Ibotta, Inc. 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Thank you, good afternoon, everyone. I'm pleased to report that in the second quarter, Ibotta delivered top and bottom-line financial results that exceeded the high end of our guidance range. Importantly, we've returned to year-over-year revenue growth a full quarter ahead of our expectations. This positive development was driven primarily by a steady improvement in our advertiser offer supply, which continues to benefit from growth in both our core product and our newer capabilities like LiveLift. Our top-line acceleration was led by our redemption revenue growth. In Q2, redemption revenue grew by 10% year-over-year, marking our fastest pace of growth in this core part of our business since the third quarter of 2024. Third-party redemption revenue grew 27% year-over-year. This growth corresponded to the continued growth in our redeemer base. We achieved year-over-year redeemer growth of 21% in the quarter.

This represents our fastest rate of expansion since Q2 of 2025, at a time when our metrics were benefiting from the launch of our Instacart and DoorDash partnerships. What's most exciting about these results is that we're driving this redeemer velocity efficiently across a significantly larger network footprint, which speaks to the continued health in the demand side of our business. Today, we're reporting that we have 20.9 million redeemers. To put this in perspective, just five years ago, we had approximately two million redeemers, an increase of more than 10X since then. As you've heard me say before, increased demand for offers alone isn't enough. Until we have the depth of offer supply to match the demand, we can't capitalize fully on the opportunity it presents.

There are positive signs on that front, including the fact that we've delivered year-over-year growth in our third-party redemptions per redeemer for the first time since the third quarter of 2024. These results are a direct outcome of stronger execution by our team. With a few quarters now under their belt, it's clear that the new verticalized sales structure and broader revenue organization we put in place beginning in Q3 of last year is working as intended. Our teams are providing customers with an upgraded consultative sales and service motion, spending more time in market, strengthening client relationships at all levels, and ensuring the level of account management continuity required to unlock deeper advertising budgets. The recovery we're seeing is distributed broadly across our clients. In fact, within our enterprise client base, the majority of accounts that declined in 2025 were back to year-over-year growth in Q2.

To share one anecdote to give you a sense of how this commercial inflection is playing out, one of our largest household products partners, a consistent top 20 client for us, was actually an early pioneer who gave us feedback back in 2024 that helped shape the initial concept of LiveLift. While their overall spend declined in 2025, we doubled down on our in-person engagement across several of their brand teams. We deepened that relationship significantly over the past year. In fact, our leadership team was invited to present at the client's internal marketing event earlier this year. We saw success by effectively multi-threading and engaging with teams across shopper marketing, analytics, and sales. This high-touch service motion quickly translated into expanded business. With recent share losses in a key segment, the client has been hyper-focused on driving incremental sales and household penetration.

Given these objectives, LiveLift is a strong fit. After running a successful initial LiveLift campaign late last year, they expanded LiveLift in the first half of 2026 across the original brand, as well as new brands in different product divisions. As a result of this upgraded execution and LiveLift expansion, our net revenue with this key partner is up 75% year over year in the first half of 2026. This upgraded commercial execution is aided by our seasonal events marketing playbook, which identifies opportunities for clients to leverage retailer-native Ibotta offers during peak retail moments such as Back to School, Prime Day, and Walmart Deals. Since May, a substantial portion of our closed-won deals have directly benefited from this strategic playbook, as brands look to capture outsized market share and maximize visibility during times when consumer volume and engagement are high.

From a vertical perspective, our growth this quarter was driven by three core categories: emerging brands, food, and health and beauty. In emerging, we're seeing significant budget inflows from challenger brands that are leveraging our network to drive immediate, efficient, net new household acquisition. In food, which remains an important category and the one most challenged by the current macroeconomic landscape, our performance marketing message is resonating deeply. Brand managers in this space view value delivery as a core mandate, and we believe they are leaning into our network because we provide scale and efficiency. In health and beauty, our strong growth is consistent with the relatively healthy industry trends for the category.

Our performance across each of these categories illustrates how the Ibotta Performance Network benefits from its diverse content, driving critical volume in more challenged sectors like food, while capturing high velocity dollars in healthier, expanding categories like health and beauty. We also continue to position ourselves as thought leaders in the promotion space. In June, our team was on stage at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity alongside key partners from Kenvue, Grupo Bimbo, DoorDash and Uber. In July, our team appeared with the SVP of Marketing and Insights at Mondelez at the Adweek House Sports Summit. Those sessions demonstrated our commitment to continuously raising the bar when it comes to measurement rigor in our industry. Along with Circana, we recently released a comprehensive meta-study and analysis evaluating 48 different Ibotta campaigns across multiple CPG categories.

