Viant Technology Inc.

Okay. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Viant Technologies' fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. My name is David, and I will be your operator today. Before I hand the call over to the Viant leadership team, I'd like to go over a few housekeeping notes for the program. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you plan to ask a question, please ensure you've set your Zoom name to display your full name and firm. If you'd like to ask a question during the call, please use the raise hand function located at the bottom of your screen. Thank you for your attendance today. I'm now happy to turn the call over to Nick Zangler, SVP of Investor Relations for Viant.

Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to Viant Technologies' fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. On the call today are Tim Vanderhoek, co-founder and chief executive officer, Chris Vanderhoek, co-founder and chief operating officer, and Larry Madden, chief financial officer. I'd like to remind you that we will make forward-looking statements on our call today, including but not limited to statements regarding our guidance for Q1 2026 and other future financial results, our strategy, our platform development initiatives, including Vine AI, our pipeline and potential partnership opportunities, growth of our total addressable market, Our share repurchase program and industry trends that are based on assumptions and subject to future events, risks, and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. These forward-looking statements speak only as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update or revise these statements except as required by law. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements and our entire safe harbor statement, please refer to the news release issued today as well as the risks and uncertainties described in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2025 under the heading Risk Factors and in our other filings with the SEC. During today's call, we will also present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, are included in the news release issued today and in our earnings presentation, which have been posted on the investor relations page of the company's website and in our filings with the SEC. I would now like to turn the call over to Tim Vanderhoek, Chief Executive Officer of Viant.

