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Unity Software Inc.
5/7/2026
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us and welcome to the Unity Technologies Q1 earnings call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please raise your hand. If you have dialed into today's call, please press star nine to raise your hand and star six to unmute. I will now hand the conference over to Alex Giammo, head of investor relations. Alex, please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Unity's first quarter 2026 earnings call. I'm joined this morning by our CEO, Matt Bromberg, and our CFO, Jared Yays. Before we begin, I want to note that today's discussion contains forward-looking statements, including statements about goals, business outlook, industry trends, and expectations for future financial performance, all of which are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. You can find more information at about these risks and uncertainties in the risk factor section of our filings at SEC.gov. Actual results may differ, and we take no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements. Finally, during today's meeting, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP financials are in addition to and not substitute for measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. Full reconciliation of gap to non-gap is available in our press release and on the sec.gov website. With that, I'll turn it over to Matt. Thanks, Alex, and good morning.
On behalf of everyone at Unity from across the globe, I'd like to thank each of you for joining us today. It is a privilege to be with you this morning. Unity is on an incredible trajectory, growing rapidly on both the top line and the bottom line, while also shipping the most ambitious product roadmap in our history. A product roadmap that we believe will transform both Unity and the future of interactive content creation. Our first quarter results reflect this momentum. with Uni posting strategic revenue growth of 35% year-over-year and our best-adjusted EBITDA margin in over two years at 27%, up 65% year-over-year. As Jared will share in more detail later, we expect the second quarter to bring more of the same, with guidance for strategic ad revenue to grow 50% year-over-year, including robust vector revenue growth, as well as year-over-year margin expansion. This organic growth trend, combined with operating discipline, means that we now expect our business to become gap profitable by the fourth quarter of 2026, an important financial milestone and a reflection of the kind of company we want to run over the long term. This is another topic that Jerry will address in more detail in just a bit. Uni's tremendous financial performance, a passion for execution, and a deep commitment to our customers have also positioned us well to take advantage of the massively positive forces we're seeing in the marketplace, driven by the adoption of AI across our industry. Our research is telling us that 90% of game developers are already using AI in their workflows, and these tools are accelerating the production of new games. We're also seeing this up close every day in our work with studio partners, both large and small. Newly released mobile apps are up 60% year over year across both iOS and Android, with a particularly noticeable uptick in more recent months. And remember, mobile games continue to account for the majority of all new app releases worldwide. These are the trends propelling our business forward. Newly published made-with-Unity games were up 12% over the prior quarter in Q1, with new Unity signups showing 20% quarter-over-quarter growth, the fastest growth we've seen since 2020. So, more games are being made. That's great for Unity. And because AI is making game creation more approachable, there are also more creators. That's great for Unity. And with more creators and more games, the need for game discovery becomes ever more acute as many more titles compete for consumer attention. So helping match consumers with the next game they want to play becomes even more critical than it is today. And that's great for Unity as well. Crucially, while these developments are driving significant change for many developers and publishers, we expect they will also be strong drivers of growth for the entire industry for many years to come. But AI is not just accelerating adoption of Unity's platform in the marketplace. It's also propelling the pace of our own product development. Unity is truly meeting the moment by building new products that we believe will form the foundation of the next generation of interactive content creation and marketing. Let's start with Vector, the AI system that sits at the heart of Unity. Improved performance and enhanced returns for our advertising customers drove another quarter of 15% sequential growth, the fourth in a row, exceeding our own already ambitious expectations. Our Vector revenue in the first quarter of 2026 is 80% larger than one year ago, an astonishing result. But what we're really excited about is just how young Vector still is. We believe we've just begun to see the impact it will have for our customers and our business. Most notably, later this quarter, we'll see Unity's runtime data graduate to our live production models for the first time. our conviction remains high that real-time sequential behavioral data will provide a significant future catalyst for growth. We're now ingesting this data inside Vector, and we are very encouraged with the results we're