The data from this independent study showed an average lift of 16.5% in incremental sales and a 17% average increase in new household penetration for the products promoted in our network. Crucially, the study also revealed a 10.9% average sales lift on non-promoted items within the same brand portfolio, demonstrating that our promotions generate a powerful cross-retailer halo effect for a brand's broader catalog. These campaigns exceeded Circana's standard sales lift benchmarks by a factor of 7x, showing the power of our promotions to move the needle for our CPG brand clients. As Circana's SVP of Global Media Enablement and Measurement noted in the release, quote, "For years, promotions in media have been evaluated on different standards, limiting marketers' ability to make true investment comparisons.

What this research shows is that when you apply the same methodology used for traditional media, promotions can play a much larger role in driving incremental growth than many organizations currently assume." End quote. We believe that stronger execution, coupled with continued investment in innovation and thought leadership, reinforces our position as a trusted partner our clients look to in order to deliver more revenue and grow market share. We continue to focus on making it as easy as possible for our CPG clients to buy campaigns on the Ibotta Performance Network. This, we believe, creates a larger TAM opportunity and unlocks access to even greater offer supply. As it relates to the key automation initiatives I discussed last quarter, we remain on track and have made significant progress against all three work streams. We're building a powerful and intuitive next-generation buying experience for our clients, which we believe will also free up our sales force to focus on selling rather than navigating administrative tasks, as well as enabling greater scaling of LiveLift. At the same time, revenue from LiveLift continues to grow both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. Finally, as I alluded to at the top of my comments, we believe the value proposition of the Ibotta Performance Network is resonating on the demand side of the marketplace. Earlier today, we officially welcomed 7-Eleven Inc. to the IPN, marking our third major publisher addition this year and significantly expanding our convenience store footprint. Ibotta will serve as the exclusive third-party provider of CPG digital promotions, excluding age-restricted items, to the 7-Eleven, 7NOW and Speedway apps, reaching shoppers across more than 11,500 U.S. store locations.

We're building a powerful and intuitive next-generation buying experience for our clients, which we believe will also free up our sales force to focus on selling rather than navigating administrative tasks, as well as enabling greater scaling of LiveLift. At the same time, revenue from LiveLift continues to grow both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. Finally, as I alluded to at the top of my comments, we believe the value proposition of the Ibotta Performance Network is resonating on the demand side of the marketplace. Earlier today, we officially welcomed 7-Eleven, Inc. to the IPN, marking our third major publisher addition this year and significantly expanding our convenience store footprint. Ibotta will serve as the exclusive third-party provider of CPG digital promotions, excluding age-restricted items, to the 7-Eleven, 7NOW and Speedway apps, reaching shoppers across more than 11,500 U.S. store locations.

The convenience store channel is strategically vital for many of our largest food and beverage clients, and we are thrilled to bring Ibotta's national offer supply to this broad and important consumer base. Historically, this specific retail channel has lacked access to coordinated digital promotions. By embedding our digital offers natively into this environment, we are unlocking another high-intent surface for our advertisers, giving them an opportunity to impact consumer consideration and purchase behavior at the c-store digital shelf. This addition is also a great example of how our network reinforces itself, as several of our key CPG clients actively helped us advocate for and secure this new publisher. In addition to this new signing, we officially launched our native offer experiences at Uber at the tail end of the second quarter, and our integration with Giant Eagle went live in July.

Both onboarding processes are progressing smoothly and according to plan. Furthermore, within our existing footprint, we continue to benefit from close collaboration with our publishers. With multiple retail partners, we are expanding how offers are integrated across digital and in-store experiences. For example, we are working closely with Walmart to help customers more easily discover manufacturer-funded savings throughout the shopper journey, including in stores, thereby reinforcing the retailer's value proposition while creating a more seamless customer experience. Our partners continue to see substantial strategic benefits from these integrations, including deeper digital engagement, greater loyalty, and increased basket size. Across the board, our network is strong and growing. Our go-to-market engine upgrades and product roadmap are moving forward on schedule, and our team is delivering against our plans. We look forward to building on this positive momentum throughout the back half of the year.