Viant Technology Inc.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Viant Technologies' first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. My name is David, and I will be your moderator 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 your firm. If you would like to ask a question during the call, please utilize the raise hand feature located at the bottom of your Zoom toolbar. Thank you for your attendance today. I am now pleased to turn the call over to Nick Zangler, SVP of Investor Relations for Viant. Thank you.

Good afternoon and welcome to Viant Technologies' first quarter 2026 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 Q2 2026 and other future financial results, our strategy, our platform development initiatives, including Vine AI, expected benefits of our acquisition of T-Vision, our pipeline and potential partnership opportunities, 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 quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31st, 2026, 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 and the mostly directly comparable gap measures are included in the news release issued today and in our presentation, which have been posted on the investor relations page of the company's website and in our filings with the SEC. I'd now like to turn the call over to Tim Vanderhoek, Chief Executive Officer of Buy-In.

Tim? Thanks, Nick, and thank you all for joining us today. We delivered strong first quarter performance, achieving new company Q1 records across all key metrics. Revenue increased 25% year-over-year, well above the high end of our quarterly guidance range, and contribution XTAC increased 18% year-over-year, above the midpoint of our quarterly guidance range. Growth was broad-based across verticals, driven by strong CTV demand increased utilization of our proprietary data, and expanded use of the Viant AI product suite. Adjusted EBITDA increased 81% year-over-year to $9.8 million for the quarter and exceeded the high end of our guidance range. We are off to a strong start in 2026, and Viant's market position and opportunity for growth have continued to strengthen. We expect accelerating top-line performance throughout the year, driven by a combination of new and existing catalysts. First, the ad environment remains healthy, as evidenced by strengthening customer demand trends observed throughout the first quarter. March performance was particularly robust, signaling strong business confidence to kick off the year. and we continue to see healthy demand trends midway through the second quarter. Our new flagship customers, Molson Coors and Whoop, among other major U.S. advertisers, went live in the first quarter and are now scaling spend across our platform. On a related note, we are currently actively engaged with our largest sales pipeline in company history. Perhaps more than ever, We believe major U.S. advertisers and their agency partners are seeking a new buy-side partner, one that is independent and objective, free of conflicts of interest, and can transparently deliver maximum return on ad spend. Vine is meeting this demand with a differentiated offering, equipped with proprietary data and evolving AI capabilities. Propelled by current market dynamics, we expect to win incremental ad spend from current customers and secure additional major advertiser wins throughout the year. Tenfold viewership events are also expected to drive ad spend to the CTV channel this year. The 2026 World Cup is hosted by providers within our direct access premium publisher program, and 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. We expect to benefit from ramping adoption and increased utilization of IrisID, our industry-leading content identifier, which recently reached nearly 50% penetration across all biddable CTV inventories. with additional major streaming services set to become IRIS-enabled later this year. Following our go-to-market launch in January, we are encouraged by early adoption of Outcomes by its fully autonomous AI-powered solution. Within our existing client base, we are beginning to capture performance budgets previously allocated to search and social channels. Advertisers are redirecting search and social spend toward the highly effective CTV channel, where spend doesn't merely take credit for sales that would have happened, regardless of a last second ad exposure. CTV actually drives net new customers. While early, we believe Outcomes is fully capable of servicing the 10 million advertisers electing to allocate spend across search and social channels. We expect outcomes to be a meaningful growth accelerator for Viant in the years to come. And finally, on May 1st, we closed on our acquisition of T-Vision, a leading television measurement provider, uniquely capable of quantifying the true value of linear TV, connected TV, and walled garden inventory through viewer attention-based insights. Together, and for the first time, we will activate T-Vision's attention data within the bid stream on a pre-bid basis, enabling advertisers to optimize budgeting and bidding decisions to inventory designed to capture genuine human engagement. In a moment, Chris will elaborate on the state of the markets. with specific reference to the growing number of opportunities available to Viant attributable to our commitment to innovate on behalf of advertisers, our commitment to remain an independent and objective partner, as well as favorable market dynamics well documented amongst trade publications. But first, I will provide an update on our recent performance and progress across our three key strategic priorities, CTV, Viant's proprietary data, and Viant AI. Within the CTV ecosystem, two major industry tailwinds are currently underway and remain in the very early stages. The continual migration of linear TV advertising dollars to CTV and the diversion of search and social performance budgets to CTV as the most sophisticated buying platform in the marketplace for CTV ad spend deployment Viant is exceptionally well positioned to capitalize on these tailwinds, both in the near term and for many years to come. Reflecting these dynamics, total CTV spend on our