Tim? Thanks, Nick, and thank you all for joining us today. We delivered strong fourth quarter performance, achieving new company records across all key metrics. Revenue increased 22% year-over-year, and contribution XTAC increased 19% year-over-year, both above the high point of our quarterly guidance range. When excluding political advertising, revenue and contribution extract increased 28% and 24% in the quarter, respectively, and more accurately reflects the true strength of our business. Growth was broad-based across verticals, driven by accelerating CTV demand, strong digital out-of-home, and mobile demand. increased utilization and further adoption of Viant's addressability solutions, and expanded use of the Viant AI product suite. Adjusted EBITDA increased 45% year-over-year to $24.7 million for the quarter and exceeded the high end of our guidance range. Our fourth quarter performance completes a solid year for Viant, In 2025, revenue increased 19% to $344 million. Contribution X-TAC increased 18% to $209 million. And adjusted EBITDA increased 29% to $57 million. While these are standout results as reported, our underlying performance was far stronger than these results indicate. Our contribution extract rose nearly 20% in 2025, while absorbing the effects of tariff-related pressure, cycling a difficult political comparison, and navigating the migration of a material client off-platform due to a corporate merger. We were also able to increase adjusted EBITDA nearly 30%, while absorbing... incremental operating expenses associated with our strategic acquisitions of iris tv and locker as we shift our focus to 2026 we foresee a year of accelerating performance attributable to a number of catalysts worth noting first we see a healthy ad environment evidenced by strengthening customer demand trends observed through this point in the quarter Our new flagship customer, Molson Coors, is live and actively deploying ad spend in the first quarter, with plans to ramp throughout the year and in the years to come. Joining Molson Coors are several major U.S. advertisers who have recently launched ad campaigns with Vine, including Whoop, the human performance company behind world-class wearable technology. Other notable wins include a leading CTV streaming service, a national charitable foundation, and a national convenience store chain. We expect these advertisers to significantly ramp ad spend in the coming quarters and we look forward to securing additional major U.S. advertiser wins throughout the year. We also expect major tentpole viewership events to drive incremental ad spend to CTV Channel this year. In February, the most watched Winter Olympics since 2014 averaged 23.5 million U.S. viewers, and the 2026 World Cup is projected to exceed a prior record of 26 million U.S. viewers later this year. Both marquee events are hosted by providers within our direct access premium publisher program, Peacock for the Winter Olympics, and Fox, Peacock, and various virtual MVPDs for the World Cup. Furthermore, we anticipate strong contribution from political advertisers in the second half of the year, fueled by midterm elections and the ongoing shift of political budgets from linear TV to CTV. Within our addressability suite, we expect to benefit from ramping adoption and increased utilization of IRIS ID, our industry-leading content identifier. And finally, I could not be more excited about the recent launch of Outcomes, our new branded AI decisioning solution powered by our AI lattice brain and intelligence layer. which is aimed at winning performance budgets across advertisers of all sizes. Chris and I are going to spend the bulk of our time today highlighting the capabilities, features, and use cases associated with the launch of outcomes. But I do want to provide an update on recent performance and progress across all three of our key strategic priorities, CTV, addressability, and buy-in AI. The migration of advertising dollars from linear television to CTV continues to accelerate, and our platform is strategically positioned to serve advertisers capitalizing on this shift. Reflecting this market dynamic, our customers increasingly directed their purchasing decisions towards CTV. with total CTV spend on our platform reaching a new all-time high in the quarter and representing 46% of total advertiser spend. For the second consecutive year, CTV contribution exact increased by more than 40%, over two and a half times the broader industry growth rate. This outsized adoption reflects Viant's strategic investments in CTV infrastructure, publisher relationships, and addressability solutions, which collectively position Viant as the platform of choice for CTV campaign deployment across the open Internet. Contributing to our outsized CTV growth is the continued expansion of our direct access premium publisher program. Direct access offers advertisers an efficient, targetable, and measurable path to purchase CTV ad inventory. By facilitating transactions directly with publishers, we can bypass bid stream resellers, allowing advertiser spend to be allocated to working media, not middlemen, driving better returns for our clients. For the full year of 2025, nearly 50% of CTV ad spend on our platform was transacted through our direct access premium publisher program, which includes CTV streaming services from leading providers like Disney, Paramount, Peacock, and many more. Our addressability suite is the bedrock of our buying platform. It includes the industry's leading audience identifier, Household ID, and the industry's leading content identifier, Iris ID. Viant's Household ID, our patented deterministic audience targeting and measurement solution, continues to see strong utilization amongst advertisers and was a meaningful contributor to top-line growth in the quarter. Household ID delivers superior addressability for advertisers looking to leverage their first-party data to reach specific audiences and measure campaign performance. Our household ID is truly ubiquitous, embedded in over 80% of all programmatic bid requests and over 90% of all CTV requests. And with 95% of all household addresses mapped to our ID graph, we can match advertisers to addressable audiences at a massive scale, with Household ID offering approximately four times the coverage of competing audience identifiers. Iris ID, our proprietary content targeting and measurement solution, continues to proliferate amongst publishers, enabling advertisers to deploy contextual campaigns at greater scale. In just over a year since its acquisition, the presence of Iris ID within the CTV bid stream has grown five-fold, reaching nearly 50% of incoming CTV bid requests during the first quarter. Iris ID empowers advertisers to target CTV inventory at the show level, going beyond the app. making it possible for advertisers to bid on unique contextual signals like emotional sentiment, tone, and brand suitability. This is made possible through direct integrations with the publisher's own content management systems, providing buy-in with a meaningfully higher resolution of contextual intelligence. Looking across our client base, financial institutions use IRIS ID for brand-safe ad placement. targeting categories like fine art and family, and content that conveys inspiration and reflection. Outdoor fashion retailers deploy IRIS ID for brand relevance, targeting categories such as nature and travel, and content that exudes reliability and ruggedness. Given the enhancement in performance, we have seen several advertisers and agencies mandate the use of IRIS ID across the entire CTV budgets. which is quite the endorsement and one that is likely to incentivize further adoption across ctv publishers in the quarter revenue attached to iris id utilization increased 90 percent sequentially moving on to buy an ai in early january we announced the launch of the fourth phase of buying ai our ai decisioning functionality AI decisioning introduces a new standard of autonomous optimization. It moves beyond initial ad campaign setup, providing for real-time campaign refinement and the technological agility to continuously react to fluid market conditions with the goal of delivering optimal campaign outcomes. The launch of AI decisioning was accompanied by the introduction of a new branded solution, appropriately named Outcomes, which we have built to service performance advertisers. At the surface level, the user interface level, Outcomes asks for just four basic inputs, the name of the advertiser or the advertiser's product or service, the budget, the flight dates, and the goal. be it incremental revenue, return on ad spend, or cost per action. Once submitted, the advertiser's work is done, and Vyan AI does the rest. Beneath the surface is a decisioning architecture purpose-built for autonomous campaign operation, which we call the AI Lattice Brain. Based on the advertiser inputs, the Lattice Brain constructs the most optimal media plan by leveraging differentiated and proprietary signals unique to Viant from within our intelligence layer. Signals that support a multitude of functions. For identity resolution, Lattice Brain utilizes signals like household ID and our custom identity graph to build and execute sophisticated audience targeting strategies, frequency capping, and sequential messaging capabilities. For supply quality evaluation, Lattice Brain leverages our unique integrations with direct access, premium publishers, and our custom supply scoring models. These models rank supply paths based on impression quality, brand safety, fraudulence, bot activity, and more, providing critical intelligence that informs channel and publisher mix modeling and price discovery. For performance enhancement, Lattice Frame Taps are high-fidelity signals, like Iris ID, along with attention and creative placement scoring models to maximize campaigns for viewability, engagement, and overall impact, aligning media delivery directly to advertiser-defined outcomes. Our AI Lattice Brain operates against a signal set that no competing DSP or standalone AI tool can replicate. Because it is dependent on proprietary identifiers, unique supply integrations, and optimized intelligence that accumulates only through our integrated stack. Importantly, Lattice Brain launches with this intelligence already in place. activating against a mature, high-fidelity signal foundation from day one. As campaigns execute, our platform continuously incorporates incremental performance data, further sharpening precision and efficiency. We believe this flywheel to decide, execute, measure, and refine, operating against the highest fidelity proprietary signals, is capable of delivering newfound levels of ad efficiency and performance that compounds over time. Historically, advertisers and agencies have been burdened with the responsibility of manually constructing and executing ad campaigns. They have had little choice but to navigate a highly complex and fluid bid stream, which operates at the staggering speed of up to 15 million bid requests per second, independently. This is a difficult task, even