Alarm.com Holdings, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Alarm.com second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised today's conference is being recorded. I would like to hand the conference over to your speaker today. Matthew Zartman, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Alarm.com's second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Please note that this call is being recorded. Joining us today are Steve Trundle, our CEO, and Kevin Bradley, our CFO. During today's call, we will be making forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections, estimates, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties, that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. We refer you to the risk factors discussed in our form 8K and the associated press release, which were filed with the SEC earlier today. The call is subject to these risk factors, and we encourage you to review them. Alarm.com assumes no obligation to update forward-looking statements or other information that speak as of their respective date. In addition, several non-GAAP financial measures will be discussed on the call. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures can be found in today's press release on our investor relations website. I'll now turn the call over to Steve Trundle. Steve? Thank you, Matt.

Good afternoon and welcome to everyone. We're pleased to report second quarter results that exceeded our expectations. Our SAS and license revenue in the quarter was $188.8 million, up 11% year over year. Our adjusted EBITDA in the quarter was $57.7 million. Our Q2 performance reflects continued execution by our service provider partners and our employees. I want to thank them for their contributions during the quarter. Today, I'll review the key drivers of our performance discuss a recent expansion of our commercial platform and provide an update on the continued growth we see in our energy hub utility programs. Generally speaking, we saw most areas of the business perform above plan. Our residential business was steady as revenue retention continued to provide a modest tailwind. In our commercial business, OpenEye delivered strong SAS and hardware revenue results as enterprise customers continued to expand their video surveillance deployments. And they often did so with increased adoption of our more powerful AI-enabled services. Energy Hub also delivered healthy SaaS growth as utility customers expanded the scale and capabilities of their distributed energy resource programs. During the quarter, our international business also surpassed 1 million active subscriber accounts This milestone is only possible because of the work we have invested in localizing our platform and developing a productive network of international service provider partners in over 70 countries. The commercial business continues to progress as our service provider partners and commercial integrators adopt more components of our unified video access control and commercial intrusion platform. We recently expanded into an additional commercial category with the launch of our fire communicator. Our new offering transmits alarm signals to a monitoring station while simultaneously delivering notifications to designated users through the alarm.com applications and services. Many of our existing partners already service a number of commercial fire monitoring installations and use fire communicators routinely, just not ours. Fire communicators are typically replaced Independently of the fire alarm control panel, this tends to occur when legacy communicators fail regular tests or lose network support as cellular networks evolve. Our new fire communicator leverages our cellular communication infrastructure and our backend platform to deliver a more efficient product for our service providers to manage at scale. We designed our fire communicator to be compatible with most new and existing fire panels, which are widely required in commercial buildings. We estimate that the addressable market for our new product consists of 4 to 5 million fire panels in the US and Canada. As with any newly launched product, driving adoption through our service provider channel will take some work. But we see a long-term opportunity to build a position in the commercial fire space and are excited to now have this product and service in the market. Turning to Energy Hub, utilities continue to grow their flexibility programs and increasingly rely upon Energy Hub to maintain grid reliability, particularly during periods of high demand. The leverage from Energy Hub's technology was evident earlier this summer during periods of extreme heat. Over the July 4th weekend, utilities dispatched more than 300 demand response events across more than 30 states and Ontario through Energy Hub. Collectively, these events shifted 17.5 gigawatt hours of electricity, roughly equal to New York City's total electricity consumption for more than two hours. Back on the security side, I also want to share a couple of recent examples of how our technology and service provider partners protect lives and property. A few weeks ago, I was made aware of an incident where one of our remote video monitoring deployments spotted an individual attempting to set fire to an occupied home by dousing it with what appeared to be gasoline and then igniting it. Using our technology, a central station operator was alerted to the arsonist's presence, verified what was happening, and quickly contacted authorities. The family inside the home escaped without injury. In a separate recent incident, one of our outdoor gunshot detection sensors detected gunfire directly at a busy outdoor area. Authorities quickly responded to the gunshot signal and secured the area. They were able to apprehend a suspect before there was any loss of life. We don't often report on these incidents, but just as Energy Hub is enabling a more reliable grid in the heat of the summer, Our life safety solutions are operating all the time, protecting communities and while providing a durable foundation for our business. We are thankful to have established partnerships with many, many service providers through the years that treat this life safety mission as importantly as we do and then do a great job on the ground every day. We believe deeply in our mission and in the enduring value of security. In summary, I'm pleased with our strong second quarter results. Our performance reflects the diversity of our business and we're excited to continue our progress in the second half of the year. I'll now turn the call over to Kevin Bradley, our CFO, to review our financial results. Kevin?

