CuriosityStream Inc. (NASDAQ:CURI) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

CuriosityStream Inc. (NASDAQ:CURI) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript March 11, 2026

CuriosityStream Inc. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $-0.06 EPS, expectations were $-0.03.

Operator: Greetings, and welcome to the CuriosityStream Inc. Fourth Quarter and Year End 2025 Results Conference Call. At this time, participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the call, it is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Tia Cudahy, Chief Operating Officer. Thank you. You may begin.

Tia Cudahy: Thank you, and welcome to CuriosityStream Inc.’s discussion of its fourth quarter and full year 2025 financial results. Leading the discussion today are Clint Stinchcomb, CuriosityStream Inc.’s Chief Executive Officer, and Phillip Brady Hayden, CuriosityStream Inc.’s Chief Financial Officer. Following management’s prepared remarks, we will be happy to take your questions. But first, I will 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-Ks 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. I will now turn the call over to Clint.

Clint Stinchcomb: Thank you, Tia, and good evening, everyone. CuriosityStream Inc. was built on one timeless idea. Curiosity changes the world. That every breakthrough begins with a question. A thousand years ago, Leif Erikson sailed west into the unknown and discovered a new world. Nearly a millennium later, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface carrying the same enduring message across time. Discovery belongs to the bold, and curiosity is our compass. From ocean waves to moondust, that spirit propels us forward today. In that same spirit of bold exploration, we delivered strong full year 2025 results. Revenue grew 40% to $71,700,000 from $51,100,000 in 2024. Adjusted free cash flow increased 46% to $13,900,000 from 2024.

Q&A Session

Q4 revenue rose 36% year over year to $19,200,000 from $14,100,000, and adjusted free cash flow climbed 33% to $4,300,000. 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; inorganic growth from existing partnerships.

The recurring, reliable, and predictable revenue from 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 have covered some of this before. Many investors, analysts, and commercial partners tell us it bears repeating. CuriosityStream Inc.’s licensing business is durable because it is built on assets that are durable, that are scarce, rights-aware, difficult to replicate, and increasingly valuable across multiple end markets. We are not talking about a single opportunistic window. We are 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 Inc. has built a large differentiated content library of rights to nearly 3,000,000 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 five to six times in 2027 as the fine-tuning of open-source and certain proprietary models opens opportunities for hundreds 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 license 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 five years, AI model development, model refresh cycles, geographic expansion, enterprise fine-tuning, education applications, systems, and multimodal search should all support continued appetite for premium licensed corpus.

For AI licensed 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 media will become more valuable over time, not less. There is plenty of media on the open web, but much of it is noisy, duplicative, poorly labeled, low quality, or legally ambiguous.

By contrast, CuriosityStream Inc.’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 in 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 are not merely selling files. We are not merely selling clips. We are selling usable datasets. That distinction is critical. In AI, a rights-cleared file has value. A rights-cleared file with strong metadata, taxonomy, provenance, 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 nonexclusivity. 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 costs to create or license in content are largely de minimis.

We will continue to increase our volume through rev-share constructs that minimize 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 and negotiating sufficient scopes of rights, enriching metadata, 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 provenance, trust, and rights discipline should favor CuriosityStream Inc., not hurt it. Our view is informed. Our view is straightforward. CuriosityStream Inc.’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 three- and six-month tranches. But as Warren Buffett often said, we would 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 $27,000,000 in liquidity and no debt, which we believe gives us financial flexibility. I will now hand the call over to our CFO, Phillip Brady Hayden, who I am sure will emphasize that, among other attributes, at today’s share price, we are 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-Ks that we will 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 $19,200,000 at the high end of our guidance and a 36% increase compared to $14,100,000 a year ago. For the full year, revenue was $71,700,000, a 40% increase from last year. Likewise, we reported another quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA, which came in at $1,100,000. This was an improvement of $3,100,000 from a year ago, and also our fourth sequential quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA.