with the use of our proprietary data signals at their disposal. But with the launch of outcomes, the onus shifts to AI, and performance optimization becomes autonomous. Outcomes assumes the role of media planner, trader, and data scientist autonomously optimizing every decision in service of the advertiser's defined performance objective. As the culmination of all four phases of buy-in AI, Outcomes is a complete autonomous performance solution. Governed by our lattice-frame decisioning architecture, it leverages proprietary data signals within our intelligence layer to deliver measurable performance outcomes in a way that has not been done before. We have built the open Internet's first fully autonomous AI-powered ad product, designed to compete for performance budgets against the walled gardens. In a moment, Chris will discuss our go-to-market strategy and run through a few early case studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of our new outcome solution. Before concluding, I want to briefly address the broader industry discussion around AI and its impact on software platforms, including companies like Viant. We believe AI strengthens businesses built on proprietary data and domain-specific infrastructure. In our case, AI amplifies the structural advantages already embedded in our platform. there is an insurmountable gap between the theoretical ability to assemble a DSP interface using AI tools versus operating a scaled enterprise-grade programmatic platform supported by irreplicable infrastructure. While an LLM may generate generic bidding logic against commodity signals, our AI operates against deterministic household-level identity proprietary content level signals, exclusive direct access supply paths, and years of accumulated optimization intelligence. LLMs cannot replicate a household ID covering over 115 million U.S. households. Selectively embedded IRIS ID across more than 1,400 publisher content management systems or recreate direct publisher integrations representing over 75% of addressable CTV through prompt engineering alone. While AI may transform user interfaces across categories such as CRMs and analytics dashboards, at Viant, AI is not an overlay. It is fused with proprietary data and programmatic infrastructure. That fusion defines our platform architecture and reinforces our competitive positioning. In summary, we delivered on our commitment to re-accelerate top and bottom line growth in the fourth quarter, anchored by our three strategic priorities, CTV, addressability, and buy-in AI. Our business is strategically aligned to capitalize on the industry's largest and most transformative growth opportunities, where we continue to lead and innovate. We believe this positioning uniquely equips Viant to capture the next wave of brand and performance budget growth in 2026 and beyond. With that, I'll pass it over to Chris. Thanks, Tim. I'll provide an update on our customer go-to-market strategy, particularly as it pertains to the launch of outcomes. But first, let's take a step back and survey the broader advertising landscape. This year in the U.S., total advertising dollars are expected to reach nearly $450 billion. Of this, 30% will be allocated to brand budgets, while 70% will be allocated to performance budgets. To date, performance budgets have largely been dominated by search and social wall gardens, including Google, Meta, and Amazon. With the launch of outcomes, we intend to compete directly for performance budgets, aiming to divert spend to the open Internet by leveraging a complete end-to-end view of attribution across the entire customer journey, connecting initial CTV exposure to file conversion. Our go-to-market approach starts with our existing customers, where we see an opportunity to drive significant organic growth as we increasingly service their performance budgets in addition to their existing brand budgets. Virtually all of our customers allocate spend to search the social law gardens as part of a well-rounded, holistic marketing strategy. We intend to leverage our existing relationships to showcase the effectiveness of outcomes and win new performance budgets from our existing customers. This initiative is well underway, and I would like to highlight a few examples of our outcomes product at work. Over 20 existing customers have extensively tested outcomes, with a number of them implementing outcomes on an ongoing basis, one of which is McKenzie Childs, a luxury home decor brand and prominent seller of tableware, kitchenware, and decorative home furnishings. In our initial test, we ran two separate ad campaigns for McKenzie Childs, each identical in scope with both campaigns seeking to maximize sales conversions over the same time period with the same budget. The only difference was that one campaign was planned, executed, and optimized by a human expert, which served as our control group, while the other campaign was planned, executed, and optimized by our new fully autonomous outcome solution. We even handicapped outcomes by restricting the use of retargeting strategies, which would have further enhanced performance, and yet still the campaign utilizing outcomes delivered a 58% lower cost per conversion compared to the control group. Let me clearly articulate this result. For this test, the human expert campaign was able to generate a $135 sale for every $33 spent on advertising, while outcomes was able to generate a $160 sale for every $14 spent on advertising, a 58% reduction in cost per outcome. So for the same budget, outcomes generated over a 180% increase in total sales versus the control campaign. There are two primary reasons behind outcomes' superior performance. First, at any given moment, amongst trillions of potential campaign configurations, by definition, there must exist one ideal campaign that best allocates spend across the right channels, publishers, audiences, and content, and does so at the right price to yield the most optimal outcome. In the pursuit of this optimal outcome, we believe our AI lattice brand is simply far better at digesting and interpreting all of our proprietary data signals, which serve as inputs utilized to create the most ideal campaign. And second, in a fluid marketplace, the ideal campaign configuration is always changing. LatticeBrain is uniquely capable of iterating and redesigning campaigns in real time in response to fluid market conditions at a speed that is simply impossible for humans to replicate. And therefore, it is far better equipped to continuously reconfigure for the most ideal campaign configuration, which results in driving superior business outcomes for the customer. And another client test, UMass Global, a private university with over 19,000 students, pitted outcomes against human experts with a goal of driving high intense student inquiries. Even with a short training period, outcomes achieved an 82% lower cost per outcome compared to the control group. Campgrounds of America, one of the nation's largest campground franchise businesses, tested outcomes during a recent holiday season with a with a goal of driving confirmed purchase events outcomes delivered a 76 reduction in cost per purchase event compared to the control group tire discounters one of the largest tires and automotive service retailers in the u.s recently tested outcomes seeking high intent lead events outcomes delivered a 43 reduction in cost per lead compared to the control group Eucora, a biotech healthcare company, saw a 95% reduction in cost per outcome, while the Alzheimer's Association saw a 68% reduction in cost per outcome. And the list goes on. Based on these results, we believe Outcomes is clearly capable of driving a meaningful inflection in return on ad spend for advertisers. As utilization scales amongst our existing customer base, we see an immediate opportunity to accelerate organic growth. We believe that over time, clients will move toward autonomous platforms that deliver increased performance and greater reliability in achieving outcomes. Beyond our existing customers, outcomes enables Viant to aggressively pursue performance budgets across the more than 10 million advertisers currently spending with Search and Social Wall Gardens. And because virtually all of these prospective advertisers are yet to utilize the highly effective CTV channel, We simply need to prove that their first dollar allocated to CTV via outcomes will outperform their next dollar allocated to Search and Social Wall Gardens, where we believe they are already overinvested and seeing diminishing returns. We are also seeing strong enterprise adoption with major U.S. brands, including Molson Coors, as they partner with Viant across a broad range of industry verticals. We recently announced a partnership with Whoop, the human performance company behind world-class wearable technology, where Viant was designated as their DSP of record. Whoop chose Viant because they recognize CTV as the most effective digital channel for growth and value our capacity to deliver measurable incremental results via proprietary high-fidelity data signals. With aggressive growth ambitions, Woot plans to deploy a sizable ad budget over the next two years through Viant's buying platform. We believe major U.S. advertisers are increasingly partnering with Viant because of our unique value proposition, rooted in independence, CTV leadership, proprietary data and addressability solutions, and AI capabilities. To capitalize on recent momentum, we have expanded our enterprise sales team, appointing tenured executive sales leaders across key industry verticals, including healthcare, CPG, QSR, retail, and travel and tourism. These seasonal leaders bring deep, long-standing relationships with major U.S. advertisers and are tasked with securing new flagship accounts. And to best serve the diverse needs of major U.S. advertisers who manage both large brand budgets and large performance budgets, our buying platform remains flexible in use. Advertisers may choose to run campaigns manually, as they have traditionally done, or they can choose to leverage various individual components of our AI suite, including AI bidding, AI planning, and AI measurement and analysis, or they can choose to go all in on autonomous advertising. delegating the entire construction and execution process to our outcome solution powered by our lattice brain ai decisioning architecture and intelligence layer in closing i want to reiterate that our long-standing vision has always been to deliver autonomous advertising to the open internet After years of dedicated investment, focus, and persistence, we are thrilled to be in market with a fully autonomous buying platform, uniquely equipped with proprietary high-fidelity data signals. With this new asset, we see an unprecedented opportunity to expand our total addressable market and accelerate growth throughout 2026 and beyond, winning incremental spend from our existing customers, performance advertisers, and major U.S. brands. And with that, I'll turn it over to Larry to provide more detail on our financial performance. Larry?

