BAND - NASDAQ

Good day, and welcome to the Bandwidth Inc. Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. And to withdraw your question, please press star then 2. Please note today's event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Sarah Walas, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Good morning. I am joined today by David Morken, our CEO, and Daryl Raiford, our CFO.

They will begin with prepared remarks, and then we will open up the call for Q&A. Our earnings press release was issued earlier today. The press release and an earnings presentation with historical financial highlights and a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial results can be found on the investor relations page at investors.bandwidth.com. During the call, we will make statements related to our business that may be considered forward-looking. We caution you not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements as they may involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to vary materially from any future results or outcomes expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements made on this call and in the presentation slides reflect our analysis as of today, and we have no plans or obligation to update them. For a discussion of material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to those contained in our latest 10-K filing as updated by other SEC filings. With that, let me turn the discussion over to David. Thank you.

Welcome, everyone. We are pleased to report a solid fourth quarter, capping off a year defined by sustained business performance and strengthening fundamentals. Throughout 2025, we delivered steady progress across revenue, profitability, and free cash flow. A primary highlight of the year was our success in the large enterprise space. We closed a record number of million-dollar-plus deals, including two significant wins in the fourth quarter alone. We also continued to invest in high-margin innovation. We are seeing tangible results from our AI voice tools, our trust portfolio, our global communications cloud, and our Maestro orchestration software. Entering 2026, we are confident in the upward trajectory of our business. When we reported 2022 results, we set ambitious four-year goals extending through 2026: a 15% to 20% revenue compound annual growth rate, a five percentage point increase in gross margin to 60%, a 20% EBITDA margin, a 15% free cash flow margin, and $125,000,000 in cumulative free cash flow. While market dynamics, particularly in messaging, will almost certainly keep us short of our multiyear revenue CAGR target, our 2026 outlook is fully on track to achieve our goals for gross margin, EBITDA margin, and free cash flow margin. Furthermore, we will significantly exceed our 2026 cumulative free cash flow objective, having already surpassed $125,000,000 by 2025. Daryl will walk through our full 2026 guidance in more detail shortly. But at a high level, our 2026 outlook reflects healthy demand across both voice and messaging, along with continued solid execution, giving us confidence in the direction of our business and our financial model. Earlier today, we also announced the authorization of our inaugural share repurchase program. This reflects our confidence in the durability of our business model and our ability to generate cash while simultaneously investing in our future. I want to thank our customers for their continued trust in Bandwidth. I also want to thank our Bandmates for their tireless commitment to excellence and I thank God for the blessing of another year filled with opportunities for our team to learn and

grow.

Over two years ago, we identified AI voice as the next frontier. Since then, we have helped customers move from AI voice experimentation into real-world production. From an AI voice concierge for a global hospitality brand to an AI-powered voice ordering system for food venues nationwide, enterprises are trusting Bandwidth to launch new AI-driven customer experience use cases. Our AI investments are paying off. The Bandwidth Communications Cloud and Maestro are purpose-built to integrate and manage AI voice across diverse environments, with the quality, reliability, ultra-low latency, and scale that global businesses require to support multichannel AI-driven customer conversations. Our enterprise momentum validates this net-centric approach. Our role as a foundational platform for AI, deeply embedded in the global communications network, becomes even more critical as enterprises manage constant change across shifting AI models and application platforms. Simply put, our communications cloud and orchestration software are essential to enabling AI in enterprise production environments. We are seeing AI-driven voice adoption across both new enterprise wins and expanding deployments within our existing customer base. A good illustration comes from a major household-name U.S. insurance group, which selected Bandwidth to replace their legacy provider in a million-dollar-plus deal. They cited our AI-enabling features and seamless integration with their complex Cisco environment. Bandwidth will power a new cloud-based customer experience stack for claims and customer quoting functions utilizing inbound voice calling alongside Google conversational AI. This is a blueprint for how we serve large global enterprises, achieving rapid value capture for our customers through low-risk cloud adoption while enabling new AI voice capabilities. Our other million-dollar-plus deal in Q4 is with a top-10 U.S. bank serving millions of customers nationwide. They selected Bandwidth’s resilient toll-free solution to modernize and protect their contact center infrastructure to enhance customer experience. This win was driven by our differentiated failover architecture and open integration strategy. A similar dynamic resulted in another win in financial services: the U.S. consumer financing arm for a top-five global carmaker. In this case, Bandwidth was selected to launch AI-enabled communications for their Genesys contact center. This win came through our channel and reflects our ability to align with partner ecosystems while serving the customer directly. By moving to Bandwidth, the customer gained greater flexibility and freed up cost savings, which supported their investments in new AI services. The transition has been seamless, thanks to the longstanding partnership and technical alignment between Bandwidth and Genesys. It is a strong example of our Maestro orchestration platform enabling enterprise customers to modernize on their terms. We also saw momentum in our messaging business, winning an ecommerce platform that supports high-volume, time-sensitive communications for top brands. This customer chose Bandwidth over our largest CPaaS competitor, citing our superior deliverability, scalable capacity, and operational support during high-demand retail seasons like Black Friday. A particularly strong example of our progress in RCS messaging is highlighted by a longtime customer that supports hundreds of enterprise brands on their

platform.

