Thank you all for being the leaders in your organization to drive social impact, employee engagement, and culture in all of your companies. As a CEO, this is super important to me, and it's something we focus on internally in a big way. It really allows a company to be successful when you focus on that. So thank you for that. I've been in the tech industry for more than a couple of decades, and I've been leading Blackbaud for about 12 years now. The tech industry changes quite quickly. We've had big shifts over the years: the internet, software companies moving to be cloud service providers, and then mobile. This is all old news now.
Why am I talking about this? The change with AI, artificial intelligence, is like nothing anyone has seen before. Nothing. Some of those shifts I mentioned took five, six years, a decade, maybe a couple of decades. The AI change is now. It's this month. It's happening in weeks and months and quarters. So companies are going to look very different before January 1st this year. No pace of change like this has been seen before. I think it's exciting. I'm an engineer by trade from a long time ago, and I'm excited to lead the company through this change and to build solutions for all of you, which we're going to hear about later today. Blackbaud is all in on AI. I'll give you a couple of examples. I actually took a class starting in June last year. It was a six-week Stanford AI class, did it at home. Had to do homework every Saturday for six weeks, unbelievable. And every employee at Blackbaud is required to get trained and certified in AI. Everybody, not just the engineers. Everybody in HR and finance, marketing, the whole company. We are all in.
The interesting thing about being a software company is we're both a consumer and a creator of AI. We are buying solutions across our company in areas like finance, sales, marketing, and legal, a lot in engineering, mostly tools in engineering, but we're also a creator. We're building AI solutions. We're building products. And we're using AI model tools like Anthropic Claude to build our AI products. So, we see this from both sides because we're buying solutions and creating solutions for all of you and all of our customers. It's been an interesting last 18 months doing that, and it's moving really quickly. The other thing that gives us a unique 360° view is that we serve both corporations and tens of thousands of nonprofits and foundations all over the world. We're very unique in that regard. There isn't another company that does both of those things. Most firms do one or the other. In nonprofits, we have nonprofits, foundations, universities, healthcare systems, performing arts centers, museums, K-12 schools. So, we get this 360° view by working with all of you and our other customers around the world, which is unique, and it really helps us understand the needs between all the different parties we serve as customers.
We are also significantly focused on launching new products. I'm going to go over one really quickly. Just a couple of weeks ago, we launched a product for our nonprofit customers, a development agent. I'll use one customer example to explain what it is, but it's basically a fully AI, fully agentic, autonomous fundraiser. It raises money. Here's an example: We're working with a university that has 190,000 alumni. They have a handful of fundraisers in the foundation focusing on the top 10,000 alumni. They use our software, do their research, create campaigns, build relationships, and raise money. So, there are 180,000 untouched alumni. Typically, in the university setting, they wait 20 to 30 years before you might get a phone call. They can't scale; they can't hire enough people or afford to approach 180,000 alumni. They also would never reach out to a recent grad who graduated last May. But with our new product, they can scale. This product is a pretty significant new step for the industry to get scale in a way they never could before. For example, they could reach out to every recent grad, the 12,000 who graduated last May and lived on campus for four years. The agent can reach out to those folks. Let's say it was me and it says, 'Mike, I'm an agent for XYZ University. Congratulations on graduating last May with a degree in finance, you lived in this part of campus, played in the band, and got hired as a financial analyst at Blackbaud.' And build a relationship and say, 'Are you willing to donate $3 a month?' So, you get to the alumni when they still have the lived experience on campus instead of waiting 25 years. There's a lot of creative things our customers can do to raise more funds in a scaled way. We just announced that product a couple of weeks ago. It's never been seen or done. We have a handful of customers using it, and it's growing every week. So, we're really focused on that.
We're also really focused on the infrastructure of software and AI, including cybersecurity, governance, and delivering AI at scale in a multi-agent environment, which is really important. Also, we're a public company. As a public company, you all have access to our financials. You can see that we're a financially healthy company, which is great. Last year, we had a big milestone. We crossed what's called a rule of 40. For a software company, the rule of 40 means you take the combination of your profit margin and growth and add them together, EBITDA and growth, and if it equals 40 or higher, that signals a very healthy company. We crossed that last year for the first time. It's pretty rare for a software company to be a rule of 40 company, so we're there. It gives us a lot of investment capital to keep driving innovation for all of you and for the company.
Our productivity through the use of AI and our innovation is like a hockey stick this year. It's been going up every year, and it's like a hockey stick this year with our ability to scale innovation using these new tools. Lastly, thank you again for coming. Have a great afternoon. Thanks.
