Inuvo at H.C. Wainwright: Strategic Growth and IntentKey Focus

On Monday, 08 September 2025, Inuvo Inc. (NYSE:INUV) presented at the H.C. Wainwright 27th Annual Global Investment Conference, highlighting its strategic growth and innovative IntentKey technology. The company reported two consecutive record-breaking quarters and outlined its path to profitability. While facing challenges such as signal loss due to cookie deprecation, Inuvo remains optimistic about its future, driven by its competitive edge in programmatic advertising.

Key Takeaways

• Inuvo aims for $100 million in revenue to achieve cash flow positivity.
• The IntentKey platform will be refreshed in Q4, enhancing audience targeting and insights.
• Inuvo has no debt, $2.5 million cash on hand, and access to a $10 million credit line.
• The company is focused on scaling its self-service business and expanding its sales team.
• Inuvo targets the $300 billion programmatic advertising market.

Financial Results

• Cash on hand: $2.5 million as of June’s end.
• No debt and access to a $10 million working line of credit.
• Approximately 14.6 million shares outstanding.
• Insider ownership, including top executives, is 8-9%.
• Cash burn rate was about $0.5 million per quarter in the first half of the year, with expectations to be positive in the second half.

Operational Updates

• IntentKey platform refresh is scheduled for Q4, focusing on audience targeting and AI-driven insights.
• Scaling the self-service business, the most profitable product.
• Continued acquisition of new clients for both managed and self-service offerings.
• Expanding the sales team and optimizing performance.
• Automating the self-service product for efficiency.

Future Outlook

• Targeting $100 million in revenue to become cash flow positive.
• Leveraging high seasonality in the second half of the year.
• Expanding penetration into the mid-size agency market, comprising 16,000 agencies.
• Increasing market share among the six major whole companies in the programmatic advertising space.

Q&A Highlights

• Inuvo focuses on its core media buying offering, despite inquiries about expanding into other verticals.
• No outstanding warrants, simplifying the capital structure.
• Analyst inquiries highlighted the potential for further market expansion.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a comprehensive understanding of Inuvo’s strategic initiatives and financial performance.

Full transcript - H.C. Wainwright 27th Annual Global Investment Conference:

Kyle Murie, Analyst, HC Wainwright: Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the HC Wainwright 27th Annual Global Investment Conference. My name is Kyle Murie, and I’m an analyst on the Corporate Access team. We’re very excited you all could join us for a productive day of one-on-one meetings, corporate presentations, and panels. For this session, we are thrilled to welcome Barry Lowenthal, President of Inuvo Inc., trading on the ticker INUV. Thank you. Barry, take it away.

Barry Lowenthal, President, Inuvo Inc.: Thank you very much. Hey, everyone. I’m Barry Lowenthal, President of Inuvo Inc. We are an advertising technology services business. We have proprietary, patented artificial intelligence, which I’m very excited to talk to you all about. Before we begin, this is our safe harbor statement. I’m sure you’ve all read it. Let’s move on. We’re really excited about the momentum that’s happening right now at Inuvo Inc. We have great growth. We have two record-breaking quarters. You guys like us a lot. Our stock now is just under $4, and you think it should be at $15. That’s very, very encouraging. We have lots of client adoption. We’ve been signing on new clients, and clients are spending more with us. Record-breaking growth, great feedback from the analyst community, and more and more clients are signing on to use our product.

We solve a really important problem that our clients are facing, which is something that’s called signal loss. What we mean by signal loss is that clients have a lot less visibility around what their clients are doing in the market. They just don’t have, they don’t know what’s performing and why because of three really important reasons. The first is cookie deprecation, which continues to be a problem. The second is privacy regulation, which continues to increase state by state around the U.S. and throughout the world, for that matter. Walled gardens are continuing to get a bigger and bigger piece of the digital media pie, and they don’t share data. If you have investments in Meta, you don’t know, you don’t understand how your investments in Google are impacting that.

There’s just very little data sharing unless you have other kinds of measurement products, which we will talk about. Because of signal loss, because of cookie deprecation, privacy regulation, and the walled gardens, our clients have a lot less visibility around what their customers are doing, and we solve for that. The way that we do that is through the IntentKey, which is our proprietary product. There are two important revenue streams. We have platform revenue streams, and we have our agency/brand revenue streams. Both of these lines of business are using the IntentKey to understand customer behavior. Like I’d said, we have a lot of clients. Many of them are renewing, of course, agencies and brands, and we have four platform clients. The way that it works is that our IntentKey reads the open web and organizes all of that information into what’s called a concept graph.

We use that information to build out our models. Those models are matched with inventory around the open web. We only operate on the open web. It matches with inventory on that open web, and where our models are matching with inventory, we place ads. It’s that simple. We build models, we match our models with publishers, and then we activate those models. There are some pretty significant advantages that our clients have when they use our models, when they use our IntentKey product around better visibility, cost savings, and privacy compliance. We don’t rely on cookies, like I had said. We access 100% of the open web, which means that if you are accessing the internet through Safari or Firefox, we can see that content, and we can place ads on those browsers. Our models update every five minutes, so it’s near real time.

We can provide full funnel support, so it’s not just a lower funnel performance product. We can build models throughout the funnel, supporting every one of your marketing objectives. There are no additional data costs to use us, so we’re not making your media CPMs more expensive. We have a moat. Here’s a video that will show how the IntentKey platform works. I’ve been doing a lot of these demos in real time, but I’m just worried because this is recorded about any sort of internet delays. We have a short video that sort of explains how the product works.

