Brand Engagement Network Inc. Common Stock 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Tyler, please go ahead. Thank you, operator, and thank you all for joining us today.

Before I talk about the quarter, I want to take a step back and explain what we're actually building at BEN, because I believe the progress we've made this quarter is best understood in that context. We believe we're at an important point in the evolution of AI. The technology is moving from experimentation toward being embedded directly into real-world workflows, customer experiences, and business operations. BEN builds technology that helps organizations, businesses, brands, make every interaction with the people they serve more intelligent and actionable. Our name, Brand Engagement Network, captures the idea behind our company. A brand is the organization, product, service, property, or experience on one side of an interaction. Engagement is the interaction itself.

So a hotel interacting with a guest, a healthcare system interacting with a patient, a vehicle interacting with a driver or passenger. The network is the technology connecting the organization, the person, the environment, the data, the experience, and ultimately, the action. Today, organizations and brands have thousands of these interactions with people every day, but much of the information and opportunity within those interactions is lost once the interaction is over. We believe AI gives organizations and brands the ability to understand those interactions, act on them, and create more value from them. That's the opportunity we're pursuing at BEN. We are building proprietary AI that can understand what's happening, engage with people and environments, personalize experiences, and increasingly take action. We don't think about this as being limited to just conversations. Engagement is much bigger. It can happen in a hotel, a vehicle, a healthcare environment, a media platform, an enterprise workflow, or an entirely new environment that hasn't even been created yet.

The question is: how do we turn an interaction into something useful and actionable rather than letting it simply end? That's what we're building toward. This quarter, we made meaningful progress turning that vision into reality. The second quarter of 2026 was defined by three things. First, completing the Cataneo acquisition and significantly expanding the scale of the company. Second, continuing to move initiatives from pilots and evaluations towards structured commercial deployments and revenue opportunities. Third, strengthening our balance sheet while continuing to operate with discipline as we scale. Let me first walk through each of these. The second quarter, as I mentioned, was one of the most significant in BEN's history.

On June 30, we completed our acquisition of Cataneo, a Germany-based media advertising technology company with 24-plus years of history serving major media companies. Cataneo's software powers the way media companies manage advertising across broadcast, digital, and on-demand channels, including scheduling, management, invoicing, analytics, and reporting. Today, the platform manages more than €6 billion in annual advertising inventory across more than 1,000 media brands worldwide. Cataneo brings an established platform, a talented team, customers, industry expertise, revenue, and a global market presence to BEN. We're all seeing the benefits of AI directly inside the Cataneo business. Over the past 8 months, our Cataneo team has internally incorporated AI-assisted workflows across infrastructure, software delivery, troubleshooting, testing, documentation, and internal knowledge retrieval. As a result, we've seen more than a 30% improvement in productivity and workflow efficiency across these areas.

We're also seeing that through faster troubleshooting and software delivery, less repetitive work, and better access to operational knowledge. Importantly, much of this capability operates within our own controlled environment, giving us clear visibility into where AI is being used and the productivity gains it is generating. We believe this is an early example of the value AI can create not only in our products, but inside the business we operate. I want to spend a moment on why Cataneo matters strategically. Global advertising spending is expected to exceed $1 trillion this year, making it one of the largest markets in the global economy. At the same time, brands are demanding greater efficiency, better attribution, and more relevant engagement. We believe applying AI to a platform like Cataneo's is an opportunity to address exactly that need. We don't view Cataneo as an advertising company sitting alongside an AI company.

We view it as another important layer of the engagement ecosystem we are building. An interaction happens, technology can understand it, AI can make the experience more intelligent and personalized. That interaction can ultimately lead to an action, a transaction, or in certain environments, a new opportunity for monetization. That's where Cataneo becomes particularly interesting. Cataneo's MYDAS platform provides infrastructure for media management and monetization. BEN brings AI and intelligent engagement technology. Together, we have the opportunity to connect intelligence, engagement, and monetization across a broader set of environments. We're already beginning to see the financial impact of bringing these capabilities together. The Cataneo acquisition closed on June 30, so its revenue contribution was not reflected in our reported results for the full second quarter.