Thanks, Steve. I'll begin by reviewing highlights from our second quarter financial results and then close with our updated guidance for the third quarter and full year 2026. Midway through the year, I'm pleased to report another quarter of execution against our financial plan. SAS and license revenue grew 11.1% year-over-year to approximately $188.8 million during the quarter, exceeding the midpoint of our guidance by approximately $3.2 million. For the third consecutive quarter, revenue retention remained in the 95% range. Our commercial initiatives and energy hub also contributed nicely, collectively growing more than 30% year over year. Hardware and other revenue totaled approximately $89 million, an increase of 5.5% year over year. During the second quarter, we saw particularly strong demand from enterprise buyers in our commercial video segment. We also benefited from increased activity in Energy Hub's low carbon and renewable fuel credit business. Through this business, Energy Hub uses charging data from its electric vehicle manufacturing partners to facilitate the generation and sale of low-carbon transportation credits to obligated fuel suppliers in certain states, retaining a portion of the value generated as revenue. This mix of enterprise hardware sales drove a 180 basis point expansion in hardware gross margin year over year, allowing us to fund just over 70% of our sales and marketing costs in the quarter from hardware gross profits. During the second quarter, total operating expenses, including depreciation and amortization, were $149.6 million. Total operating expenses excluding depreciation and amortization, stock-based compensation, and other items we adjust from G&A for non-GAAP purposes were approximately $123.7 million, a 4.6% increase year-over-year. R&D expense in the quarter, inclusive of stock-based compensation, was approximately $71 million, a 2.8% increase year-over-year. We ended Q2 with 1,148 employees in R&D functions. For those newer to our story, research and development is by design our largest area of investment. Our predominantly indirect business models allow us to sustain a high level of R&D investment while remaining capital efficient. In our symbiotic relationships, service provider partners are primarily responsible for customer acquisition and support, so our sales and marketing expense is well below most other SaaS businesses. At the same time, our R&D investments support high margin, durable recurring revenue tied to connected devices that typically remain in service for nearly a decade. The result is a model that has averaged north of a 20% return on operating invested capital over the past eight years. Non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA grew 15.7% year-over-year to approximately $57.7 million. This comparison reflects the revised definition of our non-GAAP profitability metrics that we adopted last quarter, which removes the effect of mark-to-market gains and losses on equity securities in our Treasury portfolio applied to both periods. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 20.8%, approximately 115 basis points higher than in the year-ago quarter. Gap net income attributable to common stockholders was approximately $24.2 million in the quarter, or 48 cents per diluted share, down from approximately $34.6 million a year ago. A key driver of the decline was lower interest income on excess cash following the retirement of $500 million of convertible notes in January. Non-gap adjusted net income increased approximately 17% from the year-ago quarter to $41.1 million. We produced 77 cents of non-GAAP earnings per diluted share, a 24% increase year-over-year. We ended the quarter with $479.4 million of cash on the balance sheet and produced $37 million of free cash flow. Free cash flow in the quarter was affected in part by working capital timing. We continue to expect adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow conversion of approximately 90% for the year. We repurchased approximately 570,000 shares for $25 million during the quarter, bringing our total share repurchases since the beginning of 2025 to 1.8 million shares. We continue to operate under the $150 million buyback authorization our Board approved earlier this year. I'll turn now to our financial outlook. For the third quarter of 2026, We expect SAS and license revenue of between $189.8 million and $190 million, representing approximately 8.3% growth at the midpoint. For the full year 2026, we are raising our SAS and license revenue outlook to between $754 million and $754.4 million. This is an increase of approximately $4.2 million from our May guidance. and represents approximately 9.4% growth for the year at the midpoint. We are raising our total revenue outlook for 2026 to between $1.079 billion and $1.089 billion, which includes hardware and other revenue of between $325 million and $335 million. This increases our hardware outlook by approximately $15 million at the midpoint from our previous guidance provided in May. We are raising our non-GAAP adjusted EBIT outlook for 2026 to between $221 million and $223 million, an increase of approximately $6.5 million at the midpoint. The increase flows our second quarter outperformance through to the full year and keeps us on a steady path toward our previously established target of a 21% adjusted EBITDA margins exiting 2027. Non-GAAP adjusted net income for 2026 is projected to be between $156 million and $157 million, or approximately $2.92 to $2.94 per diluted share, an increase of approximately 11 cents from our prior guidance. EPS is based on approximately 56.3 million weighted average diluted shares outstanding for the year, down modestly from our prior estimate given our buyback activity. We currently project our non-GAAP tax rate for 2026 to remain at approximately 21% under current tax rules. We expect full-year 2026 stock-based compensation expense of between $34 million and $35 million. In closing, I'm pleased with the broad-based momentum we've seen across the business so far this year. We delivered a solid quarter against our plan, and we believe we are well positioned to deliver continued revenue growth and profitability in the second half while investing to expand our long-term opportunities. With that, operator, please open the call for Q&A.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. If you have a question or a comment at this time, please press star 1-1 on your telephone. If your question has been answered or you wish to move yourself from the queue, please press star 1-1 again. We will pause for a moment while we compile our Q&A roster. One moment for our first question. Our first question comes from Saka Khalid with Barclays. Your line is open. Okay, great. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions here.