Thanks, Chris. Before I begin, I would like to remind everyone that we have posted a presentation on our investor relations website that includes supplemental financial information to accompany today's call. We concluded 2025 with a strong fourth quarter, executing against the key strategic priorities Tim outlined, CTV, addressability, and AI. and translating that momentum into record financial performance. Before diving into our detailed fourth quarter results, I will provide a high-level summary of our full-year performance. For the full year of 2025, we achieved record results across all key metrics. Revenue totaled $344.2 million, increasing 19% year-over-year. Contribution X-TAC totaled $208.7 million, increasing 18% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA totaled $57.4 million, increasing 29% year-over-year. And adjusted EBITDA margin expanded nearly 250 basis points year-over-year to reach 28%. Finally, non-GAAP net income totaled $41.1 million in 2025, increasing 19% year over year. I'll now move on to our results for the fourth quarter. Revenue for Q4 was $110.1 million, up 22% year over year and 5% above the high end of our guidance range. On a sequential basis, revenue increased 29% from Q3. Contribution X-TAC from Q4 totaled $64.6 million, up 19% year-over-year and 1% above the high end of our guidance range. On a sequential basis, Contribution X-TAC increased 22% from Q3. Both revenue and Contribution X-TAC represent record results in a quarterly period. It is important to note, as Tim mentioned, our underlying businesses performing stronger than our reported results indicate, primarily attributable to the difficult comparison brought about by last year's high political ad spend contribution. When excluding political ad spend contribution from the prior year election cycle, which weighed on revenue growth by approximately 600 basis points, and contribution XTAC growth by approximately 500 basis points in the quarter, revenue increased 28% year-over-year, and contribution XTAC increased 24% year-over-year on a pro forma basis. New customer momentum also remains strong, as evidenced by the recent announcement of a new multi-formed multi-year partnership with Whoop, alongside a number of recently established wins with other major U.S. advertisers, including Molson Coors. We believe these trends reinforce our strong competitive positioning and support our ability to continue outperforming the broader programmatic market over the long term. We delivered strong performance across most customer verticals in Q4, with financial services, public services, and CPG leading the way. Advertisers continue to select Vine for access to emerging digital channels, with CTV adoption reflecting the broader industry shift toward premium, addressable video. In Q4, customer-directed CTV purchasing accounted for a record high of 46% of total platform spend, with nearly half running through our direct access premium publishers. CTV spend reached an all-time high on the quarter as advertisers increasingly prioritize CTV to drive performance outcomes. Advertisers industry-wide continue to shift their media mix towards emerging digital channels such as CTV streaming audio and digital out-of-home. Reflecting this secular trend, customer-directed purchasing on our platform across these channels collectively represented approximately 54% of total platform spend for the year. up from 51% in 2024 and 43% in 2023. Viant remains well-positioned as a leading partner for advertisers moving beyond traditional display to capitalize on next-generation media formats. Reflecting advertiser preference for high-impact, measurable formats, customer-directed video spend, inclusive of CTE, reached a record high and represented 63% of total spend in the quarter, underscoring Viant's strong positioning to serve this demand. Non-GAAP operating expenses totaled $39.8 million in the fourth quarter, representing a 7% year-over-year increase and an 8% sequential increase. Notably, operating expenses include strategic investments related to the acquisitions of Iris TV, which closed in November 2004, and Locker, which closed in February 2025, both of which expand our long-term product capabilities and are intended to support long-term growth. Excluding these acquisitions, organic non-GAAP operating expenses increased a modest 5% year-over-year and increased 8% sequentially, reflecting continued operating leverage and disciplined expense management. Importantly, we remain focused on scaling efficiently. Even as we continue to invest in innovation across Viant AI and our broader technology stack, we are delivering measurable gains in productivity, increasing trailing 12-month A trailing 12-month contribution tax per employee by over 8% year-over-year, marking 10 straight quarterly increases, a clear signal of improving operational efficiency. Adjusted EBITDA for Q4 was $24.7 million, exceeding the high point of our guidance by 5%, and growing 45% year-over-year and 54% sequentially. Adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of contribution tax was 38% for the quarter, above our guidance range and representing nearly 700 basis points of improvement over the prior year period. Non-GAAP net income, which excludes stock-based comp and other adjustments, totaled $19 million for the quarter, up 37% from $13.8 million in the prior year. Non-GAAP basic earnings per Class A share outstanding was $0.23 in the fourth quarter compared to $0.17 in the prior year. In terms of share count, we ended the quarter with 63.3 million total shares outstanding, consisting of 17.6 million Class A shares and 45.7 million Class B shares. We ended the quarter with a strong balance sheet, including $191.2 million in cash and cash equivalents, $219.2 million in positive working capital, no debt, and full access to our $75 million credit facility. During the quarter, we generated $33.1 million of cash flow from operations and $28.2 million of free cash flow, up 101% and 132%, respectively, year over year. We also remain disciplined in our capital allocations. Since launching our share repurchase program in May 2024, we've returned $59.6 million to shareholders. As of March 9th, approximately $40.4 million remains available under our current authorization. We intend to continue executing this program opportunistically with a focus on maximizing value for long-term shareholders, particularly during periods when our stock is undervalued. We believe our strong financial foundation combined with consistent execution and a balanced capital allocation strategy positions us well to capture growth opportunities and drive shareholder value in the quarters ahead. Turning now to our Q1 outlook. For the first quarter of 2026, we expect revenue of $83 to $86 million, up 20% over the prior year period at the midpoint. Contribution XTAC of $49 to $51 million, reflecting 17% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. Non-GAAP operating expenses of $40.5 to $41.5 million, up 10% year-over-year at the midpoint. And adjusted EBITDA of $8.5 million to $9.5 million, representing a 67% year-over-year increase at the midpoint. And finally, we expect an adjusted EBITDA margin as a percentage of contribution XTAC of 18% at the midpoint, representing over 500 basis points of improvement over the prior year period. The midpoint of our guide assumes record Q1 performance across revenue, contribution XTAC, and adjusted EBITDA. I would also like to make a couple of general observations about our outlook for 2026. In 2026, we expect contribution XTAC to continue outpacing the broader U.S. programmatic market, which is projected to grow approximately 13%, driving further market share gains. We expect year-over-year growth rates in revenue and contribution extract to accelerate sequentially as we move through 2026, primarily driven by new client onboarding, ramping organic growth, and political contribution in the back half of the year. We also expect revenue and contribution at Stack to continue growing faster than non-GAAP operating expenses, leading to continued adjusted EBITDA margin expansion in 2026. In closing, we delivered another record quarter, executing against our strategic priorities and advancing innovation across our platform. We believe we are well positioned for sustainable long-term growth, given our strategic alignment with secular growth trends, including CTV, addressability, and Viant AI. And with that, I'll turn the call back over to the operator for questions. Operator?

