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Greetings, and welcome to the

Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for

Thank you, Matt. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We delivered our 18th consecutive beat and raise quarter. And I want to be clear about why this keeps happening. It is not a single product cycle or a favorable compare. It is the compounding effect of a system, proprietary data that improves with every customer interaction, intelligence that sharpens with every decision and now an interface in Athena that lowers the barriers to enterprise-wide adoption. The flywheel is what drives durable, predictable and profitable growth. Fourth quarter revenue was $395 million, up 28% year-over-year ex acquisition and political candidate, an acceleration from the third quarter. Adjusted EBITDA was $95.1 million, up 35% year-over-year, and we had positive GAAP earnings. With these multiyear rates of revenue growth, we are taking market share. This is evidence

Thank you, David, and good afternoon, everyone. Our results once again demonstrate the durability, predictability and profitability of

[Operator Instructions] And our first question will come from Terry Tillman with Truist Securities.

I had a question and a follow-up. I must ask about Athena. And again, I know that it's not generally available yet, but when you all put out a press release a while back, it did actually have a custom already quoted in there, which I thought was interesting. But you talked about a couple of agents at that point, Insights and Adviser. Can you remind us, is there going to be kind of a whole slew of agents that you will release? Or are these going to be the 2 primary wins and there is a monetization structure around that? And the last part of this Athena long-winded question is, with the business that you've signed year-to-date, has it had an influence in some of these deals getting across the line, even if you're not monetizing? And then I had a follow-up.

So thank you, Terry. Let me start by saying that those 2 agents are first because they will drive probably the greatest benefit to our customers. So when you think about Athena and you think about large language models and how we are using them to win in the marketplace, today, the

That's great to hear. And I guess, Chris, maybe a follow-up. You framed it well in terms of maintaining that 2 to 5-point cushion. But I think for the year, sometimes -- you've talked about maybe your top 5 kind of spending verticals and maybe the assumptions you're assuming for the rest of the year off of your top 5 verticals. Can you maybe share kind of another way of looking at conservatism, looking at some of your biggest verticals and what you're assuming the rest of the year like consumer retail and travel and hospitality?

Yes, Terry. I mean what we found was that those verticals that have been -- are closest in proximity to consumer discretionary, you saw through the prepared remarks, were and have continued to be throughout the year, our top performing verticals. This was a first for us in our history to have 9 out of our top 10. And that's, by the way, on a trailing 12-month basis. That's not cherry-picking in a particular quarter, grow over 20%. Our guidance does not assume that. Our guidance is probably closer to half, which is even below what we've been historically. The other way I'd encourage you to think out the conservatism in our guide is we've reiterated that continued 2 to 5 points of cushion. We have also kept what we believe is a conservative view of political candidate revenue at $15 million in the guide. So of the raise that we put through, none of it was a change in our assumption of that $15 million. So that should be conservative. We continue to be conservative around Marigold. And to the extent, as David talked about, we get really strong continued adoption from Athena and that adoption has proven to generate increased ARPUs and usage, we're assuming minimal contribution right now on the guide. So that should also be incremental upside. So I feel like this is a very nicely derisked outlook to start the year.

We'll go next to

Congrats on the strong end of the year. David, I just wanted to ask about the deals that you've already closed coming out of

The one consistent,

Exactly. What's interesting about that

Understood. And my one follow-up, Chris, is just around the gross margin numbers that we saw in Q4. Any onetime impacts here in the fourth quarter. And now with Marigold in place, how should we think about the right gross margin expectation through 2026?

Yes. Look, I even zoom out a little bit more,

Understood. Best of luck with the rest of the quarter.

Thanks,

Our next question comes from Jason Kreyer with Craig-Hallum Capital Group.

Congrats on 18%. I'm excited to hear about 19% next quarter. Wanted to just ask the evolution on One

Let me start by saying thank you, Jason. Appreciate it. And our goal, as always, when we start a year is to finish the year 4 additional beat-and-raise quarters by the end of the year. So we're at 18%. Our hope is to be sitting here with you guys next year talking about 22%. The number of enterprise clients that use more than one use case in the fourth quarter of 2025 was up 80%. That's 80%. And that is a massive testament to One

Yes. David, you said it perfectly. We had -- if you look at the total percentage of scaled customers, Jason, that are now on more than one use case, we're almost at 25% compared to, call it, 13% a year ago. So just really exciting progress made this year.

Awesome. Appreciate that. One follow-up for me on Marigold. So now that you got that closed, curious what the international expansion plan looks like and how you go after international from kind of a pull versus push mentality?