Our customer trusted us to power their first production RCS campaigns for several of their well-known consumer brands across retail, home furnishings, and hospitality. The decision followed a broader evaluation of messaging providers and was driven by Bandwidth’s ability to ensure consistent deliverability, scalable throughput, and operational reliability as RCS grows from early trials toward broader enterprise use. Taken together, these wins share a common theme. Customers need an open, scalable, reliable global platform to support their most mission-critical communications, both for today’s customer experience and the AI-driven conversations now being deployed. The majority of these wins also follow our broader path of large enterprise wins in 2025: multilocation rollouts, deep integration into existing infrastructure, and clear line-of-business value realization within the first 90 to 180 days of launch. Perhaps most exciting is the validation we are seeing from the AI developer community. The number of third-party conversational AI developers building on our platform has more than quadrupled over the past six months. While this cohort does not yet contribute materially to revenue, the momentum is a powerful leading indicator. Developers are choosing Bandwidth for our low latency, quality, and predictable economics. Bandwidth enters 2026 at the exciting confluence of enterprise communications and AI, with the global infrastructure software platform and the vibrant ecosystem to lead this next wave of innovation. I will now turn it over to Daryl to walk through the financial details of the last quarter. Thank you, David, and good morning, everyone.

I will begin with a brief update on the fourth quarter, then touch on the full year 2025 before spending the majority of my time on our outlook for 2026 and the fundamentals of Bandwidth’s business model. In 2025, strong execution drove solid revenue and record levels of profitability and free cash flow. Total revenue saw a 12% year-over-year increase on an organic basis. This organic growth metric excludes the cyclical revenue generated from political campaign messaging in 2024, providing a clearer view of our core business strength. Both our voice and messaging segments were key contributors, each achieving healthy double-digit growth. In voice, our 11% year-over-year growth was fueled by increased voice usage, rising adoption of voice-based AI applications, and growing contributions from software services revenue. Messaging organic growth of 12% year-over-year was driven by robust holiday messaging demand. EBITDA margin reached 17%, reflecting improved pricing and mix, and continued progress on profitability, providing a strong close to the year. Looking at the full year 2025, we delivered another year of disciplined performance where we generated total revenue of $754,000,000, up 10% organically year-over-year, non-GAAP gross margin of 58%, adjusted EBITDA of $93,000,000, and free cash flow of $57,000,000. Durable customer relationships drove accelerated growth in our largest voice customer category, Global Voice Plans, where 8% revenue growth more than doubled compared to 2024. Our enterprise voice customer category also delivered strong full-year results, growing 21%, supported by a record number of million-dollar-plus deals. While large enterprise customers typically have extended onboarding cycles, these customers are experiencing a faster time to value realization after launching on Bandwidth’s communications cloud. In fact, the enterprise cohort of customers added in 2025 already represents 15% of total enterprise revenue, making it the second-highest contributing annual cohort in our history. Notably, more than 40% of 2025 enterprise voice growth came from accounts added in the past three years, one of the strongest proof points that our enterprise cohort expansion continues to compound over time. Programmable messaging achieved 7% organic year-over-year growth, in line with our expectations. Beyond the numbers, 2025 reinforced critical themes: the durability of our customer relationships, growing deal sizes, and improving profitability driven by operating leverage and an expanding mix of higher value software services. As we look ahead, we expect 2026 to be a year of continued growth and margin expansion. First, we expect continued accelerating revenue growth in voice, supported by higher usage demand, including usage influenced by AI-driven call flows, large deal activity, increasing software services contribution, and geographic expansion. Second, we remain focused on operating leverage and platform investments, which we expect will continue to support margin expansion and profit growth. Based on these factors, our 2026 full-year guidance shows total revenue growth of approximately 16% year-over-year, including cloud communications growth of approximately 10%, adjusted EBITDA improvement of nearly 30% year-over-year in line with our aim to achieve a 20% full-year adjusted EBITDA margin, and non-GAAP earnings per share of approximately $1.66 to $1.74, representing growth of approximately 19%. We are excited that our execution and investments position us now to achieve our three-year goals around gross margin, adjusted EBITDA margin, and cash flow goals. And beyond 2026, we anticipate delivering sustained double-digit growth in cloud communications revenue independent of the political