For the full year, adjusted EBITDA was $8,200,000, a $14,300,000 improvement from 2024. Adjusted free cash flow exceeded our guidance in the fourth quarter at $4,300,000, which is also our eighth consecutive quarter of positive operating cash. For the full year, adjusted free cash flow was $13,900,000, a 46% increase from $9,500,000 in 2024. Licensing revenue was $9,800,000 in the fourth quarter, an increase of $6,100,000 from last year, while subscription revenue came in at $9,100,000. For the full year, subscriptions were $37,000,000, while licensing came in at $33,200,000. This was an increase of over $25,000,000 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 $14,400,000, 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 one-time 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 $1,000,000 in 2025. For the full year, net loss was $6,400,000 compared to a net loss of $12,900,000 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 one-time 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 $1,100,000 in the fourth quarter compared to a loss of $1,900,000 a year ago. And for the full year, adjusted EBITDA was $8,200,000 compared to an adjusted EBITDA loss of $6,000,000 in 2024. For the full year, adjusted free cash flow was $13,900,000, a 46% increase from $9,500,000 in 2024. This totals well over $20,000,000 in operating cash that we have generated over the last two years. On October 14, 6,700,000 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 $4,700,000 for our fourth quarter dividend. Including our $0.10 special dividend paid in June, this brings our total dividends paid to $22,000,000 for all of 2025. We ended the year with total cash and securities of $27,300,000 and no outstanding debt, and we believe our balance sheet remains in great shape. Based on yesterday’s share price, CuriosityStream Inc. 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 $6,000,000, and we plan to selectively resume our repurchase activity in the coming weeks and months. Moving to guidance. For 2026, we expect revenue in the range of $38,000,000 to $42,000,000 and adjusted free cash flow in the range of $6,000,000 to $9,000,000.

For the full year, we continue to believe we will 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: Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press 2 to remove yourself from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up the handset before pressing the star keys. One moment while we poll for questions. This is Brent. We are ready to take questions. Go ahead. We are 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 Inc. year end 2025 earnings call.

We are still having technical difficulties. If you are in the question queue right now, would you please email your questions in reply to the email that you are about to receive, and we will take questions over email shortly. Thank you so much, and thank you for continuing to hold. Thank you for holding. This is the CuriosityStream Inc. 2025 year end earnings report. Our first question today comes from Dan Medina from Needham.

Dan Medina: 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?

Clint Stinchcomb: 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 is 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 are seeing repeat business. At the same time, we are seeing a lot of new potential partners express interest and express either very high volume and specific requirements that we are working aggressively to fulfill right now. Thank you, Dan.

Dan Medina: Any change in the pace of adding other companies’ libraries to your ability to license hours to the LLMs?

Clint Stinchcomb: We are like the Golden Gate Bridge there, Dan. We are constantly in acquisition mode. We have built and amassed, I think, an extraordinary library. We have been told just 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 have enhanced our human talent. We have done the necessary things to ensure the sturdiness of our subscription services, and feel really, really good about the year, Dan.

Dan Medina: Can you give us some cases of how LLMs are using the information you licensed to them in the market to make money, tools, and apps?

Clint Stinchcomb: I think it is a great question, and I think that if you look at the evolution of what our technology partners are looking for and are working toward, if you start with 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. We transitioned up the scale to kind of multimodal AI, which is text, which is images, which is audio, which is video, and that led to video summarization, camera assistance, text-to-image, text-to-video, and agentic AI. Obviously, that is part of the spectrum now, and that is where systems plan, use tools, and act autonomously.

And the use cases there are research agents, travel booking assistants, code agents, data ops agents, CRM bots. There is almost an infinite number of use cases. And then I think certainly an exciting stage that we are in the early stages of right now is physical AI where the content is being used to embed AI into robots, into cars, into drones, into devices. And similarly, I think, an infinite number of use cases here with 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 are able to fulfill a large scope and scale of requirements.

Jason Kreyer: 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?

Clint Stinchcomb: 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 to our subscription business, and that includes wholesale and retail subscriptions, we are confident that we are going to grow that at low to mid single digits, and we are really confident in that because we have new partnerships coming on every month with channel stores around the world for CuriosityStream Inc. for CuriosityStream Inc. You, and even for CuriosityStream Inc. 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.

That is going to take a while to roll through our financials. But with those three things and with the marketing money that we are spending, we are very confident that we will grow our subscription business in the low to mid single digits. And so, based on what Phillip shared, that is off a base of $3,637,000,000 a year. On the subscription side, we are confident that, or I am sorry, on the licensing side, we are confident that we are going to eclipse our subscription revenue because of the work that we have done to date. We are experiencing and anticipating a lot of repeat business from existing partners and customers. And at the same time, I think that our new Chief Commercial Officer, John Belaid, 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 are going way beyond the obvious top six to eight companies that are in the space and anticipate expanding our roster really significantly this year. Now, again, that will be choppy, but the opportunities are big. I am glad that I lived to work through this period of time because we have the goods. We have really unique advantages. We need to execute, but I have never in my career been so close to so many big opportunities at the same time. Thanks, Jason.

