DoubleVerify Holdings, Inc.

Thank you for standing by. My name is Rebecca and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the double verify first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, Simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you. I will now turn the call over to Brittley Johnson, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon and welcome to Double Verified's first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. With us today are Mark Zagorski, CEO, and Nicola Alias, CFO. Today's press release with this call may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to inherent risks, uncertainties, and changes, and reflect our current expectations and information currently available to us, and our actual results could differ materially. For more information, please refer to the risk factors in our recent SEC filings, including our Form 10Q and Form 10K. In addition, our discussion today will include references to certain supplemental non-GAAP financial measures, and should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for our GAAP results. Reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures are available in today's earnings press release, which is available on our investor relations website at ir.doubleverify.com. Also, during the call today, we'll be referring to the slide deck posted on our website. With that, I'll turn it over to Mark.

Thanks, Brindley, and good afternoon, everyone. We delivered strong Q1 results as we continued our solid execution on our product innovation, strategic, and financial roadmaps. In Q1, we achieved 10% year-over-year revenue growth, led by accelerating growth of our social verification and optimization solutions, and we delivered a 31% EBITDA margin, which exceeded expectations largely due to AI-fueled operational efficiency. Advertiser growth was positive across all key industry verticals in the quarter, as we continue to benefit from our focus on further diversification of customer engagements and ad spend across various client types. We also repurchased $100 million worth of shares year-to-date, reflecting confidence in our business and our commitment to returning capital to shareholders as a core element of our long-term value creation strategy. We expect to deliver a strong 2026 as we successfully execute on our strategic plan to verify the quality, optimize the investment, and prove the impact of digital ad impressions across any platform, media, or market where advertisers spend. The solid results this quarter were fueled by our core growth catalysts, social activation and measurement products, streaming TV verification, and our dynamic suite of solutions that empower advertisers to better navigate the evolving ecosystem of AI advertising platforms and Gen AI content. Across all of these sectors, our incredibly durable value proposition remains tantamount. DV is the independent, essential trust layer that marketers rely on to ensure their ad spend is protected from fraud and unsuitable context, and most importantly, delivers the highest possible return on investment. And this essential role in the ecosystem continues to expand as new product innovations power our growth flywheel. Let me share a few recent stats that underscore the impact of these investments. Driven by continued success on meta, social measurement grew 23% year-over-year, a significant acceleration from Q4. Social activation, our fastest growing solution set, grew 92% year-over-year in Q1, up from 62% in the fourth quarter. Authentic Advantage on YouTube, which combines side-bid AI optimization with pre-bid filtering and post-bid measurement, launched in Q3 last year and is also expanding rapidly. It is now on track to deliver $10 million of expected ACV in 2026. CTV measurement impressions volumes also grew, up 28% in the quarter, and our ABS-enabled streaming TV pre-bid do-not-error list entered general availability in January, with three top 15 customers representing hundreds of millions in CTV spend implementing these DV-only streaming TV controls. DV continues to break new ground in the drive towards greater transparency in streaming TV. AI measurement tools like SlopStopper, which is now available on YouTube, and AI AgentID are are showing meaningful engagement rates. Our AI slop stopper measurement solution for mobile and online video and display is already applied to over 40% of measured impressions. And the pre-bid tool is being tested by six of our largest advertisers. Our midterm goal remains to increase the contribution of social streaming TV and AI driven solutions from under 30% of total revenue today to approximately 50%. As we drive this evolution, our mobile and online video and display business remains stable in Q1 with approximately two-thirds of impressions that we engage with delivered on mobile in-app and mobile web environments. We remain focused on creating a revenue mix that closely aligns with the fastest growing global digital ad sectors. DV continues to drive new revenue opportunities, distance ourselves from competition, and create meaningful margin expansion through AI efficiencies and product innovation. AI solutions, social activation tools, and streaming TV quality solutions are positively impacting our customers' ad performance and building a foundation for TAM and market share expansion for DoubleVerify. Shifting focus to the role that AI is playing in the ongoing expansion of our product-led growth