Unidentified speaker, Inuvo Inc.: Welcome to the IntentKey platform by Inuvo, your AI-powered audience modeling tool. In seconds, you can build, refine, and activate dynamic audience models using our proprietary AI. Just type a short audience description, like eco-conscious travelers looking for sustainable products, or enter a URL. IntentKey instantly generates your model, revealing the key concepts that define your audience, how concepts relate to each other, estimated audience size, sentiment, demographic data, and geographical insights at both the state and zip level. From there, adjust by adding or excluding concepts, or move straight to activation. Simply select Activate Model, enter your DSP and seed ID, choose ad types, and hit Submit. Your model is ready to perform. Fast, simple, and built on AI.

Barry Lowenthal, President, Inuvo Inc.: This is the way the IntentKey works. What’s really exciting about this, and this product is actually getting refreshed come the middle of Q4. Clients are using this for a lot of use cases. Targeting audience is one, but also uncovering insights is another. We think that this product will have lots of use cases across a variety of different clients, whether you’re a CMO or whether you’re a media buyer. In fact, I was talking to a creative agency about last month, and I was presenting to them. In the meeting, I copied all of the concepts that came up for this model. I dumped it into ChatGPT, and I asked ChatGPT to write a creative brief for a creative team targeting audiences that were interested in these concepts. I got a great creative brief that this agency could now use to help brief in a whole campaign.

There are lots of different use cases beyond just buying media. The money shot. The business is doing really well. Quarter over quarter, we’ve been doing great. Yes, take that picture, share it on social, tag Inuvo. We have been showing compounded quarterly growth. We have cash on hand, we have no debt, and we have access to capital. The business is in a really strong position, which is great. For the second half of this year, which is really important for us because it is high seasonality, we’re really excited about the momentum that we have going into the second half. The market opportunity. We are competing in a really big space. The programmatic space, which is the area that we compete in mostly, is worth over $300 billion. We have a very, very small percentage of that business.

For managed services, our product is attractive to about 16,000 mid-size agencies, and we have a really small penetration. For self-service, it’s against the six major whole co’s, which represent a majority of global media buying. We’re just starting to penetrate this market with our self-service product, which launched using that platform come February. We are competing in a really big market, which we have not yet penetrated in a meaningful way. There’s a lot of upside. Given all of the momentum we have, we think that that momentum is going to accelerate. We work with some really major brands, across every single category. When clients test us against our competitors, we beat our competitors. We drive better performance. It’s one of the reasons why these brands keep coming back to us quarter after quarter, year over year.

We’ve talked a lot about in our earnings call the importance of the $100 million mark, because that’s when we’re going to be cash flow positive. We have a real pathway towards that $100 million mark. The first is scaling that self-service business, which is our most profitable product. What we need to do is grow that product fast. The second thing is continue to bring on new clients, which we’ve been doing for both managed and self. You all think very highly of us. We have several analyst reports that are giving us that $15 buy order. We’re expanding our sales team, and we continue to optimize them. We get rid of poor performers, and we bring on people that sit at the intersection of hustle, relationships, and knowledge. That is the profile of an Inuvo sales team.

If any of you know anybody that fits that model, please introduce us. Please introduce them to me. Finally, we continue to automate our self-service product. I told you that we are planning on refreshing the platform that I showed you come middle of Q4. Record-breaking momentum, a product that outperforms our competition, great feedback from all of you, and real clear plans to scale the business. Those are some of the investment highlights. If you have any questions, I’m here and Wally is here. Wally is our CFO. Happy to answer any questions. Thank you. That was very kind. I appreciate that feedback. Thank you. Please.

Wallace Ruiz, CFO, Inuvo Inc.: What are your pathways? I know you get post-casual. Human sounds like, but I have cheaper.

Barry Lowenthal, President, Inuvo Inc.: Yes, but first introduce yourself. Tell me who you are.

Nice to meet you, Karen. Wallace, do you want to jump on that?

Wallace Ruiz, CFO, Inuvo Inc.: We don’t have any debt.

Barry Lowenthal, President, Inuvo Inc.: I have too.

Wallace Ruiz, CFO, Inuvo Inc.: We actually got $2.5 million as of the end of our last reporting period, June. We have a line of credit, a working line of credit of $10 million. We have no warrants outstanding. It’s just a simple cap structure of common stock. We have about 14.6 million shares outstanding.

Barry Lowenthal, President, Inuvo Inc.: How much are you burning right now?

Wallace Ruiz, CFO, Inuvo Inc.: It’s seasonal. In the first half, we were burning about $0.5 million a quarter. We expect to be positive in the second half.

Barry Lowenthal, President, Inuvo Inc.: Insider ownership?

Wallace Ruiz, CFO, Inuvo Inc.: Insider ownership, D’s and O’s are about 8% to 9% in that range.

Barry Lowenthal, President, Inuvo Inc.: Including myself and Wallace Ruiz?

Wallace Ruiz, CFO, Inuvo Inc.: Right.

Joe, Analyst, Warner Tower Research: Joe, I’m Warner Tower Research. Outside digital, have you thought of any other additional verticals you could explore?

Barry Lowenthal, President, Inuvo Inc.: That’s a really good question. The answer is yes. I think the Insights product would be a really cool product, but it’s really not on the roadmap right now. When we refresh this portal, it’s really going to be focused on that media buying customer. There’s clearly so many use cases. You know, the biggest challenge that we have is to make sure that we stay focused because we only have so many engineering resources that we can put against any of these projects. Thank you, everybody.

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