Thank you, Larry. We will now proceed to the Q&A session. As a reminder, if you have a question, please use the raise hand feature in your controls located at the bottom of your Zoom window. And our first question comes from Jason with Craig Halem. Jason.

All right. Thanks, guys. I appreciate that. Maybe I'll start off just, Larry, where you ended that. You talked several times about the opportunity for accelerating growth through 2026. Maybe frame expectations for the year relative to the guide for Q1, kind of what drives that upward swing as 2026 progresses.

Yeah, certainly. Thanks, Jason. Well, if you break down, we've talked a lot about the tailwinds we're having right now. And if you break them down relative to our Q1 guide, which can kind of speak to what we see in the future quarters. First of all, Q1, we had limited contribution from Molson, Coors, and Whoop. Both of the advertisers onboarded during the quarter and only have spent modestly. We expect that for both of them to significantly ramp beginning in Q2. Similarly, with outcomes, very little contribution in Q1, really a lot of early stages of testing. And as we move through the quarters, we expect that to obviously contribute nicely. We talked about other customer wins that we haven't announced. We talked about them a bit generically. Many of those are also ramping up in the second and third quarters. So we expect to get a lift from that. And relative to Q1, you know, Q1 is historically our lowest quarter. And I think this year, based on our mix of clients, maybe we're over-indexed a little bit towards customers that – Customers that have the lowest or the most seasonality, negative seasonality in Q1, which impacted Q1 guy a little bit, certainly relative to Q4. But we see a nice ramp up as we move through based on the new clients we're winning, outcomes coming through and starting to build up, that it will build nicely. We're very confident that it will build nicely as the quarters progress in terms of growth.

All right. Good color on that, Larry. Thank you. I want to step back and maybe talk about the late stage deal pipeline that you guys had talked about a couple of quarters ago. Just want to get an update on how you feel that's progressed the last few months, how you feel about win rates in deals that have closed, and then just maybe what has been your ability to add or to replenish to that pipeline of additional late stage opportunities?

Yeah. I'll start with that. One of the big areas of investment around operating expenses is building out the enterprise sales team. And so I think we've done a great job of putting leaders in place that are from high-quality places. We pulled leaders, vertical categories from TikTok, Yahoo, many other very high-quality companies. So that investment is going to continue to replenish that sales pipeline there. It's not just the win rate, I would say. It's who we're beating, much larger competitors at late stage in the game. We're always up against a very large competitor, and typically you're seeing the advertisers select buy-in for the innovation that we're pumping out. So that pipeline continues to grow. We talked to most investors. We mentioned last year around $250 million of pipeline. We've closed very big wins in that. Some of those have been delayed to this year. A lot of times when we don't win a customer, they've chosen not to make a change until a future period because it is a fairly big lift to change platform providers. And so I think some of those will get kicked into the back half of this year as that determination of when to switch. You want to add anything? I would just say, though, in these pitches, it's becoming very apparent of our advantage around our proprietary data, both around household ID, the continued scaling of IRIS ID, our supply quality models that doesn't get enough attention but clients find incredibly valuable, our direct access program. of being able to be direct to the largest content owners in the world. All of that is really opening a lot of eyes with a lot of these large brands. And really, these large brands, and I think they all have a commonality, is that they have to drive higher growth. And they've looked at, many of them are looking at their playbook that they've run for the last four or five years, giving the largest platforms in the world most of their money. While those companies have outsized growth, the largest platforms in the world, their business suffers. And I think we're a great counterpunch to that, and a lot of marketers are really taking a look at the proprietary data that we have and saying that's a way for them to deliver more growth in the future years.

Perfect. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.

Thanks, Jason. Our next question comes from Laura Martin with Needham. Laura?

Okay, so these are fantastic numbers. Somebody just has to tell you that, and I'm going to ask about you versus your growth in the quarter. So when we look at DB360, their third party was down 2%. The Trade Desk up 13% in net revenue. You guys up 19% in net revenue. Really big size difference. Like you guys are tiny compared to those two. My question is, Are you taking share from these – you just said you were taking share from these bigger companies, but how much of this is sustainable over time? Because I sort of feel like Wall Street thinks globally scaled large footprints have competitive advantage over smaller companies. Right now you are disproving that, but convince me that small kind of can win at these much higher revenue growth numbers than small. Google, and Trade Desk, who are your sort of globally scaled competitors in your direct business, because these numbers are amazing. And then the other, I wanted to drill down on the IRIS ID. I remember at CES a year ago we were talking, you had just bought IRIS, maybe it was two years ago, I'm sort of forgetting. You said it was up five times year over year, and you are now at 50% of the incoming CTV bid stream had IRIS IDs. What's the gating factor there? Would you expect that to get to 75%, 100%? What's stopping more usage, or do you expect that kind of up 5X to continue over in 26 and 27?