seeing in testing. And with opt-in rates to our developer data framework remaining at over 90%, adoption rates continue to scale each day, enhancing our unique competitive position. But Vector is about much more than just advertising. At its heart, Vector is personalization AI designed to understand how and why games appeal to players. It's trained on 20 years of game making on the one side and interaction with billions of consumers on the other. Our vision is for these two domains to interoperate so that we can better understand both what appeals to players, as well as how those appealing experiences are designed, constructed, and delivered. Vector is where these two domains come together, and it's now at the center of our product development across both Create and Grow. Our first vector-driven enhancement for the Unity engine, Unity AI, went into public beta earlier this week, and the response from creators has been really gratifying. Unity AI is an integrated agent tuned specifically for Unity. It has full context for your project and is custom-made for Unity workflows, so it knows both your game and our software better than anyone else, and it writes code directly into Unity Project. From scene hierarchies, packages, code, assets, all the way down to performance controls we've never made available before, it knows not just how to make a game, but how to make a game that runs well across every platform, fully in service of the individual creator's vision. The Unity AI interface also offers extreme flexibility so that our customers can work not just faster and more efficiently, but more creatively. For example, we've remarked on many occasions that generic world models would be a great source of prototyping material, and that game engines like Unity could ingest those pixels, transform them into Unity's scene, and enable developers to build deep interactive content and systems around them. Well, that's just what Unity AI now does. It ingests image pixels, outputs primitives, and does mesh-up scaling and textures, constructing the entire content pipeline almost instantly. Image data is thus transformed into production-ready format, massively accelerating the process of game development. You can check it all out, including a cool video introduction at uni.com backslash features backslash AI. The conversation about world models and game engines has been framed as a contest, but I think that framing misses what's actually happening. Today, the most ambitious interactive experiences will combine what generative systems do best, speed, personalization, and the ability to produce variation at a scale humans can't with what engines do best, which is determinism, persistence, and the consistency players and developers depend on. As neural capabilities continue to advance, new forms of interactive entertainment will emerge, and they will look quite different from the games we play today. Different modalities, different form factors, things we haven't yet imagined. We don't think the future is a threat to what Unity does. We think it's the reason Unity exists. In fact, Unity has a pipeline of new products scheduled for release before the end of 2026 that we believe have the potential to accelerate this future massively and redefine our industry. These new launches are AI native yet integrated with authoring tools robust enough to produce professional results. not just for today's professionals, but for the motivated and talented millions of new creators who will be inspired by all these new capabilities. These creators, both professional and otherwise, need tools and technologies that will enable their inspiration to become more than just an experience, to enable them to become a real system, a real game, distributed everywhere, rendered at high fidelity even on mobile devices, tied to our advertising and monetization capabilities, driven by data and AI, but not defined by them. Empowering this new creative class and realizing the next era of the democratization of gaming is very much in Unity's DNA. Here's what's crucial to understand about the future of interactive entertainment. Great experiences will still come from human creative vision. AI models are powerful precisely because they're trained on what human creators have made. The bottleneck in the future isn't generation. That will become a commodity if it hasn't already. The bottleneck is effective direction and realization. It's how a creator takes a spark of an idea and transforms it into a deep, engaging commercial system that is distinctive rather than generic. that can be distributed and enjoyed at high fidelity on any device that has a business model to sustain its creator. That's a tools problem. And it's a creator meets technology problem. And those are exactly the problems Unity has spent 20 years solving and will continue to solve. Our role in this future is to build the tools that let human creativity shape what AI can do so that the results reflect the creator, not the average of the training data. So you can see what an incredible opportunity we have. All of us around the world feel so privileged to be delivering the kind of extraordinary business results we are today and are also on the precipice of so many incredible advancements in the near future. There is no company in the world better positioned to win in this marketplace than we are. With that, I will thank you once again for your time, and I'll pass it over to Jared for a deeper dive on our business results. Jared?
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