platform reached a new all-time high for a first quarter, accounting for over 50% of total ad spend. Contribution X-TAC increased well over 40%. And this performance in Q1 2026 marks the third consecutive year that CTV Contribution X-TAC has increased over 40% on a year-over-year basis, a rate that is three times that of the industry growth rate. This outsized adoption reflects Viant's strategic investments in critical CTV infrastructure, publisher relationships, and addressability solutions. which collectively established 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, with new integration announcements coming in the next few weeks. Direct access offers advertisers an efficient, targetable, and measurable path to purchase CTV ad inventory. By facilitating transactions directly with publishers, we bypass bid stream resellers, which reduces CPMs for advertisers and drives better return on ad spend for our clients. In the quarter, over 50% of CTV ad spend on our platform was transacted through direct access, which includes leading CTV streaming services, including Disney, Paramount, Peacock, and many, many more. Viant's exclusive data has expanded and now consists of three primary pillars of exclusive, proprietary insight into content, identity, and now, attention. Through our acquisition of Iris TV, our proprietary content signal continues to proliferate amongst publishers. enabling advertisers to deploy show level and contextual campaigns at greater scale. In just over a year since its acquisition, the presence of our content identifier, Iris ID, within the CTV ecosystem has grown fivefold, reaching nearly 50% of incoming CTV bid requests in the first quarter. Viant's content identifier empowers advertisers to target CTV ad inventory at the show level, providing a substantially more detailed and granular targeting capability relative to our competitors, who are limited to app-level targeting only. Iris uniquely enables advertisers to align their message with specific shows, contextual categories, emotional sentiments, tones, and brand suitable content. representing a degree of micro-targeting that enhances return on ad spend and drives outcomes. This is made possible through direct integrations with publishers' own content management systems, providing Viant with a meaningfully higher resolution of content intelligence. With new major streaming services slated to become enabled later this year, Viant's content identifier penetration is expected to soon reach over 75% of biddable inventory. Viant's household ID, our patented identity solution for audience targeting, saw utilization meaningfully accelerate in the quarter, fueled by a growing number of advertisers electing to deploy sophisticated campaign strategies. Household ID delivers superior addressability for advertisers looking to activate their first-party data to reach specific audiences and measure campaign performance. It is embedded in approximately 80% of all programmatic bid requests and now 96% of all CTV requests. And with 95% of all household addresses mapped to Viant's ID graph, we can connect advertisers to addressable audiences at a massive scale, offering over four times the coverage of other competing identity offerings. On May 1st, we closed on our acquisition of T-Vision, a preeminent television measurement provider uniquely capable of quantifying consumers' eyes-on-screen attention while watching linear TV, connected TV, YouTube, and prime video content. on and at inventory. T-Vision gathers this proprietary data point through their nationally representative panel of U.S. households, each equipped with T-Vision's computer vision and automatic content recognition technology. T-Vision's attention data provides advertisers with four unique signals, in-room presence, co-viewership, viewer demographics, and eyes-on-screen attention. with each signal offering critical insights exclusively available to buy-in's advertiser clients. In-room presence lets our customers know if their ad was delivered to an audience or an empty room. Co-viewership measures the total number of viewers in the room, allowing advertisers to optimize decisioning to target larger audiences. T-Vision enables the most accurate targeting and reporting of demographics across linear TV, CTV, and walled garden content. Within a typical household, one logged-in user registers across various streaming services. But a typical household includes multiple individuals, each with their own viewership preferences. As an example, in my household, Amazon believes my wife is watching the NBA playoff game on Prime Video, because she holds the Amazon account for our household. T-Vision's technology identifies the actual viewers within that household that are sitting in front of the TV when the content plays. Eyes-on-screen attentive viewership tracks whether the audience is actively watching the TV screen during content and ad airings, or if they are distracted or disengaged. Together, these insights provide Viant with an exclusive lens of the CTV market and enable our bidding algorithms to price all CTV inventory on a first-of-its-kind attention-adjusted CPM. Viant receives these attention signals in real-time, ahead of the ad break, enabling our AI-powered buying platform to to assign definitive attention scores and corresponding attention-adjusted CPMs to all CTV ad inventory and direct purchase decisions toward inventory where attention and price are aligned to maximize return-on-ad spend efficiency and deliver optimal outcomes. To be clear, Viant's proprietary data comprising exclusive content, identity, and attention signals, is unique to Viant and cannot be replicated by competitors such as Google, Amazon, OpenAI, or Anthropic. This is attributable to the strategic acquisitions of Iris and T-Vision, as we are the only company currently capable of activating attention as a pre-bid signal for advertisers. providing an exclusive and differentiated performance advantage for our clients. This takes me to Viant AI. Leveraging proprietary data spanning content, identity, and attention, our fully autonomous, AI-powered ad platform is actively building and executing campaigns