Yes. I mean what we're seeing now, Jason, is international is really happening very naturally, as our clients are mostly multinational enterprises. The adding of the Marigold international assets should accelerate that, but at the same time, I want to point out, the vast majority of our revenue is in the United States. This is the largest advertising market in the world by dollars and we are taking meaningful market share. Last year, the average growth rate of the marketing ecosystem was about 10%, we grew 30%. So as we are disrupting the marketplace, we're taking greater market share in the United States, and we're seeing a natural progression and a very nice growth rate internationally, which is a reverse from prior years where we had struggled there. So I'm hopeful for international, but I would tell you that we certainly are not projecting it to be a massive component of this business for many years to come.

We'll go next to Arjun Bhatia with William Blair.

Congrats on a strong Q4 here. Maybe I'll continue on the kind of Athena line of questioning. David, you're clearly having success already with One

I think it could be' '26. We're not counting on it, and we have not put that into our projections. And certainly, you don't know. But what I can tell you is if you look at the early access clients, they are spending materially more with Athena than they were without her. They are telling us that they're seeing a game-changing workflow environment, which is great, and they are seeing a substantially higher return on investment, which at the end of the day, when you think of our biggest moats as a company, data is number one. Number two is our ability to drive superior return on investment, call it, right now, 600% return on ad spend. And then, of course, the ability to work with very large enterprises through their data security group, their data privacy groups, their legal groups, their procurement groups, so on and so forth. I think Athena helps us continue to drive greater return on investment both from a workflow management perspective and from a return on ad spend, which will cause our clients to drive even more of their existing marketing dollars to us.

All right. Perfect. That's helpful. And then Chris, one for you. In the back half of '25, you kind of ended the year on a strong note in terms of profitability GAAP profitability, GAAP net income and in Q4, you had kind of net income positive as well. How are you thinking about how that shapes up in 2026? And what does that sort of imply for stock comp outlook next year and beyond?

Yes. Thanks, Arjun. It was an area that we had just very constructive investor feedback that was important for the company to make strides towards that goal, turning the corner this year in 2025 towards positive and then seeing ourselves kind of this being now an inflection point. I think it from a GAAP EPS perspective, call it $0.02 to $0.04 in that range. There's upside to that and obviously depends on a number of factors. But when you think about the ingredients that went into that inflection point and turning positive, it was progress on dilution, it was progress on stock-based compensation and then more and more yield off of adjusted EBITDA dropping to free cash flow. So we're really excited about that being a turning point, and it's onward and upward from here.

And we expect to be net income positive this calendar year forward.

Our next question comes from DJ Hynes with Canaccord Genuity.

Congrats on the excellent quarter. David, I want to ask about the OpenAI partnership. I think you quoted saying, this is going to be the most instrumental partnership we've ever embarked upon. As you look out over multiple years, like can you see the potential for how that relationship may evolve over time? Like what excites you the most about that opportunity?

Well, first of all, they're an incredible -- I'm sorry, I'm getting back feedback. Can you hear me, DJ?

I can hear you, yes.

Right. So what I would say is, first of all, OpenAI is an unbelievable organization. And when we think about the large language models, we think about them much like we would think about AWS or Snowflake, where they are all at some point going to be a part of our stack. In fact, we work with most all of them, if not all, already. The partnership with OpenAI is different because it's foundational to Athena. We're also working with them on other components of their business where we are actively talking about doing things to help them with their business while we are talking about them doing more things to help us with our business. So I was really referring to sort of the organizational partnership when I was talking about how I think this will be one of the most important partnerships we've ever made. And as we're looking at Athena, so once again, this whole narrative that large language models are going to disintermediate enterprise software, in our opinion, is silly. We think that large language models are going to be a component of what we do. And of course, we will pay them for their products and services. At the same time, they'll drive efficiency and accelerated revenue growth into our business, which will more than make up for that. And when you think about what we're doing here, the whole goal is to get our clients to be able to more seamlessly use our platform, drive higher return on investment and make easier workflows for them around flying a 747, which is our platform versus the Cessna they currently know how to fly. OpenAI being foundational to Athena is helping us do that, and helping us do that in a very impactful and very meaningful way. Does that make sense, DJ?

It does make sense, yes. Maybe a follow-up on the data side. I'm curious, does the ability for Disqus to collect data or intent signals change in any way with the emergence of AI answer engines? I'm just feeling like people are landing less on owned media and now just reading more summaries. Have you seen any change in the volume of comments or authenticated site visits? And does that impact your ability to collect data at all?

