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?