Why don't you take Iris? Yeah, so with Iris, we've seen incredible adoption of the Iris ID. What that means is that we need content owners to carry it. And we've made announcements with some of the largest content owners, the largest television manufacturers. And the Iris technology in and of itself to be able to run computer vision, to contextualize the video, pull out emotional sentiments, check for brand suitability, this is checking a lot of boxes for marketers. Most marketers, I will say, they're completely unaware of the fact that when they buy CTV, they're only able to buy at the app level through other platforms. So you can only buy the app. A lot of these large apps have 20,000, 30,000 titles of content. So a brand may not be the right fit for half of those content titles. And so most brands are unaware of that, and when you give them that problem statement, Iris completely answers that. That's number one. Number two, marketers have been testing it. As we said, revenue from Iris ID was up 90% from Q3 to Q4, so huge growth. Why? Because they see the performance improvement. When they see the performance improvement, they bid higher for those IRIS IDs that are relevant for that brand. It's driving, on average, we've said, a 46% increase in conversion rate. Forget upper funnel metrics like brand awareness and consideration. Just straight up conversion rate and sales. So marketers bid up for it. Content owners get more money for it. That increases the amount of content owners that will then carry the IRIS ID. So we're at approximately 50% now. We believe we're going to continue to scale that. We think it's reasonable that we would get to 70% penetration this year. And so, you know, the future looks really bright for Iris, and it's also really bright for our customers because they're taking advantage of that and they're driving greater returns. Again, being a buy-side player, we only care about what drives our customers' business. If we drive their business and their growth, they're going to spend more money on our platform. So on your first question, just can the smaller company beat the larger companies, I think we're proving it now, and we really believe it's sustainable over the long run due to proprietary data. When you can only target at the app level and not achieve the performance, but buy it, can deliver the performance, that's really a big gating item. The second concept here is that the large platforms have been self-reporting their own success back to these brands. Meanwhile, the total sales of the brand are actually down. So these things aren't correlating, and they've had now half a decade or a decade of working with these larger companies where this is just a continual output year after year. So they've really lost faith in the reported metrics that the platforms are using, and I think they're looking for an independent buy-side platform to help them understand what's driving success for their business. So what drives our success? It's proprietary data and buying AI, which is the automation and the autonomy where they can get way more productive with their media dollars at work. And I would add to that direct access. By pulling out all the middlemen, the same dollar has more working media. They're getting more ad impressions per the dollar than they were prior to direct access being there. It's really the combination of all of this that's driving better efficiency when you work with buy-in relative to, you mentioned Google, Trade Desk, or in Amazon. Amazon has a different type of perspective where they're really good at subsidizing businesses in the near term. I think you're seeing that with their 1% fees that they've been out in the marketplace or bundling of the products of AWS plus subsidization. But in the end, Google and Amazon, the two very large platforms that we compete with, platforms sell media. We help the buyers of that media allocate their budgets appropriately across. We're only on their side of the table. We're not on the other side of the table. And I think that's another thing that the Fortune 500 or large advertiser set has come to grips with is like, actually, I can't believe these numbers because I have a decade's worth of data that says it doesn't correlate to overall business results. And I need a partner just on my side with proprietary data and the automation of the workflows to actually improve efficiency of their business. I firmly believe that it's sustainable. I think you're, you know, when it comes to whoop, we beat the trade deaths. When it comes to others, we beat Google. You're seeing with down on third parties. So we've proven it many times. And although Amazon had a banner 20, 25 years, certainly in the space, that I don't believe is sustainable over the long run as marketers are smarter and smarter to not trust a platform who's selling them media or ads.

is a better way to say it you can't trust the metrics that you're looking at thank you very much great numbers thank you thank you our next question comes from tom white with da davidson tom uh great uh thanks for taking my questions nice end of the year guys maybe just with regards to your commentary about the expansion of your addressable market You know, if I think back, it seems like a lot of the recent product innovations that you've launched were initially conceived around, like, kind of going towards the smaller end of the market, right, those sort of search and social advertisers. But, you know, over the last several quarters and thus far this year, it seems like you're getting traction with kind of the bigger boys with some of this innovation or at least getting their attention. Like, you know, when you look out to 26%, 27%, 28%, What sort of a bigger opportunity do you think for you? And then just if you can quickly comment on Iris ID as a competitive mode. Obviously, you guys have a head start there, and the numbers look great, but, like, I don't know, what's stopping any of the other big platforms from, you know, going out and trying to convince, you know, content owners to start embedding this, you know, this idea or coming up with something similar?

Thanks. Yeah, I'll answer first on the expanding TAM. You know, I think that you have to have – what we see as a commonality, I think in big brands, they have brand-based budgets where they're looking to raise awareness and consideration for their products and services that might pay off in a future period. But they also have performance-based budgets where they've got to get sales now. And really what you have to do is create ad products that address both of those. And that's really what we've aimed to do. So, you know, if I look at these TTC brands, many of them start only in performance, but they quickly realize that they tap out in meta or Google's performance max or demand gen or search. They tap out there because they can't drive growth after a certain period. So then they realize, oh, we have to invest in our brand to raise our baseline sales. And so what we're seeing is that when we go down market to these direct consumer e-commerce companies, we're seeing that what they need is they need to tap into CTV. That's really going to drive growth for them. But they need tools. They need a level of workflow automation that they're used to in some of these platforms like Meta's Advantage Plus or Google's PMAX. So we deliver that with outcomes. But they're tapping into a really high-growth channel that not only drives brand awareness but also is capable, as I said, with solutions like Iris ID, they can drive the lower funnel performance for sales now as well. So, you know, what's bigger? Look, the down market DTC and e-com companies or small businesses, Meta, Google, they have an audience of 10 million businesses that buy advertising from them. If you look at the open Internet, I don't know, 10,000 to 20,000 companies buy advertising in the open Internet. And how many companies buy television? Maybe 1,000 to 2,000, something like that. So we're looking at addressing. We want to, again, all marketers of all sizes have similar challenges. You have to create products for both. But we see them just both equally as appealing. On the Iris ID question on why someone couldn't just copy it, it really is the network effect of Iris ID, and it's why we hit it so hard last year in scaling that ID. Network effects of tying the ecosystem around this identifier, and that's why getting to critical mass was critical. so important for us in 2025 and scaling that. And how do we do it? We've done over 1,400 integrations with content management platforms, all various content management platforms. Even a big content owner, they'll have many content platforms underneath it. So we've done all these integrations, again, over 1,400. That takes time, resource, and effort to actually get done. Or you could just adopt the IRIS ID. And every big platform would have to go do the similar types of integrations to replicate what the IRIS ID brings. The second area of that network effect is just the OpenRTV protocol that we operate in. There's only one spot for a content object ID in the OpenRTV protocol, and Iris ID is implemented nearly 50% of the time in that spot. So the content owner is really not incentivized to bring a second one in because you can't even get it through the RTB protocol with IRIS ID installed. So there's a number of factors there. I would just ladder it up in total to network effects of this content identifier that we've captured in 2025. Thank you.

Very interesting, helpful call. I appreciate it. Thanks, Tom.

Great. Thanks so much, and congrats on the quarter. First, I wanted to ask about outcomes. You mentioned that you ran about 20 outcomes pilots in Q4 with a number of clients implementing outcomes. Anything you can share maybe on the initial conversion rate and where you see that over time? And then how should we think about sort of incremental uplift to monetization as you roll out this functionality across sort of your broader advertiser base?