Steve, maybe for you, could you maybe just talk about the market that Energy Hub competes in just a little deeper? And maybe more specifically, is this a rising tide market just given everything that's happening in utilities? Or do you feel like Energy Hub is able to take market share as well?

Hey. Sure, I'll be glad to talk about that a bit more. I guess to the last question, is it a rising tide? Yes. We think that the overall market is growing. The value from variable supply is going up. I think it's well known there's a shortage of supply in the energy market. Data centers are eating more. We're electrifying cars, et cetera, et cetera. So from the utility perspective, you have to either Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. range of the energy hub solution now to move from really thermostat demand response types of solutions to a full solution that also includes EVs, EV chargers, batteries, and thermostats. So we're attaching to more devices in the average property now than ever before, and yet we still have a ton of of Headroom there in the TAM. At the moment, we're probably 2% penetrated in the North American TAM, maybe a little higher than that in the base of utilities where we have programs, which is more than half of the utilities. But overall, there's a lot of room to grow sort of the attachment to the meters that we already are positioned to service and grow that business nicely. And then the market's demanding that we do that.

Got it. Got it. That makes a ton of sense. Kevin, maybe for my follow-up for you, maybe staying on Energy Hub, you know, I think it's been a couple quarters now of a little bit of acceleration in that SaaS revenue line. Maybe the question is how much that has come from really what sounds like a few good quarters of Energy Hub, or is that really coming from that growing mix of broader emerging solutions?

Yeah, hey, Saki, thanks. I think the answer is it's a little bit of both of those things. I'd say more so Energy Hub, but also collectively what we call the growth initiatives. You know, any single thing's contribution to our consolidated growth rate is a function of how much revenue there is, it's weighting in the portfolio, and then how fast it's growing. The growth initiatives sort of writ large are just about 35% of revenue now, and second quarter grew a little over 30% year over year. So they're collectively contributing about 900 basis points of growth rate this year in the second quarter. Now, some of that is inorganic, obviously, tucked into Energy Hub. Among the three of them, Energy Hub is certainly the one whose growth rate impact is accelerating the quickest. Commercial is also a contributor to an accelerating growth rate a little bit due to that weighting characteristic, and I would characterize international as sort of contributing about steady growth rate the past several quarters.

Super helpful, guys.

Thank you.

Again, ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question or a comment at this time, please press star 1-1 on your telephone. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Adam Tindall with Raymond James. Your line is open.

