CuriosityStream Inc. Class A Common Stock 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Please go ahead. Thank you, and welcome to CuriosityStream's discussion of its second quarter 2026 financial results.

Leading the discussion today are Clint Stinchcomb, CuriosityStream's Chief Executive Officer, and Brady Hayden, CuriosityStream's Chief Financial Officer. Following management's prepared remarks, we will take questions from the analyst community. But first, I'll review the safe harbor statement. During this call, we may make statements related to our business that are forward-looking statements under the federal securities laws. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, but rather are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. Our actual results could differ materially from the expectations reflected in any forward-looking statements. Please be aware that any forward-looking statements reflect management's current views only, and the company undertakes no obligation to revise or update these statements, nor to make additional forward-looking statements in the future.

For a discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our SEC filings available on the SEC website and on our investor relations website, as well as the risks and other important factors discussed in today's press release. Additional information will also be set forth in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, when filed. In addition, reference will be made to non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to comparable GAAP measures can be found on our website at investors.curiositystream.com. Unless otherwise stated, all comparisons will be against our results for the comparable 2025 period. Now, I'll turn the call over to Clint.

Thank you, Vanessa. Second quarter was a defining quarter for CuriosityStream. We delivered the strongest quarterly financial performance in our history, including record operating income, EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, net income, and earnings per share. The results demonstrate what Curiosity can produce when we combine the value of our differentiated content and data assets with our disciplined operating model. In the quarter, high-value licensing revenue, reliable subscription revenue, efficient spending, lower year-over-year operating expenses, and a focused cost structure came together to create substantial operating leverage. Revenue was $23.2 million in the second quarter, up 22% year-over-year. Licensing revenue was $14.1 million, up 48% from the prior year quarter. Licensing represented the largest component of our revenue growth in the quarter and highlights the strategic value of the Curiosity corpus and the multiple ways in which we can monetize it.

Today, we're able to engage with leading global media and technology companies through licensing, supported by three distinct and durable pillars. First, we license premium factual video to broadcast, AVOD, streaming, cable, satellite, wireless, and other distribution partners. Second, we license highly structured custom and off-the-shelf video and audio data sets to technology companies for AI training. Third, we offer a private code corpus of more than 880 billion tokens for licensing to frontier model developers and coding agent providers for AI training and reinforcement learning, as well as to enterprises seeking to fine-tune models after pre-training and general training on closed and open source large language models.

While we believe our private code database offering is the largest available in the world, simply put, beyond sheer volume, we offer unique software engineering environments containing code, history, decisions, failures, and verifiable outcomes that can improve coding agents through training, RL, and evaluation. We believe these three distinct sources of licensing intellectual property reduce medium-term licensing risk and create significant long-term upside. They allow us to participate in several large and expanding markets while serving customers with different use cases, buying cycles, and commercial objectives. In response to partner demand, we have also now productized a significant portion of our video library, specifically for AI training. We believe this productization will reduce friction in the licensing process, make it easier for prospective customers to identify and evaluate the data sets they need, and ultimately shorten sales cycles. We currently offer 17 off-the-shelf video data set products.

These include extensive premium collections covering scripted entertainment, professional and collegiate sports, animation, wildlife, science, automotive, and instructional content, as well as highly structured data sets and clips built around high dynamic range video, character tracking, synchronized multi-camera footage, merging objects, and raw footage. Importantly, we're not simply offering large quantities of video. We're increasingly organizing, structuring, and packaging our IP around the specific requirements of sophisticated AI developers. We believe this substantially increases both the utility and the value of the underlying content. At approximately $9 million, subscription revenue was roughly equivalent to the second quarter of 2025. We remain committed to our subscription business and to building the long-term value of the CuriosityStream brand and customer relationships. At the same time, we continue to manage that business for durable economics rather than pursuing growth at any cost.

Our diversified monetization model gives us the ability to be disciplined in customer acquisition spending while we capitalize on high-value licensing and distribution opportunities. We also made meaningful progress in improving the efficiency of the business. By leveraging AI productivity tools and better aligning our talent base with the highest value priorities, we reduced spending across our primary expense categories. Total operating expenses declined 24% year-over-year. We expect to make further progress in the second half of the year. This is not simply a cost reduction story. This quarter showcases a more efficient business model in which CuriosityStream can convert high-value revenue into meaningful profitability while continuing to invest selectively in the content, technology, distribution, and commercial capabilities that support long-term value creation. The resulting profitability was exceptional. Net income was a record $8.9 million, up 1,133% compared with $0.9 million in the prior year quarter.

Second quarter EPS was $0.15. Adjusted EBITDA was a record $11.4 million, up approximately 300%. Margins reflected this operating leverage. Gross margin increased to 73% from 53% in the prior year quarter. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 49%, compared with 16% in the prior year quarter. Our strategy remains clear. We continue to pursue high-value licensing opportunities that recognize the differentiated value of our extensive portfolio. We will maintain our focus on operating discipline, including thoughtful marketing investment and rigorous expense management. We will continue to build the long-term value of the Curiosity ecosystem across established and emerging platforms while simultaneously exploiting existing and new grants of rights that we can monetize. I want to thank the entire Curiosity team for delivering these results.

The quarter was a powerful demonstration of the value of our brand, flexibility of our business, and the earnings power of the company, made possible by the breadth and depth of our IP. We are pleased with the momentum, but our focus remains squarely on execution and on our longer-term objective, building Curiosity into a company that informs, inspires, and entertains, and in so doing, generates $100 million or more of reliable, recurring, and increasingly predictable annualized revenue. I will now hand the call over to our CFO, Brady Hayden.

Thank you, Clint, and good afternoon, everyone. Our full Q2 results will be in the 10-Q that we will file within the next day or two. Let me quickly hit some of our second quarter highlights. As Clint said, in Q2, we reported revenue of $23.2 million, compared to $19 million a year ago. Likewise, we reported record adjusted EBITDA of $11.4 million. This is also our sixth consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA. We generated second quarter subscription revenue of $8.9 million, a slight improvement from Q1. Licensing came in at $14.1 million, a 48% increase from last year. Second quarter gross margin was 73%, improving from 53% last year, as we were able to generate significant new revenue in the quarter with only minimal incremental distribution costs. Total operating expenses were down by 24.1% as we continue to see the benefits of our ongoing cost rationalization efforts.

We reported record net income in the second quarter of $8.9 million, or $0.15 a share. This compares to $0.8 million of net income in the second quarter of 2025. We believe our balance sheet remains in good shape. In June, we paid our regular $5 million dividend, and we repurchased $600,000 of our shares in the quarter. We also prepaid $2 million to fully consolidate the ownership of our German business and buy out our JV partners, SPIEGEL TV and Autentic, of their stakes. This transaction officially closed on July 1st and will be reflected in our Q3 results. We ended the quarter with total cash and securities of $10.9 million and no outstanding debt. Based on our quarterly dividend of $0.085 per share, at yesterday's closing price, CuriosityStream shares provide a dividend yield of about 12%.

Looking at our liquidity outlook for the remainder of 2026, we expect to end the year with a cash and investments balance of $17 million-$22 million. We expect revenue for the second half of the year to be $38 million-$41 million, and full year 2026 revenue in the range of $77 million-$82 million. Furthermore, we expect adjusted EBITDA for the second half of the year to be $6 million-$10 million, and full year 2026 adjusted EBITDA in the range of $18 million-$22 million. With that, I will turn it back over to the operator to begin our Q&A.