Yeah. I don't have the exact numbers on conversion rate, but there's just a number of factors. Obviously, the cost efficiency relative to the sales that Chris touched on in our prepared remarks there are really, really good compared to what anybody's seen from an autonomous platform. So I think overall conversion rate, it's hard to give you an exact answer to that other than we're beating what the current status quo is, which is manual optimization or some level of automated optimization that's out there today. And I would just say, you know, the real throughput line here about the performance improvements is the fact that we have proprietary data signals that are extremely valuable. But when you couple that with an autonomous workflow, the speed of that is what's driving the improved campaign results or the performance improvements. And it's doing it at a level of reliability for marketers that is way greater than that of human-based, stressed-out workflows. When I think of the jobs of traders, really, the gun that they're under, so to speak, they have to come up with the optimization strategies and the tactics that they're going to pull, and they do that on a day-to-day basis. And it is an absolute grind. And that leads to an instability in the reliability of the metrics. And really, the autonomous workflows that we've put out here are really driving tremendous value, and it's what we think marketers over time are going to continue to adopt.

Got it. That's very helpful. And then just would love to hear your thoughts sort of on the Trade Desk OpenAI partnership and what that means for the programmatic space more broadly and then for your platform more specifically. And I guess, what are your thoughts on being involved in monetizing those emerging AI services?

Yeah, obviously the number of users using chatbots is really exciting when you look at it as a brand-new channel. It's kind of like social when it started to originally emerge and users flocked to it. So there's a ton of real estate available there for advertising. I think OpenAI's strategy in partnering with third-party DSPs is kind of like Facebook's early strategy they were a part of our TV everyone was involved and then they pulled it all back and went with their current go to market so we're always a little slower and going to work with organizations like this because we're mindful that they may change strategy overnight like You saw agentic checkout with commerce transactions. That's already been abandoned. So I would caution investors about putting any level of excitement until you really see what is the ad format, how does it actually work, and what level of data would be shared. I think with the announcement around the trade desk, It doesn't really fit with the RTV protocol as we do. You would have to have sensitive user level data be sent across. Usually big platforms don't pass that level of granular information due to consumer privacy reasons. So the truth is we don't know what OpenAI is thinking here at Viant. We're watching, but there's a huge amount of users, a huge amount of real estate and time spent, and certainly a whole bunch of interesting insights that OpenAI knows that no one else knows, kind of like search data is unique. But when I chat with an application, I'm very rarely ready to buy right now. I'm usually, you know, middle of the funnel doing some research information. So although very interesting and exciting around future opportunity, I don't think that's a 2026 revenue generator in a large-scaled way. Of course, these guys are innovating at incredible rates, and so I may eat my words in the back half of the year, but we're watching, we're paying attention to it, and it appears to be, Chatbots appears to be a brand-new channel that's opening up tons of available inventory for advertisers to get out So as we learn more and go throughout the year, we'll certainly participate where it makes sense. Relative to Trade Desk, I think Criteo, who's actually been announced, I do want to say Trade Desk was a rumor and interesting timing there, but Criteo has been announced. That makes more sense around product listing or shopping-based ads that they could provide given Criteo's customer base. So Criteo feels more like a natural fit. I would say Trade Desk and buy-in seems a little bit different.

That's very helpful. Thank you.

Thanks, Maria.

Our next question comes from Matt with Citizens. Matt?

Thank you so much for taking my question. The first one, just to follow up on some earlier comments about Amazon, you know, they've announced new partnerships with Netflix and also their integration with Roku. It seems that they're obviously pushing more and more into their ability to service third-party inventory. Can you just talk about just How would you expect, and obviously today most of what the spend is going to is Prime Video and to Amazon's own platforms, but they're clearly more aggressively going after that third-party inventory. Just how do you see that shaping up here in 2026 and 2027? Why aren't they as big a threat as maybe the media seems to portray them?

Well, I don't want to say they're not a threat. They are a threat. They're subsidizing their products. They're doing the bundling strategies that Google executed. So it definitely is a threat. And by it, we're paying a lot of attention to Amazon. So I don't want to discount Amazon as a competitor in the space like some others have. I think, you know, we do focus on Amazon. But what Amazon knows, they know a lot about customers of Amazon. They know very little in all the other retailers like Walmart, CVS, all these other products. And so if you're a QSR, is Amazon DSP a good fit for you? Likely not based on the proprietary data that they have. If you're a product that is sold through Amazon, Amazon DSP makes a lot of sense to actually partner with to track the sales and reach consumers on Netflix or some of the other platforms. I caution the other big content owners out there because if Amazon runs the same playbook as Google, what they do is they say Prime Video outperforms every other app on the buy. And it's all about by doing that integration, we bought the ad, but, hey, the ROAS was not as good as Prime Video. I can basically write what the report is going to say as long as they follow that same strategy, and they have been. I think they have a major trust issue when it comes to the metrics that they're reporting in the platform if the transaction doesn't happen on Amazon.com. That being said, a lot of products and services are sold on Amazon, and I think it makes sense for those customers to use the Amazon DSP in that way. But if your product is also sold in 50 other retailers, the Amazon DSP really isn't a good fit for you.

Great. That's very helpful. And then just to follow up on, I believe when you landed Molson, they talked about findability being like the key metric that was the reason why they went with you guys. For Whoop, was there a similar metric that they found? What was the product that really got them over the goal line to go with find? Thanks, guys.

Yeah, so they had a huge focus on CTV. This is a growth brand. They're a fast-growing company, and they're very focused on continuing to grow their brand. And in CTV, what do you want? You want addressability, both in terms of I want to reach the right households, the right people, and then I also want to know what type of content they're consuming so I can make my ad relevant to that content. That drives performance. So, yeah, heavily looked at our addressability solutions. A lot of clients kick the tires hard on that right now, and they see our scale relative to other players, ours is dramatically longer. And one of the big reasons is we've been at this. This isn't a two- or three-year effort. We've been at this for over 10 years. We're a leader in this space. So I expect many more brands to continue to focus around addressability. A lot of people think addressability just for targeting. The largest advantage of addressability is measurement. For you to truly see, I showed a CTV ad, did I get a sale? But it's not just that, it's what else did they do in the journey? Oh, we showed a CTV ad, they then went to Google, searched, later were exposed to a social ad, and then purchased. That level of visibility that you can give to a marketer and help them properly allocate their money accordingly is incredible. Without an addressability solution for measurement that we offer, they will continually just put money to whoever showed the last ad, which marketers are increasingly not falling for anymore. I just want to add to that too, not about Whoop, but about Molson Coors around the addressability solutions of IRIS. If you're a regulated industry like alcohol, you cannot show ads in children's content. And so IRIS becomes a critical content identifier as well. for you to actually deploy money with confidence that you're not going to get a fine for showing ads in children's content. And it's the combination of these two proprietary data signals that we have that's really pulling the large enterprise customers our way.