So it's a great question. The answer is no. We have not seen any of that. In fact, because right now, the publishers, a lot of them have a challenge, right? If you look at Google, by way of example, it used to be that 90-plus percent of all queries were directed off to a publisher, a brand or an e-commerce platform. Today, according to them, greater than 60% of all queries are being answered on their platform. That's creating a massive tailwind for

Our next question comes from Richard Baldry with ROTH Capital Partners.

It looks like quota carriers are up about 10% sequentially. I assume some of that has to do with the Marigold acquisition. Can you talk about any cross-training efforts that are needed and how we should think about more additions to the quota carriers throughout the year ahead?

Yes, Rich, we added, call it, 15-ish in that range from Marigold in terms of quota carriers sequentially. So you're right, that was a driver there. I'll let David take the next one.

Yes. What we're doing, Rich, is we're sort of teaming their salespeople up with ours. So rather than taking all of the time to train them on everything we're doing, for their clients, we've sort of segmented it to the top 30, which are, I'm pretty sure, all Fortune 500 companies. But the reality is that we're going in and we're seeing really interesting cross-sell opportunities already because of that.

Got it. And lastly maybe sort of will be gentle and call it an unusual environment for software valuations. So I'm sort of curious, your own internal preferences to allocate capital between either M&A because you've done some meaningful strategic M&A versus buybacks over sort of the near term, intermediate term?

Yes. So let me start by saying we are buying back stock very rapidly. I think we have $130 million left, give or take, on our existing buyback. When we get through that one, we will most likely announce the next one. Every time we've announced a buyback, it has been 100% greater than the prior buyback. So I think right now, the single best use of our capital is to buy back our shares. Now that being said, we've been around for 18 years, I just did a CNBC interview earlier. And it's sort of -- we figured out we've been around for 18 years. We've done 18 acquisitions and we beat and raised 18 quarters in a row. So this is sort of the 18 cubed results as it relates to that. It is highly probable we'll do a 19th acquisition. And this is obviously a good environment to buy what I think are high-quality assets at a lower price than you would have had to pay. We have a very, very solid balance sheet. We have a lot of cash. We are generating meaningful free cash flow at almost a 60% conversion rate of cash to EBITDA. And I think that will continue to go up as we've talked about. And we have de minimis debt. Our debt ratio was below 0. I don't want to come below 0, but it is 0 at this point. So I think we have the opportunity to do something, although there's nothing on the radar right now. Right now, we're operating our business. We've obviously given as reported guidance to a 40% growth rate in the first quarter, a 35% growth rate for the year and feeling like we're in a very good place.

Rich, we've really stepped up the repurchase program in '25. And as David said, especially at these levels, I would expect it to sustain. As a percentage of free cash flow, we did 45% repurchase to free cash flow ratio in 2024. We did 73% in 2025. So our model has always been at least 50% of the free cash flow we generate. But as David said, we're going to be aggressive in this environment.

And Rich, I don't know if you've been able to dig out of the snow but just to show the nimbleness of our organization, I woke up in Los Angeles yesterday with a 50% probability of going to New York to do our earnings, a 50% probability of the team coming to L.A. to do earnings, and we are now all in Miami doing our earnings because it was the only place we could all get to. So we tend to be on the more nimble side as it relates to this stuff.

Got it. Maybe one last one for me. The net retention number of $120 million was a pretty strong number. To keep it a little bit apart, was it more driven by volume usage or the -- more by the number of use cases sort of climbing? And a little struck that it's that strong ahead of Athena being GA because it seems like that lowers the friction to usage. So is there anything we should think about on that number and it's sort of onetime orientedness or sustainability or extensibility?

No, I mean, if you look at -- you can go into each of the Qs and get a pretty good indication throughout the year of the net revenue retention rate, you can get pretty close to it, not exact because that's an annual metric. But you'll see that it was really kind of a -- we're going in with a running start into 2026. It was a very strong end of the year. A few dynamics to think about. First, we benefited from a lot of new customers that were added late in 2024 that very nicely scaled throughout 2025. What's also, I think, evident in the results is not just the addition of use cases and channels, Rich, but growth within brands in the agency ecosystem. If you look at brands within the holdcos on a year-over-year basis, they're up 80%. That's a big change that drives growth within just, call it, 1 scaled customer, but can have some pretty dramatic ARPU expansion outcomes.