campaign cycle while driving further growth in gross margin, EBITDA, and free cash flow. Now I want to spend time on what we believe is the most important point: the quality of Bandwidth’s business model. Our view is simple. Bandwidth is a durable cloud communications platform with software-like expansion economics. There are five principal reasons we believe this is true. First, our customer relationships are highly durable. We set the industry standard for customer satisfaction rates. We see the direct outcome of that with ultra-low customer churn and strong retention across customer categories. Our customer name retention rate remains above 99%, and our organic net retention of 107% reflects ongoing expansion as customers grow their usage with us over time. Our top 20 accounts have a median tenure of twelve years. Within enterprise voice, we again, in 2025, realized a 100% customer name retention, which means zero churn. In fact, we recognized a 98% customer retention rate from our enterprise voice customer cohort of three years ago, a remarkable demonstration of outstanding customer durability. In addition, our average annual revenue per customer continues to increase, driven by larger deployments, deeper integrations, and expanding use cases. We ended 2025 with average annual customer revenue of $232,000, a record and up from $171,000 three years ago. All these metrics underscore the long-term value of our customer base and the mission-critical role our platform plays. Second, Bandwidth owns and operates a scaled infrastructure-based global cloud communications platform. In contrast to others, we do not market a thin application layer underpinned by reselling commodity third-party carrier access. Bandwidth’s ownership model supports structurally higher margins that expand with usage and create durable operating leverage over time. Our margin performance is fueled by scale, voice AI adoption, growing software services contribution, global coverage, and operational efficiencies. Our incremental gross profit yield of 82% in 2025 demonstrates that each incremental cloud communications revenue dollar converts highly attractive economics. This is the foundation of our operating leverage, driving long-term profitability and creating a meaningful competitive advantage for large enterprises that require consistent quality at scale. Third, we continue to see strong traction in large deals. In 2025, we closed a record number of $1,000,000-plus deals. These larger deals not only contribute to near-term growth, but also create long-term expansion opportunities as customers increase usage and adopt additional services. Fourth, we see a growing opportunity to expand relationships through upsell and cross-sell. Software services are becoming a more meaningful part of our value proposition and our financial model. These solutions complement our communications cloud, deepen customer engagement, increase platform stickiness, and support continued progress toward margin expansion over time. We exited fourth quarter 2025 with software services revenue at an approximate $15,000,000 annualized run rate, driven by solutions that are increasingly attached to core voice usage such as Maestro, CallAssure, and our trust services offerings. Our year-end annualized run rate was meaningfully ahead of the $10,000,000 expectation that we expressed a few months ago. Notably, software is now attached to all million-dollar-plus deals. These solutions are embedded into customers’ communication stacks, producing recurring high-margin revenue streams that scale with usage. Finally, our model is designed to grow profitably. We are focused on scaling the business in a disciplined way, balancing growth with operating leverage, margin expansion, and cash generation. As we continue to execute, we believe Bandwidth is positioned to deliver sustainable revenue growth, expanding margins, and increasing long-term value creation. Regarding capital allocation, our business is strong and set to generate continued meaningful free cash flow. After focusing since 2023 on reaching the 2026 margin metrics we previously outlined, we are pleased to announce, as David mentioned, that our board of directors has authorized an inaugural share repurchase program of up to $80,000,000 in common stock. Our balanced capital strategy involves both this new share repurchase program and our largest investment in research and development in company history this year to accelerate innovation across our AI portfolio. This dual approach gives Bandwidth the flexibility to capitalize on market when they arise while actively managing dilution to enhance shareholder value. In closing, we believe our performance in 2025 and our outlook for 2026 demonstrate the strength and durability of Bandwidth’s business. We are encouraged by continued voice growth, the incremental usage driven by AI-enabled applications, and the expanding contribution from software and services, all supported by the strength of our business model and sustained operational performance. We are also proud of how we are embracing AI across our business. Recently, Bandwidth was honored to be recognized by Gartner as a first mover in the deployment of AI for investor relations. We believe this mindset, combining innovation with operational excellence, positions Bandwidth well for the future. With that, I will turn the call back to the operator for questions.