On a pro forma basis, as disclosed in the Form 10-Q, Cataneo's contribution would have meaningfully increased our revenue base for the first half of 2026. Walid will walk through the financial details in a moment. As we look ahead, it's important to clarify that BEN is not an industry-specific technology company. Our technology is designed to work anywhere there is meaningful connection between an organization, brand, and the people it serves. That can be a healthcare organization interacting with a patient, a hotel interacting with a guest, a government agency interacting with a citizen, a mobility platform connecting people and vehicles, or a media company connecting a brand with an audience. The industry can change. The underlying engagement opportunity does not. That is what we mean when we talk about engagement.

We're currently focused on driving commercial activity in healthcare, mobility through automotive and fleet applications, and media and advertising, but those are not limitations on where BEN can operate. They are areas where we see strong opportunities today. That's important because the same underlying technology can be applied across very different environments. Wherever there's an organization trying to understand, engage with, and create value from its interactions with people, we believe BEN has an opportunity to participate. This is also why Cataneo is strategically important. Cataneo gives us an established infrastructure with the media and advertising ecosystem, where global advertising spend, as I mentioned, is expected to exceed $1 trillion this year. As BEN expands intelligent engagement into healthcare, mobility, hospitality, government, and other environments, we believe there may be opportunities to connect those interactions with brands, content, media, and ultimately monetization.

The opportunity isn't to build a separate AI product for every industry. It's to build an underlying engagement technology that can be applied across industries, and then connect that engagement to increasingly valuable outcomes. That's the broader opportunity we see for BEN. Getting into healthcare. In June, we launched INTERVENT Health AI, a 50/50 joint venture with INTERVENT International. InnoVent has spent more than 25 years developing and validating evidence-based health coaching programs, and these programs have served more than 2 million individuals and are supported by more than 120 published scientific abstracts and manuscripts. BEN brings the AI technology that can help those proven health coaching programs into scalable AI-powered experiences. To lead that effort, INTERVENT Health AI recently appointed James Hughes as CEO, where he will lead the commercialization and development of the joint venture. The goal isn't to replace the human health coach.

It's to use AI to extend the reach, consistency, and availability of the coaching itself, helping more people access evidence-based support at greater scale. There is an organization with expertise, content, data, and a proven way of serving people. There is a person who needs that expertise. AI creates a new way for those two sides to interact more continuously, more personally, at a significantly greater scale. We see that as an important example of how BEN can apply its technology within a high-value engagement environment. We see a similar opportunity in automotive and mobility. During the quarter, we completed a $1 million strategic investment in Accelevate Solutions, acquiring approximately 10% of the company, with a warrant that would increase our ownership to approximately 20%. Accelevate operates in fleet management, where organizations interact with people, vehicles, and physical environments in real time.

That gives us another environment where BEN can apply intelligence to transportation data, operations, and engagement. Shortly after the quarter closed, we took that opportunity a step further. Together with Cataneo, we launched an AI-powered Transportation Media Network designed to turn connected vehicle fleets into a new advertising channel. We think this is a good example of how the different pieces of BEN can come together. A passenger gets into the vehicle. That creates an interaction. The vehicle and transportation system generate data. BEN can bring intelligence and engagement into that experience, while Cataneo provides the infrastructure to manage and monetize the media opportunity. An everyday transportation experience can potentially become more intelligent while creating a new economic opportunity around that engagement. Another important part of our strategy is how we build relationships around the technology. Our work in Africa is a good example.

Through Skye Africa Intelligence, we have been building relationships across healthcare, government, education, and local technology partners. One relationship we continue to develop is with Nelson Mandela University. We initially began working with the university around an AI-powered student well-being initiative designed to provide students with an additional governed channel for wellness support. What is important to us is that this goes beyond simple deploying software. The university wants to create a connection between its students and its technology, and we want the connection as well. It gives BEN an opportunity to understand how people actually interact with AI in a real institutional environment while giving the university and its students access to technology that can complement the services they already provide. We believe these types of relationships are important because the best technology is built through engagement with the people and environments it is designed to serve.