Viant Technology Inc. Class A Common Stock 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to Viant Technology's second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. On the call today are Tim Vanderhook, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Chris Vanderhook, 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 Q3 2026 and other future financial results, our strategy, our growth opportunities, performance and benefits of our products, our platform development initiatives, including ViantAI, expected benefits of our acquisition of TVision, our pipeline and potential partnership opportunities, our share repurchase program, potential tailwinds 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 June 30, 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 to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, are included in the news release issued today and in our earnings presentation, which have been posted on the investor relations page of the company's website and in our filings with the SEC. I would now like to turn the call over to Tim Vanderhook, Chief Executive Officer of Viant.

Tim? Thanks, Nick, and thanks to everyone for joining us today.

We delivered strong second quarter performance, achieving new company second quarter records across all key metrics. Revenue increased 34% year-over-year, well above the high end of our quarterly guidance range, and contribution ex-TAC increased 24% year-over-year. Growth was broad-based across most verticals, driven by strong CTV demand, increased utilization of our proprietary intelligence, and expanded use of ViantAI. Most notably, customer CTV spend surged by nearly 50% in the quarter, attributable to the unique performance advantages we deliver for advertisers within this secular growth channel. Finally, adjusted EBITDA increased 26% year-over-year to $14.2 million for the quarter, exceeding the high end of our guidance range.

As our second quarter results clearly indicate, Viant has entered into a new phase of accelerated growth, propelled by the continued adoption of our platform by major U.S. advertisers. Ramping spend from these clients contributed to one of our strongest top-line quarters ever as a public company. Our momentum is accelerating and is supported by the largest pipeline of new business opportunities in our company's history. Our differentiated value proposition, further enhanced by the integration of TVision's attention insights, is resonating with advertisers and agencies more so than ever before. Viant has evolved from a demand-side platform into an advertising intelligence company, uniquely capable of empowering advertisers with proprietary data, independent measurement, and cutting-edge AI solutions, which collectively work in concert to optimize media execution. Viant is in market with an industry-leading arsenal of technological solutions specifically engineered to drive superior ad campaign performance.

Our intelligence layer synthesizes proprietary viewership signals, spanning audience identity, content selection, and viewer attention into real-time actionable insights that best inform campaign targeting strategies. AI Lattice Brain, our AI-powered decisioning architecture, operationalizes these insights, dynamically refining every campaign to ensure that performance is continuously optimized. Our Direct Access supply path connects brands directly to premium publishers, lowering costs and eliminating bid stream inefficiencies to maximize working media spend. These solutions, exclusive to Viant, are attracting new advertisers to our platform while simultaneously fueling organic growth through deeper value-driven relationships with existing clients. Our commitment to innovation is solidifying Viant as an essential must-have partner for today's outcome-oriented advertisers. In a moment, Chris will provide some perspective on today's market environment and detail how Viant is strategically positioned to capitalize on emerging market opportunities to deliver sustainable long-term growth into 2027 and beyond.

First, I will provide an update on our recent performance and progress across our three key strategic priorities: Viant's proprietary intelligence layer, ViantAI, and CTV. Beginning with our intelligence layer, Viant empowers advertisers to deploy sophisticated campaign strategies through three core pillars of proprietary intelligence, spanning identity, content, and attention. These proprietary data signals allow our advertisers to parse through the 15 million bid requests made available to them every second and identify the specific impressions that will drive performance. Leveraging our proprietary intelligence, advertisers can precisely target their desired audiences within contextually relevant, high-attention environments and capture value by acquiring inventory where the intrinsic value exceeds the market price. Walking through our intelligence layer, Viant's identity intelligence is powered by our Household ID, a patented solution for audience targeting.

Household ID delivers superior addressability for advertisers looking to activate their first-party data to reach specific audiences and measure campaign performance. Household ID is widely available across the digital landscape, embedded in 80% of all programmatic bid requests and 96% of all CTV requests, offering four times the coverage of competing identity solutions. It is mapped to 95% of U.S. household addresses through our identity graph, enabling advertisers to activate first-party data at massive scale. A large grocery store chain has been utilizing Household ID for several years. By leveraging the pervasive reach of Household ID, they are able to deploy sophisticated audience targeting campaigns at a scale that is simply unmatched in the market. We link their first-party data directly to our identity graph to establish a precise one-to-one match.

Because Household ID is so ubiquitous, we can scale their strategy across the entire programmatic ecosystem more broadly than any competitor, while providing simple, clean, closed-loop measurement back to their own internal IDs. Household ID utilization reached new heights this quarter, fueled by a growing number of advertisers deploying sophisticated targeting strategies. This adoption drove robust performance, with contribution ex-TAC attributable to Household ID achieving its strongest year-over-year growth in five quarters. Viant's content intelligence is powered by the IRIS Content ID, which empowers advertisers with show-level targeting, a significant leap in granularity compared to that of our competitors who are limited to app-level visibility. We achieve scene-level targeting through direct integrations with publisher content management systems, which provides Viant with high-resolution contextual intelligence that is not available elsewhere.

Leveraging the IRIS Content ID, advertisers can align their ad creative with specific shows, contextual categories, and even emotional sentiments, enabling a level of micro-targeting that drives better outcomes. A brand like WHOOP will combine the audience precision of Household ID with the contextual intelligence of the IRIS Content ID to achieve superior return on ad spend. By stacking Household ID with IRIS Content ID, WHOOP not only reaches fitness enthusiasts, they reach fitness enthusiasts in the specific contextually relevant moments that matter most, like during premium sports programming, which significantly boosts campaign performance. We are seeing a powerful feedback loop. Advertisers are prioritizing IRIS Content ID for its granular targeting capabilities, and publishers are rapidly adopting the standard to make their inventory more competitive and attractive.

IRIS Content ID is currently enabled across a number of leading CTV OEMs, including Samsung, LG, Vizio, TCL, and Xumo, along with leading streaming services including Paramount+, Tubi, AMC Networks, and A&E, among others. Presence across enabled publishers has pushed IRIS Content ID to nearly 50% penetration within the bid stream. Over the course of the third and fourth quarters, we are scheduled to launch the IRIS Content ID across Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, Roku, DirecTV, Sling TV, Spectrum, and Philo, pushing penetration to approximately 70% of biddable inventory by the end of the year. Viant's attention intelligence is powered by TVision and its nationally representative panel of U.S. households, each of which is equipped with TVision's computer vision and automatic content recognition technology. TVision's attention data provides advertisers with four unique signals of attentive insight: in-room presence, co-viewership, second-by-second eyes-on-screen attention, and associated viewer demographics.

These signals quantify viewer attention across the entire media landscape, which includes linear TV, connected TV, and the walled garden platforms of YouTube and Prime Video. To date, TVision's attention measurement data has been an essential asset for advertisers looking to optimize market planning and elevate creative performance. Publishers also rely on TVision's insights to pinpoint where viewer engagement gravitates, allowing them to better refine their content strategies. Together, Viant and TVision are pioneering a new standard of advanced targeting. We can now deploy attention data as a pre-bid signal, which empowers advertisers to target inventory based on its attentive value, a breakthrough capability that has not existed until now. To be more precise, TVision's attention signals effectively act as a proprietary lens for price discovery. We can now calculate the real-time intrinsic value of any impression based on its attention score.