David Marsh: On the subscription front, how many new platforms are you expecting to launch during FY26? And how many new countries do you think you could launch with existing partners?

Clint Stinchcomb: Great question, Dave. Thank you. Well, I think just this year alone, we have 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 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 are working with are good at growing subscribers. So I feel really confident about our ability to grow that side of the business, and it is sturdy.

David Marsh: If I heard you correctly, it sounded like SG&A would have been down $1,000,000 year over year without the nonrecurring charges. So would mid $20 millions be a good expected run rate for fiscal year 2026?

Phillip Brady Hayden: Good question, Dave. We do not provide guidance on the expense side, but I think those are fair numbers. Obviously, with stock-based comp, that is a little bit of a wild card because of 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 are actually looking at G&A other than SBC below $20,000,000. I think your range is certainly fair.

David Marsh: Any M&A opportunities you might consider?

Clint Stinchcomb: Thanks for that question, Dave. We will always do what is in the best interest of our shareholders. I think that the M&A environment will be exciting this year, will be ripe. 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 and our licensing business, that we will have the opportunity to consider whatever combinations are in the best interest of our shareholders.

Patrick Sholl: Could you provide any additional color on the market for content to license for AI training and how your partnership with Versus Video Training Library supports these efforts?

Clint Stinchcomb: So Versus is a really good company. They are a technology partner of ours. We have worked with them for a long time. They help us to organize our content, for the most part, help to clip our content, and they help us manage an increasingly large volume of content as we are organizing fulfillments there. Now, we did a lot of licensing agreements before we started working with Versus, but I think they are helping us 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, a lot of people rightly think of CuriosityStream Inc. as a company focused in the factual media space. And certainly, we are. And certainly, we have a whole variety of content there.

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 faith films, etc. 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. That is something that gives us a unique advantage and enables us to engage with virtually everybody on the planet who has video licensing needs for training and other purposes.

Patrick Sholl: With the price increase implemented March 1, what is the timing of it being fully implemented and expectations on churn?

Clint Stinchcomb: It will take a year to fully implement just because we have so many people on annual subscriptions. I think what you will see in the first month is probably 3% to 4% of all of our customers, 5% maybe, who become part of that, and so that will roll out over time. With our pure direct customers, obviously, it will not roll out fully until everyone has renewed their agreement. On the partner side, most of those subscribers are monthly, and 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 will get significant benefit this year, and we will continue to get benefit through February next year.

Patrick Sholl: Any additional commentary on the cadence of guidance and expectations on the full year?

Clint Stinchcomb: I will speak to that for a minute, and then I will hand over to Phillip for his point of view as well. We got into the half year because many of the partnerships that we are working on are large and have the potential to be very large, and they are a little bit lumpy. The benefit to working with the biggest companies in the world is you know you are going to get paid. You are 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 in light of these big licensing opportunities. And so we are extremely confident in the year that we are going to have this year. Without giving specific year-end guidance, like 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 are going to end up. We have said double-digit increases in both cash flow and top line revenue, and that is what we are working toward every day and are confident that we will achieve.

Phillip Brady Hayden: The only thing I will add is the revenue cycle for these deals, and we have talked about this before, but it is generally between four and six months. We are delivering content. We are then recognizing the revenue. We go through an acceptance process. We are not issuing our POs until we are actually getting paid under most of the contracts that we are doing. So the entire cycle can last as long as six months, and it has 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 midyear, I think there is a good chance we will narrow our guidance and revise it into Q2. We know it is a little bit broad, having the $38,000,000 to $42,000,000 and $6,000,000 to $9,000,000 on the cash flow side. But our plan would be to narrow that to the extent that we can here during the second quarter.

Clint Stinchcomb: And I know that it is March 11, and people are probably wondering what we are going to do in the first quarter. And what I will say is the good news about much of what we are doing today is it is 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 opportunities. 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% to 46%, but our intention as we give guidance is to beat that guidance. And that is the approach that we are taking, and we believe that over the year, that will yield the best results for us. Thank you for that question, Patrick.

Tia Cudahy: Clint, Phillip, thank you. This is the end of the CuriosityStream Inc. Q4 and year end 2025 earnings call. Thank you again to all of the participants on the line staying with us through the technical difficulties. Have a nice evening.