cycle, we continue to lean into AI to operate more efficiently launch products faster, and improve margins. And as the emerging AI advertising universe evolves, it is creating new revenue opportunities that expand our TAM as we extend our essential role in this burgeoning environment. Regarding this new environment, we've identified three main areas where DV has the largest AI growth opportunities and which we are already seeing traction with customers. First, the agentic buying and selling of media, where we are building new products, connecting with and leading the development of the numerous protocols that will help advertisers lean into AI-based buying. Second, we are empowering advertisers to navigate the dynamic AI-impacted advertising landscape as AI cyber fraud and AI content swap becomes prolific. And third, we are digging into the massive potential ad market on LLM chatbots, where many of our current advertisers are beginning to deploy their marketing dollars, yet have had little in the way of transparency and independent measurement. Let me talk briefly about each one of these opportunities. First, we are focused on establishing security and trust in the agentic advertising ecosystem. Trust has always been essential in our industry, and we recently joined the Ad Context Protocol, ADCP, a coalition of ad tech companies established by a gentic advertising organization to define standards for ad buying and selling by AI agents. According to eMarketer, about two-thirds of ad buyers plan to focus more time on agentic ad buying this year. While in early days, we are actively engaged to make sure DV is at the forefront of establishing standards that will continue to preserve trust and transparency for its advertisers wherever they choose to deploy their advertising investment. As with all of our engagements, we remain independent and agnostic and the way we operate in the agentic advertising world will be the same with the ability to plug into any agentic protocol from the IAB framework to platform specific systems that are important to our customers. Second, we are expanding tools to protect ad investments from AI fueled challenges. We continue to enhance our market leading suite of AI tools that combat the increasing challenges of navigating AI slop and avoiding AI cyber fraud. With the launch of DVAI Slop Stopper for social, we've expanded our capability for advertisers to avoid low quality AI generated content on YouTube and will broaden our coverage to other walled gardens in the coming quarters. Fueled by malicious AI, cyber fraud continues to become more sophisticated threatening to challenge the ROI and efficiency gains driven by the positive use of AI. In Q1 2026, DV's Fraud Lab continued to harness AI to fight fraud as AI-powered fraud schemes proliferated at a record pace and became even more sophisticated. AI-powered bot schemes continue to evolve faster than ever, with 140% more bot scheme variants emerging in Q1 2026 compared to Q125. In parallel, app-based fraud continues to accelerate dramatically, especially across mobile and CTV, where we have classified over 1,300 apps as fraudulent since the beginning of 2026. Finally, we are focused on capitalizing on the massive potential ad market that AI chatbot marketing will represent. According to eMarketer, Ad spend on LLMs is forecasted to grow by over $25 billion by 2029, with ad spend expected to cannibalize over 14% of search spend, a $400 billion market that DV has historically not been able to access. OpenAI recently shared that they expect to generate $100 billion in advertising revenue by 2030, underscoring just how the market may be moving even more rapidly than analysts are predicting. As has been the case for the open web, mobile, streaming, and social environments, unbiased, independent measurement will play a key role in engendering the advertiser trust needed for this new ecosystem to thrive. While AI platform ad models continue to evolve, advertiser demands remain the same, ensuring ad transactions are trusted and transparent, and ads are viewable, brand suitable, and delivered to legitimate traffic within authentic content environments. Our enterprise customers and agency platforms have made it clear to us that expanding beyond test budgets in AI environments will require even greater transparency and trust than is present today. We are confident that, as we have shown on social and streaming platforms, our role as an essential trust layer will extend to this new ecosystem, and we are engaged in discussions with several LLMs who are leaning into ad-supported models. As AI drives digital advertising to become more automated, agentic, and opaque, and as AI slop becomes the must avoid content category for advertisers, the need for independent verification, protection, and performance measurement has never been greater. Regardless of platform, buying mode, or message, DV will be an integral, trusted part of the ad equation. Moving to social verification, the social sector remains our fastest growing business segment and is a core driver of our next phase of growth. No other verification or measurement provider has more innovative solutions for advertisers seeking to protect their spend on social platforms and ensure it performs. Social activation accelerated meaningfully to over 90% year-over-year growth in the first quarter, up from around 60% growth in Q4. This acceleration was driven by continued scaling of our social pre-bid solutions elevated by enhanced product capabilities on Meta, as well as expanded capabilities across TikTok and YouTube. 