Yes. I don't see it as an anomaly, Rich. I mean we're not going to guide to that. But the reality is that what we're seeing is we're seeing, bringing Ed See last year and building the systems around One

Moving next to Elizabeth Porter with Morgan Stanley.

Awesome. This is Katie Keyser on for Elizabeth. I just had a quick one, hoping for an update on the political and advocacy side of the business, really just in the context of what you've seen during previous elections. You guys clearly expanded the size and scale of the platform since prior midterm election cycle. So wondering what you're seeing early in '26 as it relates to advocacy. And then maybe just for Chris, if you could comment on how that spend is expected to phase through your guidance, kind of what scenario would cause that to prove conservative. Any thoughts there would be great.

Sure, I think, Katie, and give our best to Elizabeth. From 2020 to 2022, the contribution in political candidate revenue halved. It was, call it, $20 million in 2020 -- sorry, $15 million in 2020, and it was $7.5 million in 2022. In 2024, total political candidate revenue was right around $40 million. So starting this year's guide at $15 million is probably conservative. What we've said in terms of the cadence of that spend that we expect to realize is, call it, $7 million in the third quarter and $8 million in the fourth quarter. Advocacy is an always on industry for us now. It's obviously bigger in political candidate cycles, but we've actually made some really exciting new hires in 2025 into that area in advance of building momentum for 2026. So I expect that to continue to be an always on industry for us. It will benefit in the candidate year, but it's not driving any outsized contribution in our current guide right now, though.

Yes. And it could be upside, Katie.

Moving next to Matt Swanson with RBC.

Great. A really impressive number when you're talking about the 600% ROI from the Forrester study. Can you just talk a little bit about kind of the macro resiliency that, that gives you a business just as we're dealing with all the headlines around tariffs and everything else?

So thank you, Matt. We actually think it doesn't just insulate us from the macro environment. We think it accelerates in this macro environment. What we see is, as clients are dealing with different sort of variables in their businesses, they want to maximize their return on investment in every component of their business, with marketing being one of their largest expenses as organizations. So I think it's helped us over the last year, and I think it will help us over the next few years.

And then if I could just double-click on one aspect of Marigold, I know Loyalty was something that we talked a lot about when the acquisition was first announced. I think in the prepared remarks, you mentioned that you're seeing some early interest from customers. I was wondering if you could just expand on that a bit.

Yes. So we're -- first of all, we're very excited to take their customers and move them into the One

And we'll go next to Scott Berg with Needham & Company.

This is [ Lucas Metcalf ] on for Scott Berg. Just in terms of 2026 marketing budgets, what are you guys hearing from customers about overall kind of spend growth and how AI is shaping kind of their allocation decisions? And then I guess, specifically, are you seeing AI driving incremental budget expansion, more platform consolidation? Or are you just kind of seeing a reallocation within existing spend?

Well, it's a lot to answer in one fell swoop. What I would start with is, yes, we're seeing platform consolidation. We're starting to see that our entire strategy around disintermediating point solutions into one platform is really taking hold. And Lucas, I think our 120% net retention rate last year really evidences that. What you're also seeing is you're seeing marketing budgets from our vantage point in the United States in their entirety going up into 2026. We think we'll see marketing budgets up and to the right. And we think we will continue to take a multiple of that growth in our growth rate as a company.

Moving on to Jackson Ader with KeyBanc Capital Markets.

This is Jack Nichols on for Jackson Ader. With RFP volumes more than doubling, who are you mainly seeing in deals from a competitive standpoint? And can you talk about

Yes. I mean we continue to see a whole host of point solutions depending on how the RFP is drafted, and we moved the narrative from individual point solutions to our platform solution, which is how we're winning. What I would tell you is we continue to see Salesforce, Adobe, to a less extent, Oracle and a few other smaller players in the CRM RFPs. And then in the acquisition RFPs, we're seeing companies like the Trade Desk continue to be challenged as we continue to take market share from them and others continue to take market share from them. I'm sure they'll have their viewpoint on that at some point. But what I would tell you is that we see the different point solutions in these RFPs. And what I would tell you is we continue to win greater than 50% of the engagements and RFPs we get invited to participate in. And what you're seeing in the numbers, which obviously are growing faster than we even expected and we expected to grow fast is we're seeing far more RFPs than we've ever seen before. So we're seeing more RFPs and we're still winning greater than half. So you're starting to see that ripple into the numbers. I'm pretty sure this will be our third consecutive 30% growth year based on our existing projections. You're talking about 3 years in a row of 30-plus percent growth and a 4- or 5-year 30% compounded growth rate, you're seeing that come in through the growth of the RFPs.