Thank you. We will now open for questions. To ask a question, please press star then 1. To withdraw your question, please press star then 2. Our first question today comes from Arjun Bhatia with William Blair. Please go ahead. Yes. Perfect. Good morning, and thank you. Maybe if I can start off first, just

want to touch on the enterprise voice segment. It seems like you know, you are clearly signaling you are getting good enterprise demand there, and software services as a part of that is also ticking up. I was hoping you could just touch a little bit on what you saw in terms of Q4 trends and the growth rate. I think if I am backing into some sort of an implied Q4 growth rate for enterprise voice specifically, there was a little bit of a tick down. So I was hoping you could address that and then talk about outlook in 2026 as well, especially with those large deals starting to contribute. How much of a bump and tailwind could that be next year?

So let me start with and I am grateful for that. Let me start with the growth rates in terms of enterprise for the fourth quarter. We did have an acceleration last year with some deployments customers. So we had a little bit of a lapping and tougher compare. We, for a quarter, are real pleased with the annual rate of 21%. We, again, are with a record number of million-plus deals, you know, we see that deployment and ramping into 2026 driving the growth that we have called for for enterprise. So we are projecting very healthy growth again in enterprise going forward into the new year. In terms of software services contribution, absolutely. As we said, each of the $1,000,000-plus deals and really nearly every deal includes software services now as an upsell, cross-sell add-in feature. We think that it is becoming critical for the customer in terms of the value that it provides. The value proposition is just dramatically clear to them. The benefits that we accrue as a company are as I articulated previously, which is around stickiness as well as durability, and as well as allowing us to continue to expand and cross-sell and upsell. So did I capture the bulk of your questions, Arjun? Is there something that I might have missed?

Yeah. No. That is super helpful. You touched on all of it. Thank you. And then, actually, Daryl, a follow-up for you just in terms of 2026. Can you just help us understand how you are thinking through contribution and should we comp that to 2022? Or what is the right cadence? Yeah. I am glad you asked.

We are, you know, we have guided to 15% revenue growth, 10% cloud communications growth. The midterm elections are different from the presidential elections in the sense that the presidential elections, the caucuses, and the early primaries would have started two years ago, and we would have more visibility. The midterms are more state, local. They do not really have the presidential primaries. They start later in the season, say, midsummer-ish time frame is where we may see benefit. Based on what we are seeing and speaking and hearing from our customers, we think that the political campaign contribution this year will be roughly 2.5% of cloud communications revenue. And we will keep monitoring that. We do not really expect to experience anything in the first half of the year, but we will keep monitoring that. You know, it is good to say that two years, four years ago, we were making the remark that our political campaign customers were beginning to diversify. That they were not really just appearing for like a cicada and then going back into the ground, that they were beginning to diversify their business most. Four years on, they truly have. So these customers are really durable for us in terms of civic engagement and other commercial types of messaging business, as well as they scale up and down for the political content. So we are really happy with that. And we will see maybe about 2.5%, but we will update you again next quarter as we get better visibility into the year.

And our next question comes from Eric Sepager with B. Riley Securities. Please go ahead. Yeah. Thanks for taking the question. First, could you just discuss or give us some context around the dynamics between the cloud communication growth outlook for 10% and the total revenue growth of 15%? Why is there a significant difference between those two?

Well, that would be the difference is surcharge growth rate from carrier messaging surcharges. Last year, you will have noticed in our reported results that surcharge growth was relatively tame, very, very moderate. It was dampened by the carrier pricing environment where there was really only one noticeable price increase by a carrier on surcharges last year. So surcharge growth last year for us on a reported basis was simply due to our continued messaging volume growth. This year, just one note, think this is David. Sorry to interrupt, Daryl. I think you mentioned

Top line total growth at 15%. It is actually 16%.

Yeah. Oh, okay. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Correct that. Sixteen and ten. Sixteen and ten. This year, preceding our guide that we just released, we have had two carriers, I will not go to the effort to name them, but two major carriers have already announced price increases that have gone into effect and will be going into effect in the next month or so. So we have taken those price increases into account in our guide. And just critically, those are pass-through surcharges. So they are not margin important at all for us. And CloudComms importantly has become, as Daryl mentioned, so durable that we are projecting forward to achieve double-digit cloud communications growth irrespective of political seasons altogether. Okay.

Second question, Twilio had noted a significant increase in their voice traffic. I am wondering if you are seeing evidence of them getting more competitive on the voice side of the CPaaS market.

You know, we are not. The customer examples we cited in our script were win-aways from Verizon in two of the cases, from AT&T in one of the cases, and from a smaller carrier in the final case. And none of those was

Twilio relevant. Very good. Thank you. Thank you.

Our next question today comes from Patrick D. Walravens at Citizens. Please go ahead. Oh, great. And congratulations to you guys.