87 advertisers have now utilized Meta activation since launch, up from 68 in the fourth quarter, with 31 of these customers coming from our top 100 clients. As of the end of the first quarter, our Meta activation product was already at $12 million annualized run rate. On YouTube, DV Authentic Advantage has seen strong customer adoption. Some of our largest CPG customers have started scaling on the solution, driven by the significant ROI improvements that it delivers. Through the combination of Sybids AI optimization with social pre-bid filtering and post-bid measurement, DV Authentic Advantage customers have seen their media CPMs decline by as much as 36%, while reach has expanded by 64%, and brand suitability integrity remains strong. As with DV's meta pre-bid solution, we are just starting to scratch the surface with the impact that authentic advantage can have on our customer's business and our growth profile. And we're excited about the significant opportunities ahead for both products. As mentioned previously, our social suite of tools are ramping and we recently announced the expansion of DV AI verification to include DV's AI Slop Stopper for Social. This new industry-leading offering is designed to help advertisers navigate the growing challenges posed by low-quality AI-generated content and safeguard brand reputation across social and video-centric environments, starting with YouTube. DV's AI Slop Stopper for Social is another DV tool that empowers advertisers to ensure their brand investment is protected wherever they spend while driving stronger media outcomes. Additionally, in the quarter, we expanded brand suitability coverage across Snapchat's Discover feed format, enabling our advertisers to have complete coverage across Snap Discover tiles placements. And we recently announced that we achieved Media Rating Council, or MRC, accreditation for TikTok video viewability, becoming the first measurement vendor to receive the accreditation. As advertising investment continues to grow across video-centric social platforms like TikTok, independent verification plays a critical role in ensuring transparency and accountability. And with accredited measurement informed by tens of trillions of historical ad transactions, advertisers can now evaluate campaign effectiveness with greater confidence and ensure their media investments deliver real value. This milestone underscores our commitment to delivering the highest standards of measurement accuracy and transparency and further demonstrates the company's alignment with the MRC accreditation process as a critical layer of accountability in digital advertising. Turning to streaming TV, we continue to deliver product innovation to address advertiser demand for independent transparency and increasing fraud in streaming environments. Our continued product innovations helps grow CTV measurement volumes by 28% year over year this quarter. We've already begun to see solid adoption of ABS Do Not Air lists from eight of our largest advertisers, as well as strong interest in our authentic streaming TV solution. And in this quarter, we announced that Spectrum Reach became the first partner to join DV's certified transparent streaming program, reinforcing its commitment to secure, program-level transparency across streaming TV inventory. Spectrum Reach will share key show-level data across their programming, including news and live sports, spanning both direct IO and programmatic buying. These insights will be available directly within DV authentic streaming TV reporting, giving advertisers verified post-bid visibility into the specific programs their ads ran alongside. By combining real, not implied or aggregated, show-level transparency in a privacy-focused way with DB's performance analytics and optimization capabilities, advertisers can now better understand how contextual relevance drives outcomes and make smarter decisions to optimize future streaming investments. This is just the start of our drive to deliver granular, unaggregated, show-level transparency across all streaming environments, And we are seeing momentum from additional platforms to join our certified transparent streaming program. The results of our innovation leadership are clear. We are growing client engagements and winning deals with new solutions where there aren't any competitors. We work with over 340 advertisers now, generating more than $200,000 annually. And our unique solution underscored a 77% greenfield win ratio in Q1. meaning that we're winning deals with solutions in new areas in which there are no competitive incumbents to displace. Investment and innovation continues to be DV's secret sauce to get stickier with our customers, win new deals, and gain market share. And AI is enabling us to innovate more efficiently than ever as we continue to expand margins while launching and expanding the tools that cement our role as the essential trust layer for buyers and sellers of digital media. With strong execution in the first quarter, we're leaning hard into AI-powered innovation that will continue to extend our leadership position. Looking ahead to the rest of the year, we remain focused on product development acceleration, partner expansion, and market share growth, and continued strong margins in cash flow. With that, let me turn the call over to Nicola.