That's helpful to understand. And then maybe as a follow-up, how specifically are agencies thinking about their AI marketing strategies, maybe splitting the difference between Athena and then third-party LLMs, how are the marketing agencies kind of going about the testing and then the use case testing and deployments there?

The LLMs have no capabilities around activating marketing. I mean to be very clear. Today, the only thing the LLMs can do, it can help more efficiently code, which, by the way, our entire engineering staff is using every tool available around efficiency of coding, whether it's Anthropic or it's OpenAI or other products in Guild and we continue to use all of them, which is one of the ways we're staying ahead of our competitors as it relates to our engineering and innovation capability. So we're not seeing any of the agencies at this point looking to move activation to an LLM because they have no activation capabilities. Even the LLMs that are driving -- rolling out their own marketing are not doing it themselves. So I think what you're going to see is you're going to see the agencies continue to consolidate platforms. As Chris said, I think we grew our brands with the agencies we work with by 80% last year over the year before. That's not an accident, right? They're not looking to split that up with LLMs. Now I have had conversations with the heads of all the agency holdcos as of late, and everybody is looking to figure out how do they use large language models to be more efficient inside their businesses just like we're doing. And I think they're going to continue to look to do that. But from an activation perspective, our data which is one of the biggest moats in our business, which is never fed into large language models, it stays behind our cloud, is invaluable to our enterprise and agency clients as it relates to our models being able to train on our data exclusively and the ability to better target and create better return on investment. So I'm not seeing any of that being split up at this point.

We'll go next to Koji Ikeda with Bank of America.

This is George McGreehan on for Koji Ikeda. I wanted to ask on the strength you're seeing in terms of Fortune 100 and Fortune 500, these large enterprises and the new customers coming online from those areas. What are conversations like with these large enterprise customers that presumably have a lot more room to grow with the platform over time? What are they excited about when it comes to the

So thank you, George. Great question. First of all, as we announced, we are now working with 51% of the Fortune 100 and 24% of the Fortune 500. But you're right, we have a very small wallet share there with a massive headroom to grow. Everybody that we're talking to in the Fortune 500 is focused on return on investment. How do they get the highest possible return on their marketing spend to drive efficiency into their business because for most Fortune 500 customers, especially the ones that are consumer-facing, I would say that their second or third largest global expense is marketing. And as they think about that, they're thinking about how do they invest that in a way that they can get the highest possible return. I would tell you, even 5 years ago, Fortune 500 companies were focused not on return on spend. They were focused on the percentage of their revenue that sales and marketing represented. So if they were spending $100 -- I'm sorry, if they were generating $100 in revenue, how do they spend $20 or $22 in marketing? As it relates to today, it's how do we spend $1 and return 500%, 700% or 1,000% against that dollar? And the attribution capabilities compiled with our proprietary data, compiled with our activation capabilities are creating a true return on investment analysis that has not been available to Fortune 500 companies in the past.

And we'll go on to our next question, Callie Valenti with Goldman Sachs.

Just one for me. I wanted to ask -- I know part of your strategy over time has been acquiring assets to add to your Data Cloud. Curious, as consumers interact more with LLMs and that ecosystem continues to mature, how do you think about the potential to capture data from these new channels through M&A or other means?

It's a great question. And yes, we, Callie, have always looked at how do we build on our Data Cloud. What I would tell you is, you hate to plant a flag and say you're done, but I would tell you that today, our Data Cloud is really the best data cloud in the world. We've got better access to information than at any point ever. We're ingesting trillions of signals. And by the way, we've rolled out our own generative optimization platform, the GEO platform where we are helping our clients to better get their information and their businesses fed into the large language models. It's something that allows us to learn a tremendous amount about how the LLMs are acting by building that GEO product. So in many cases, we bought businesses, in many cases, we've built different platforms. In this case, we see GEO as strategic, not just helping our clients get to the next generation of marketing, which we're doing, but also the ability to learn how those models are thinking, how they're ingesting information and how do we get information back from them.

This now concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the floor back over to David Steinberg for closing comments.

I will close simply by saying I have never been prouder of running this company. We have the right people at the right time with the right technology, not just to win today, but to win for many, many years to come. We're incredibly excited about the innovations around artificial intelligence and how they are willing to fit into our platform and how we are going to be the disruptor of marketing over the next generation, not the disruptee. I hope everybody has an incredible day and an incredible week. Thank you for listening.