Okay. Our final question will come from Barton Crockett with Rosenblatt. Barton.

Okay. Thanks for squeezing me in. So I was wanting to ask two questions, really. First is, just looking at the growth rates that you're talking about, you know, CTB ex-political or contribution ex-tax ex-political up 24% in the fourth quarter, but slowing to the high teens in the first quarter. Do you see the ex-tax revenue number, you know, at some point returning to what you were doing in the fourth quarter and I know there were some seasonal factors in the first quarter, but that is kind of a notable slogan. So I was wondering if you could address that first.

Yeah, first is it's just the makeshift of our advertisers and the way that they spend their money. It's better to look at it on an annualized basis. So if you look at our contribution extract on an annualized basis of 2025, we're going to hopefully outperform that in 2026, given the customer wins. And as we mentioned, Woop, Molson Coors, some of the large advertisers were, I don't want to say de minimis in Q1, but you know, slowly coming on, learning, understanding how things go. So those ad spends will kick in in the later quarters. And so I think the biggest thing to take away from our call is we're going to grow these numbers sequentially throughout the year. And as you look at the second half, political really kicks in. About half the money is spent in Q3 and about half the money is spent in Q4, roughly is the way that it goes all the way up until that election cycle. So I would really caution everyone to look rather than quarter to quarter. When you look at advertising-based businesses, there is some seasonality. There's a mix shift of the various advertisers on our platform that's really driving the Q1 number that you're seeing. But I can tell you the pipeline is strong. The growth of our business is very strong, and we think we'll deliver just like we did last year.

Okay. Thanks for that. And then one of the things I was just wondering about in terms of the LLM debate, um, You know, you mentioned that it might be easy for an LLM to vibe code an interface, but the value is really, you know, elsewhere, kind of the data and presumably the execution. Would it make sense for, you know, someone like Viant to perhaps use an LLM, though, as an interface, as a way to perhaps penetrate clients that are not wedded to the trade desk interface, you know, at the agency level, essentially to be an MCP where the execution is through you, but maybe the front end is clawed? You know, is that conceivable? Could that be an opportunity over time? Or is that something that's just not on the table because of the risk of them getting too much leverage or, you know, scraping your data?

No, look, the Vine AI interface is an LLM interface today. The users of that interface are not interacting with the traditional self-service user interface. So I think we've already delivered on that. It's getting users comfortable with that. I hate to say old habits die hard, but people like to click buttons. It's just a lot of work, and they want to know, is there a hallucination in the data? So a lot of this is test and learn and users getting comfortable with this new interface. is a big one. As far as an MCP, certainly going to be a big factor in the future. We're thinking about it each and every day. But, again, the market is moving so fast, quarter to quarter, you kind of have to project out. And so I think it absolutely, if the interface is your moat, you're in serious trouble in 2026 this year and in the outer years. So I think we have a lead there. We delivered it, you know, I think 18 months ago or so. We delivered that interface to customers for them to initially test and learn on. And people love it because there's no training. There's no certification. You don't need to go to Trade Desk Academy for two weeks and still make mistakes after that. So I think overall the interfaces are dead. Dashboards are dead. You really want an LLM to deliver the info. And I would just say, you know, what we're doing today – If you look at digital advertising and programmatic, these are human workflows. There's entire organizations that are built around these human workflows. When Tim's saying old habits die hard, although there's an incredible amount of innovation, and I believe that we're leading in that, We are the ones who are moving from human-based workflows to autonomous workflows. Autonomous, base word, autonomy. Where is all of tech going? It's going autonomous. So we are leading there. However, if I rolled out and said all brands today, if you want to interact with me, you must build your own agent that then plugs into my MCP, we are so far away from that today i know that there are early uh i would say kind of the green shoots that are out there that that we are looking at and i think those are going to be in in kind of the dtc e-commerce space that we're first going to see that we are very focused on that market so as we think about our own go to market as going after these uh these dtc and e-commerce brands we think that's a really good solution there but over time it does make a lot of sense that that an agent will come to the infrastructure that provides all of this and will want to go to infrastructure with incredible proprietary data, which we also have. So we do look to enable that in the future. And let me just add, we believe that LLM is the commodity. It's the proprietary data on top of that LLM which is unique or the application layer tied to the RTB infrastructure that we actually have. And I think, you know, getting to Chris's point here around humans, right now you have humans in a five-step process. The human is in the middle of it all. We've taken the human out of the middle and put it at the very front of the line. You set the guardrails, you set the goals, and then you let autonomy actually happen. And so that's really the big difference that I see. The LLM mode that they have is with consumers. ChatGPT has 650 million consumers spending tons of time per day on that. That's not commoditized. That's very valuable as a media seller. But for us, from an enterprise perspective, the LLMs are commoditized. I could swap out Gemini with OpenAI. I could swap out OpenAI with DeepSeek. It doesn't really provide very high levels of difference in the output sets there or noticeable levels of difference in quality. So to me, from an enterprise perspective, the LLM is the commodity. Proprietary data is the mode. And I think the commodity piece is that the reasons why many of them give you back the same answer is that they're all trained off of the same data. They're all trained off of scraping the web, all of them. Certainly you could argue some of them have certain proprietary data assets, certainly. But that is very – I think that's becoming understood that that is the piece that is commoditized. But that said, your core question, will we enable third-party agents to be able to intersect and interface through an MCP into our infrastructure? Yes.

Okay, that's interesting. Thank you.

Thanks, Martin.

That concludes the Q&A portion of the call. Thank you.

Thank you, everybody.

Have a good evening.