Okay, thanks. Good afternoon and congrats on a good quarter. Steve, I wanted to start on the commercial side of the business and specifically around the fire communicator, which I thought was interesting. That's a market that, as you mentioned, is fairly sizable, I guess, and it's been around for a while. Kind of twofold question, why now? And second, what is the advantage that you bring to this versus sort of the big incumbent that plays in this space? and Kevin, if you could touch on how the business model in that side of the business would be similar or different from traditional residential as that grows. Thanks.

Hey, Adam. Good question. Yeah. Why now, I guess, is the first part of it. I'd say the biggest sort of reason is we simply listen to our dealers and we've had some demand from our dealers, from our partners for us to provide a solution in this segment. I think that's a function of the fact that if you just think about our business over the last three or four years, there's been a shift more towards the commercial side of the intrusion space and the video surveillance space. And therefore, the folks we interact with today have a little different makeup than maybe what would have been the case five years ago when we were a more dominant residential space. platform. So as we've seen growth on the commercial side, the cadence of request for us to bring a solution to bear on the commercial fire side has sort of increased. And that's probably the biggest reason. But then we had an opportunity to also take advantage of some of the and get some leverage out of the R&D that we put into producing what we call the universal communicator that we launched some time ago. A lot of the work we did there was work that we could use as a foundation for the creation of the commercial fire products. So it made sense to pursue that because the incremental investment was not dramatic. And I guess the advantage to the market is First, the service provider, our dealer, wants to have as much as they can on our back-end platform. It allows them to more efficiently manage their customer base, schedule their work, know what's happening with all of their paying customers. That's one advantage. But then there's also, from the customer perspective, a single pane of glass situation where you can see the status of everything in your building. all the time in one place. It works similarly. You set up the same types of addresses. So there's some advantages there, especially within our existing customer base that we think will help us create some pull-through for the new product. And I guess I'll leave the second part to you, Kevin.

Yeah. On the business model, so if we split that into the delivery model, the price metrics, and the price level, As Steve was saying, the delivery model is the same as residential and much of our other offerings. It's channel-based. The price metrics are also the same, meaning we sell a piece of hardware and then we bill on a per-month, per-subscriber basis, per-building basis in this case. The price levels are what changes. In this case, what we're doing is we're selling the hardware... at more of a gross profit neutral or slightly positive level. So it's a little bit lower gross margin than the rest of our blended hardware gross margin portfolio. And then on the services side, you know, it represents, call it 2x the ARPU probably of what we would get for a typical residential account.

Got it. That's helpful. Thanks. Maybe a follow-up, Steve, one of the other things that stood out to me in your prepared remarks was over 1 million active subscribers in the international business, and congrats on that. I'm just kind of reflecting on having covered you guys for years. If I think back to the core residential business, the path to the first million subscribers was longer, and then the incremental million after that truncated the timeline, right? The next million happens faster. Right. Right. So I wonder if you might sort of reflect on that and apply it to the international business and think about any opportunities that you see to maybe accelerate that piece. Thanks.

Right. No, good observation. Yeah. The first million in the core business in our business when we started was a slog. It took forever. You had to build a lot of infrastructure. You had to find all the right partners. It was really defining in terms of whether or not we were going to make it. So I'd like to believe the same is true here. We certainly have some calluses from our work internationally, especially in really trying to bring the product around to a localized state that works in the 70 markets that we're servicing. We've done a lot of work to lay in place the base of service provider partners there. We've had some ups and downs. We've had quite a bit of Thank you very much. Thank you. We have some momentum. We know these markets. We kind of know what's worked, what hasn't worked, and where to look next. And I would hope that the next million comes more easily and faster than the first million, absolutely.

Sounds good. Thank you, guys.

Sure.

One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Samala with Jeffries. Your line is open.

This is Jordan Barretzon for Samad. Great to see the strong results. Steve, in the prepared remarks, you mentioned that commercial customers are expanding their video surveillance deployments and specifically that's being driven by AI-enabled products. So it seems like the Salesforce is effectively executing on the opportunity around the growth initiatives that you've spoken to over the past two quarters. Could you speak to the market segments where you're seeing outside strength or success? Is it a specific vertical or size? and maybe parse out whether it's new versus existing customers. And then are you enabling the sales force to best succeed in selling these newer offerings that they're maybe a little bit less familiar with at first?