without any human intervention and is delivering return-on-ad spend performance that human traders cannot beat. In early January, we launched Outcomes, a fully autonomous ad product designed to serve performance ad budgets. Outcomes is the do-it-for-me solution for the open Internet, ingesting just four basic inputs, the advertiser, the budget, the flight dates, and the goal. Based on these inputs, Vyan AI constructs the most optimal media plan, leveraging our exclusive data. After the advertiser provides Buying AI with their goals and budgets, Buying AI automatically constructs the ad campaign and transparently shows the advertiser where their ad will be placed, to which audiences it will be shown, the times of day it will run, and before deployment, asks the advertiser for approval. Once approved, Buying AI implements, executes, optimizes, and reports on the results without any human intervention, making decisions in milliseconds. Together, our exclusive data and Viant AI's Lattice Brain Decisioning Engine is producing better results than any form of manual optimization could ever achieve. And coming soon, Viant AI and our outcomes product, will lever T-Vision's attention data to optimize bidding decisions toward inventory that commands high attentive scores and features attractive attention-adjusted CPMs, driving yet another enhancement to return on ad spend efficiency that no other platform can offer. A growing number of advertiser clients are utilizing Buy an AI and our Outcomes product to deploy ad spend, and we continue to deliver impressive results. We will continue to expand the adoption of buy-in AI's full capabilities amongst our current customers while continuously enhancing the solution based on learnings from every impression we deliver and every exclusive data point buy-in AI receives. In summary, Viant is transforming from a media execution platform into an advertising intelligence company. The competitive landscape is increasingly split between traditional DSPs focused on media execution and closed ecosystems built around owned data, owned inventory, and self-contained measurement. Viant is building a different model, one built around the advertiser. We are combining proprietary data, independent measurement, and real-time activation into one self-reinforcing platform. Our identity, content intelligence, attention data, and cross-channel measurement help advertisers understand what media is worth, which impressions deserve investment, and how to activate against those signals in real time. That combination strengthens our moat. and separates buy-in from platforms built primarily around execution alone, as well as closed ecosystems where the same company sells the media and measures their own results. That is the model we are building, and it is the foundation for the next phase of buy-in's growth. With that, I'll turn it over to Chris to walk through the current market dynamics. Thanks, Tim. I would like to share our findings from recent interactions with agencies and advertisers across the marketplace. And I'll process these remarks by noting that this is an extraordinarily exciting time for Viant as we are addressing the largest RFP pipeline in company history. From our perspective, we believe there are three primary reasons why agencies and advertisers are increasingly engaging with Viant. Number one, Our commitment to relentlessly innovate on behalf of advertisers and their agencies by creating unparalleled efficiencies and exclusive data signals that are in high demand but only available in Viance platform. Number two, our commitment to remain a transparent, independent, and objective partner. And number three, favorable market dynamics. We believe advertisers and agencies have finally drawn a line in the sand with regards to the self-attributing tactics of walled gardens and the general lack of transparency provided by our competitors. To elaborate, beginning with our commitment to relentlessly innovate on behalf of advertisers, the market clearly recognizes Viant as a platform provider in a perpetual state of innovation, as demonstrated by our recent strategic investments, and a string of new product launches, all of which are designed to further establish Viant as the leading platform for CTV. Our solutions are industry-leading and exclusive to Viant. Household ID is the industry's leading audience identifier, boasting over four times the availability of alternative solutions. Direct access provides the cleanest, most efficient path to purchase premium CTV ad inventory in the market. Leveraging our content identifier, Iris ID, Viant was the first and remains the only buying platform that enables contextual targeting for CTV. In two years, we rolled out four phases of Viant AI solutions, culminating in a fully autonomous, AI-powered buying platform Producing results human traders and media planners cannot replicate. We acquired T-Vision, a leading attention measurement provider of TV, and we plan to strategically merge T-Vision's attentive insights with Iris ID to create an attention-optimized targeting and measurement solution for TV buying that does not exist elsewhere. And there is more to come. We will continue to invent new solutions unique to our platforms, that are designed to maximize return on ad spend efficiency and drive outcomes, helping our advertiser clients win in market and gain market share against their competitors. Last quarter, we announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Whoop, the human performance company behind world-class wearable technology. Viant is now the DSP of record for Whoop, responsible for powering their ambitious growth expectations. Whoop's fitness and health-focused wearable device competes with big tech competitors like Apple and their Apple Watch. But in partnership with Whoop, we have developed a marketing plan that utilizes Viant's full arsenal of advertising solutions and aims to compete and win versus Apple, among other competitors in market. Together, we expect to drive meaningful share gains for Whoop's wearable devices and help fuel their growth. Moving to the second reason advertisers are increasingly engaging