then with that, I think I’m gonna close it up here and and take a peek at the questions coming in so we can address some of those. Let’s see here.

James Calhoun, CEO, Gaia Inc.: Great stuff, Ned. That’s twenty minutes and twenty seconds. So we have, some time for q and a here. We can probably just handle it from the top here. So, there’s a question here for Cyril.

Q one shows less revenue than q four. Does that mean the business is shrinking despite a lot of cash and CAC? The f c free cash flow looks far away from the 5,700,000.0 objective for 2025. I’ll get started on that. I’ll let I’ll let Ned Ned jump in a little bit.

As we shared in our earnings transcript for the q one re results, we had some one off business line items that performed a little better than expected in q four and a little less well than expected in q one. If you look at our performance compared to analyst projections, we’re, you know, around 1% or less, off that target. As as I mentioned on the earnings transcript, this was primarily related to our marketplace initiative. So marketplace was a new business that launched in August 24, so q three, and it has more of a lumpy revenue stream than we anticipated. It’s a new business, so it’s a little more difficult for us to project.

We also had some Egypt tours as a reasonably large part of the marketplace initiative in q one. And at the end of last year, the US government issued a travel advisory to Egypt, and that severely impacted the numbers that took these tours in q one. So and and I’m sure you’re aware why. I mean, there’s, you know, some instability in in The Middle East and in particular Egypt borders on on Israel. So we have made up for that by expanding upon the tours that we’re running in Peru for q two.

We had a sold out tour, and we have a tour where we’re doubling capacity in q four, and that’s, like, almost 70% sold out already. So

Ned Preston, CFO, Gaia Inc.: And let me pick it up from there because, really, q one did was down sequentially a little bit, but it was double digit growth on a year over year basis, perfectly into the free cash flow. That was 700 ks for Q1. It will accelerate from there in the subsequent quarters. And and so, as as James said, we we feel as though the sequential growth will come into play and will continue to grow north of 11% on a year on year basis, by quarter. So by the end of the year, finishing over a $100,000,000 and 12%.

That free cash flow question leads right into the second question we’re seeing here. How much incremental cash flow could add Ignatant for ’25 and ’26? I would say, you know, currently for that, we’re not gonna speak specifically to Ignatant. It’s it’s clearly a a large upside opportunity for us on revenue stream. A portion of that is included into that pro form a that we just presented, but we’re not gonna talk specifically about Ignaton until later this year until after our our our official, launch here, in in q

James Calhoun, CEO, Gaia Inc.: and and and again to this question on the the ownership of Telomerron and and the valuations there, what we’re most interested here is in the valuation of Ignaton, which is the private subsidiary. You know, we raised capital in that entity. We own 71%. That’s that’s where our focus is. And and the second one that’s saying, we’ll be sharing more details on this subsidiary as it becomes material.

Until then, we’re focused on bringing it to market and scaling it as quickly as possible. In terms of tact LTV with members, I think one thing that, you know, we don’t share, which I could share a little bit here, is that at the end of last year or sort of around mid last year, we’re focusing on higher LTV customers. And so, you know, while the member growth, is is not as fast as previous years, this is likely related to a price increase and also, focused on higher LTV markets like The US, Canada, Deutschland, Austria, and Switzerland, or the DACH region. So, you know, for our business, like Ned mentioned, the deferred revenue is growing, which means we have more members securing longer tenured membership up front, which typically come from our high LTV territories. This is improving the stabilization of the business, which is really, important for for us moving forward.

Ned Preston, CFO, Gaia Inc.: Let me take the next one, and it just don’t mean, you probably aren’t seeing the question, so I’ll just read it off quickly. Says, what are the primary drivers behind the sequential growth in subscriber count? And how sustainable is that trend? I’ll I’ll start and I’d love for, James to give some color on this. But, we we we mentioned some of our alternative revenue streams, and really a lot of that’s gonna be retention and bringing in new customers.

So we really do feel is that the, material that we stream, whereas in the past was very niche, it’s becoming more mainstream. I’m sure you all hear, podcasts and whatnot all the time. And it really is leaning into our space, not just about yoga and meditation, but around spirituality, manifestation, all kinds of trends. And so we we feel as though going back to that TAM slide we showed earlier that there’s going to be more people coming in our space in general. And we’ll also leverage some of the the community and the AI aspects that James, touched upon earlier, which will really, we believe allow us to grow that subscription, subscriber count well over a million dollars in in the quarters and years ahead.

So I

James Calhoun, CEO, Gaia Inc.: wanna acknowledge we’re just at twenty five minutes, thirty seconds here. Last question is from Chris around, companies making money off selling or licensing content to hyperscalers. Per the most recent earnings transcript, I’m going to be moving towards focusing on this as well as, capital needs for Ignatant as a private entity so that’ll have no dilutive effect on Gaia as the primary entity and also licensing deals for Ignatant coming up from this summer onwards. And Kirsten Medvedich, tenured in nine plus years at the company, professional from Sony Pictures will be taking over my role as CEO so that I can go work on this. I think it’s a huge opportunity for the business, and we’re hopeful that we should expect some additional revenue streams from this channel in in 2026 as we move towards, p and l positive.

So thank you very much everyone, and, appreciate your time.

Ned Preston, CFO, Gaia Inc.: Yeah. Looking forward to talking to several of you in one on ones, and, feel free to reach out anytime with questions. We’re very open when it comes to talking to investors. Pleasure talking to you all today.

Operator: That concludes Gaia Inc. Presentation. You may now disconnect. Please consult the conference agenda for the next presenting company.

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