Right. Good question, Jordan. We generally think of commercial as sort of enterprise and then small business. I would say during the last quarter anyway, the more of the strength was on the enterprise. I think what we're seeing there is a couple things. First, folks are thinking about with AI, making sure they're installing products that future-proof their business, that give them the ability to seize the opportunity. Not just today, but for the next couple of years. And we're pretty well positioned there with our AI-powered video camera solution, especially on the OpenEye side. I think there's also, with that, a thing that's driving some of the demand is just the shift from video as a surveillance tool towards video as an operational data and some of the interface elements we've added to the platform allow people more easily now to ask questions of what's happening in their business that are only marginally related to security. So people want that. That's driving some demand. We've done some work, to your point on the sales team and empowering the sales team, we've done some work to better enable Cross-selling opportunities to make sure that we're aligned in what we're trying to achieve. In terms of the mix, the nice thing on the enterprise side is it's a nice mix of both new logos, but also once you're in at a site, if you perform and you do well, there's sort of a steady stream of ongoing demand as they add facilities or as they identify locations where additional cameras may be needed. We get a very positive revenue retention characteristic from that part of the market that has been helpful to our commercial performance.

Appreciate the color. Then, Kevin, maybe a quick question for you. Great to see the strong EBITDA results. I wanted to dig into margin events, specifically sales and marketing expenses. Thank you for joining us.

employees in sales and marketing, obviously, but it's for the most part trending with the rate of revenue growth. We've seen a little bit more leverage. Actually, you know, if you zoom out and take like a two-year view, the number of total employees we have is about flat going back to the middle of 2024. It's grown at like a CAGR of 0.4% or something like that. and that leverage is really coming in other places. It's coming from G&A and to a smaller extent in R&D. I think if we look forward sort of near term over the next year or two, I suspect you'd probably see a similar story, total employees roughly flat as we do a little bit more with the same and you'll see a slight complexion shift towards sales and marketing spend and possibly employees and maybe slightly further away from other areas.

Awesome. Thanks for taking my questions. Congrats again.

Thanks, Jordan. Again, ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question or a comment at this time, please press star 1-1 on your telephone. Our next question comes from Stephen Sheldon with William Blair. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. You have Matt Filek on for Stephen Sheldon. Thank you for taking my questions. I wanted to start with circling back on the commercial fire question. I was wondering if you could help us frame the addressable market of that and how meaningful the offering could become to growth over time. I know it's a new offering and it will take some time to scale, but any additional color on how you're thinking about that opportunity would be great.

Hey, Matt. This is Steve speaking. Sure. Yeah, it's a good thing to drill down on. I think we look at the addressable market of commercial buildings in North America to be something around, that likely, by the way, are already being serviced, to be somewhere between 4 million and 5 million in total. And then we look at kind of the population of our service providers that we think might be engaged in this type of, in this area of the business and I believe that we, our best estimate is that around 3,000 or so of our service providers are at some level engaged in the commercial fire business and could be candidates to deploy our products. So that's about a third, roughly, maybe a little less than that. But we're going to sort of see how it goes. We've gotten at this moment, you know, just with sort of in the last, you know, two, three weeks of launch, we're probably... Approaching 1,000 that are in the ground, and we're going to see if we can build some. And that's with very few service providers moving. We're going to try to build off of that. And if I were to look forward, I think we'll use 2027 to sort of size up the steady state demand for the product, get it introduced to all the service providers, and see really what steady state demand looks like, and then probably be in a little better position to estimate what the long-term What our long-term capture of that market is and how quickly those buildings that we've identified turnover and change product. Couldn't really provide that estimate at the moment, but that gives you a feeling for what we think of as the TAM.

Very helpful, Steve. I appreciate the additional detail on how you're thinking about that. And then for my follow-up, I just had a quick one. on capital allocation. What does the current M&A pipeline broadly look like? And also curious how you're thinking about share repurchases now that shares have rallied off recent lows.