Hey, Dave. Can you

actually have two hi. Hi. I actually have two questions with the first one is, you talk a little bit more about the insurance example that you gave us? And you said that you are working with Google Conversational AI on that. Can you just explain what exactly they were doing, what you do, and what the potential is to do more of those kinds of deals with Google.

So absolutely. The most important aspect of that customer case is the complex preexisting Cisco environment for their contact center and the need that this very large household-name insurance company had to integrate Google’s AI solution within that environment. And so orchestration among chosen best-of-breed AI solutions is vital, was vital for them, and Maestro from us is perfect. And that is what facilitated that opportunity. And in the other cases, if some of our other customers chose differently to go with Google or to go with someone else, again, Maestro is ideally situated to give flexibility at scale for these enterprise customers to navigate what is the most fluid and dynamic changing AI environment

imaginable. Alright. Great.

Thank you. And my second question is, you know, for every stock that we cover, really, it has become all about

is the incredibly rapid increase

in AI good or bad for this business? And what are the moats that the business has to prevent larger, new AI companies from coming in and somehow disrupting their business. How would you explain that to shareholders? What are your moats?

So the

first part of your question is interesting, and I will get to moats. As to the relevance of

AI

for Bandwidth as a tailwind, we are deeply convicted that the need for intelligent voice agents to communicate across every imaginable channel with the empathy and intelligence to answer questions of all kinds means that for us, and we are already seeing this in our voice growth and acceleration, for us, it is an amazing moment. It may not manifest as fast as the work-from-home dynamic that occurred back in the early 2020s, but will ultimately be far more durable and persistent as the next billion users of the global PSTN that we have a footprint for are voice agents acting on our behalf in wonderful, delightful ways. What kind of a moat do we have? We have a moat that is a mile wide, filled with oil, and lit on fire. Very difficult to cross because you have to cross it at the speed of government across 80-plus countries. We have interconnections with all the global incumbents necessary to provide immediate footprint again to the next billion voice agents. We own and operate this infrastructure. It is across the globe. That gives us a structural margin and cost advantage, which is why we have grown gross margins from 47% to now 60% during the time that we have been a public company. Our ARPU per customer is exploding because of their adoption of our different software services. And again, we are focused on the enterprise and the agents that are lining up to be able to engage globally in use cases that are awesome.

Fantastic. Thank you.

Thank you, Pat.

And our next question comes from Joshua Christopher Reilly at Needham. Please go ahead. Yes. Thanks for taking my questions. How we think about the pipeline for voice AI relative to other voice opportunities here heading into ’26? And does that remain a relatively low overall mix of voice revenue today? And is 2026 maybe kind of the inflection point where voice AI use cases are ramping and the

marketplace. And your overall revenue base.

It is a really good question, Josh. AI is a component of all enterprise conversations, with Maestro attaching to almost, to actually to every enterprise deal. So it is really a degree question. It is not whether or not AI is germane to these enterprise conversations. It is to what extent does the revenue of

that

motion manifest? And your primary question is when is the inflection point in voice growth driven by AI, disproportionately or more heavily. And what we believe, having for two years been focused on this moment, what we believe is that we are seeing, whether it is the developer channel that has quadrupled as we talked about in our script, or the enterprise use cases that are proliferating, this year is a vital year to watch and observe and see the results from AI adoption in voice hit the top and bottom line. That is the year that we are in. We have captured that in our projection for 16% top-line growth and 10% cloud communications growth. Again, we are disciplined as a team, so 20% EBITDA margins render our overall business plan, I think, very strong. But we think this is a vital year for AI adoption to go from experimenting to real scale and deployment.

Got it. Very helpful. And then you mentioned reaching a record number of million-plus deals. I think that was for the year of 2025, not the quarter. Correct me if I am wrong there.

You just share a bit more about the composition of some of these newer Global 2000 deals? Is there functionality that they are asking for today that they were not a couple years ago? And maybe is that one of the key reasons that is helping you win against some of the legacy telcos?

Terrific question. We closed more million-dollar-plus deals in all of ’25 than we did in ’23 and ’24 combined precisely for the reason that you are asking about. The product portfolio has expanded to really answer the key questions on value. And we have got here with us our Chief Product Officer, John Bell, and I will just invite him to add to my answer. Yeah. But the Maestro have been very, had a strong enterprise value proposition around integrations, supporting move to the cloud. In all of these conversations we have with enterprises, it is really about now the move to AI. And so the move to AI is reinforcing the value proposition and showing up in these customer conversations.

Awesome. Thank you, guys.