with Viant. Viant has remained steadfast in our commitment to provide advertisers and agencies with a transparent solution that fully aligns their best interests with ours. And in doing so, we have established an unwavering degree of trust that ensures agencies and advertisers remain partners with Viant for the long term. Viant is an independent and objective platform. We do not own any publisher content, and therefore we have no motivation to direct ad spend towards any specific channel or publisher. We work on behalf of our advertiser clients to deliver optimal outcomes and return on ad spend efficiency, regardless of channel or publisher distribution. Competing platforms lack this level of integrity, and quite frankly, the worst offender is undoubtedly Amazon. The Amazon DSP is effectively a margin trap, strategically designed to drain all profit from the marketer. We hear these horror stories firsthand from advertisers leaving their platform. Amazon will first attempt to steer the vast majority of advertiser spend towards its owned and operated inventory, including Amazon Prime Video, where, of course, Amazon captures full margin. It then uses self-attribution measurement tactics to make the claim that all sales originated from its own inventory, compelling the advertiser to further increase spend with Amazon. What's more, Amazon directs consumer audiences to purchase the advertiser's product on the Amazon website, leading to the advertiser's growing dependence on Amazon as a primary sales channel. This dependency enables Amazon to trap more and more and more ad spend from the advertiser if they want to maintain their positioning in the Amazon store. As Amazon becomes an advertiser's leading distribution channel, it effectively crushes the advertiser's product margins because Amazon takes the largest cut of the sale amongst all retail distribution channels. And finally, Amazon leverages this sales data against the advertiser, to benefit competing advertisers in the same product category, and more egregiously, to develop its own competing white-label products. How on earth does this model represent a viable option for advertisers? Where is the partnership? There is no partnering with Amazon, and the advertisers that have been spurned by this model are looking elsewhere. And what they are finding is that true independence and objectivity is hard to come by these days. Google's DB360 deploys the same self-attribution tactics as Amazon, claiming YouTube and Google Search are the only channels capable of driving sales on behalf of the advertiser. Yahoo DSP is no different, claiming the same self-attribution across their publisher properties. Well, advertisers are finally waking up. They have learned you cannot trust a buying platform that also serves as a seller of ads. because selling their own content will always take priority at the expense of the advertiser. We believe this leaves Viant and the Trade Desk as the two remaining independent and objective enterprise-level buying platforms in market, which, of course, in light of recent press coverage, brings me to transparencies. Buyer's go-to-market strategy is fundamentally centered on providing advertisers and agencies with transparency, control, and the option to utilize our platform in a way that best suits their needs. We believe we are widely recognized as one of the most transparent buying platforms in the industry, consistently receiving client praise for the high degree of visibility we provide regarding platform fees. Vine's commitment to transparency is rooted in the proven effectiveness of our solutions. Essentially, our products pay for themselves. When advertisers opt to use household ID or iris ID for audience and contextual targeting, they are rewarded with a significantly enhanced return on ad spend, an investment that pays for itself. The same goes for when advertisers opt into AI bidding. which enables our algorithms to purchase inventory on their behalf. We generate savings that overwhelmingly accrue to the advertiser. We believe our go-to-market approach supports a mutually aligned business model that drives a win-win scenario for both buy-in and our agencies and advertisers. This commitment is further demonstrated by Vine's direct access solution, for which Vine charges no fee, passing the value of our direct-to-publisher integrations to our clients, allowing for more working media dollars and better campaign performance. In fact, direct access is specifically engineered to completely eliminate all unnecessary fees charged by bid stream middlemen, by creating what we believe is the most efficient programmatic route to premium inventory for our clients. Our business model is predicated on the success of our advertiser clients. We work on their behalf as a true partner, and therefore, when they win, we win. And finally, touching on market dynamics, which has been well documented amongst trade publications. From our perspective, it is abundantly clear that agencies and advertisers are finally ready to take action and explore alternative demand side partnerships. Notably, Vine maintains strong long lasting relationships with all of the major agency holding companies, which collectively account for approximately one third of our ad spend mix. As a trusted partner, Continuously innovating on behalf of advertisers, we welcome the opportunity to service incremental spend from these existing agency partners. Additionally, our team is actively engaged with a growing number of major U.S. advertisers. These are household names across CBG, retail, QSR, and healthcare verticals, representing ad spend opportunities that either match or eclipse ad spend levels associated with our recent major wins. notably Molson Coors and Whoop. Through a superior offering continuously enhanced by innovation, exclusive data signals, a model built on transparency, and favorable market dynamics, we believe we have an unprecedented opportunity to secure incremental spend from existing agency partners and win amongst major U.S. advertisers, and we intend to capitalize. With that, I'll turn it over to Larry to provide more detail on our financial performance. Larry?