Maybe I'll cover the latter one and then turn it over to Steve for the M&A pipeline. Yeah, we were very excited the last quarter or two to sort of see buying opportunities at things like a 12 PE. You don't see that very often in SaaS, let alone for one growing earnings double digits. So we were pretty aggressive in terms of capital allocation there relative to our history. I think if you rewind the clock a little bit further back even to Q1 or Q2 of last year, we were trading at sort of similar prices as we are currently. I think we'll still be active in the buyback market at a minimum. to buy back to offset the dilution from stock-based compensation. And at these price levels, if you look back to what we were historically doing at this time, it probably gives you a pretty good sense for what you may see us do near term.

And on the M&A front, the answer here is always similar in that we run an active process. We're constantly evaluating opportunities. oftentimes we're trying to underwrite one or two specifically to see if we can make it work. We're kind of in the same condition as always where we do have some things that we're working on. None at the moment are things I could announce publicly, but we hope that we can move some of that activity forward. I think, as I've said before, we're broadly looking at opportunities that Thank you both. One moment for our next question.

Our next question comes from Jack Vandarde with Maxim Group. Your line is open.

Okay, great. Good evening, Steve and Kevin. Congrats on solid results and yet again, another raised outlook. So Steve, maybe I would like to get your thoughts in any color on new potential residential and commercial ARPU drivers and outside the commercial fire opportunity, obviously. For example, I've asked in the past about potential drone integration in applications, and I think you've previously partnered with Sunset Labs for real estate, for example. Just any thoughts on expanding partnerships and other ARPU drivers? Thanks.

Sure. Yeah, I think on the residential side, the biggest driver of ARPU gains are our Currently around what's possible with the video camera and the intelligence you can provide the consumer from the video camera, whether it be on the door or whether it be under the eve of a home. And then especially with the rollout of what I think we talked more about last quarter, which is remote video monitoring, where a consumer can kind of go to bed at night knowing that if someone Thank you for joining us. A live operator got that event from one of our video cameras. It was a very good dealer that serviced that customer and had everything set up right and it worked well and the operator responded and the family was protected. So that type of capability on the residential side is becoming more in demand and that drives some ARPU there. Over a longer period of time as we look out, yes, I think that we'll continue to sort of push on a broad category of robotics, including autonomous drones and other technology. But in the near term, the bigger driver on the residential side will be RVM. On the commercial side, it's really two things. It's also RVM there. Remote video monitoring really can You know, protect the property better when you're watching and dealing with incidents before they ever escalate and become more significant. But we're also seeing, I gave another example in my prepared remarks of an active shooter detection sensor being used to prevent an issue. And I won't be surprised if we see, for better or worse, More demand for that solution in the commercial space. And that can also be a way that we augment what we're already doing and drive some ARPU. So those are the two things in the near term I'm probably looking for. Longer term, I think it's going to be our job will be to partner with the various players that can bring autonomous devices to bear for the benefit of the security of the property owner.

Okay, excellent. I appreciate all the color there. And then maybe a follow-up separately for Kevin. On the venture growth businesses, international plus commercial plus energy hub, last few quarters, I believe the rough estimate was these in aggregate represent around 33% of total SaaS and growing between 25% to 30% year-over-year. And I think I heard for 2Q, these are actually – these upticked. It's around 35% and growing – 30% plus. And so it sounds like these businesses are all accelerating. And it's good to hear the update on international hitting 1 million subs. Just any comments there? Is it acceleration across the board there? And are those numbers kind of correct? Thanks.

Yeah, yeah, those numbers are correct. You know, I think the one thing to keep in mind, I would still say for the year for 2026, you know, our our Thank you very much. does happen to be one of the sort of faster growing quarters because the programs launched in Q2 happen to be at this moment growing faster. So that's the predominant reason that you see that acceleration.

Okay, great. Well, I appreciate the color, guys. I'll hop back in the queue. Sure thing.

And I'm not showing any further questions at this time. And as such, this does conclude today's presentation. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect and have a wonderful day.