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DATE

Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2026 at 4:30 p.m. ET

CALL PARTICIPANTS

• Investor Relations - Trey Campbell
• Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer - David A. Steinberg
• Chief Financial Officer - Christopher E. Greiner

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TAKEAWAYS

• Revenue -- $443 million, growing 44% year over year and exceeding the midpoint of guidance by $23 million.
• Organic Revenue Growth -- 28% year over year, excluding the impact of acquisitions.
• Adjusted EBITDA -- $92 million, increasing 56% year over year with a margin of 20.7%.
• Rule of 64 Achievement -- 64.7, calculated as the sum of 44% revenue growth and a 20.7% adjusted EBITDA margin.
• Fiscal Year 2026 Revenue Guidance -- $1.811 billion to $1.824 billion, representing a $33 million increase at the midpoint from prior guidance and 39% year-over-year growth.
• Fiscal Year 2026 Adjusted EBITDA Guidance -- $404.1 million to $406.3 million, representing a margin of 22.3% and a 45% increase year over year.
• Third Quarter 2026 Revenue Guidance -- $469 million to $472 million, reflecting growth of 39% to 40% year over year.
• Super-Scaled Customers -- 197 customers, increasing 17% year over year and exceeding the company's long-term model growth rate of 4% to 8%.
• Super-Scaled ARPU -- $1.8 million, growing 17% year over year and exceeding the long-term target range of 12% to 16%.
• Free Cash Flow -- $58 million, representing 73% year-over-year growth and a margin of 13.1%.
• GAAP Net Income -- $8.2 million, resulting in GAAP earnings per share of $0.03 compared to a net loss of $12.8 million in the prior year period.
• Fiscal Year 2026 Free Cash Flow Guidance -- $254.8 million to $255.8 million, reflecting 55% year-over-year growth.
• Fiscal Year 2026 GAAP EPS Guidance -- $0.09 to $0.11, up from the prior guidance range of $0.02 to $0.04.
• Sales Pipeline -- $100 million in growth over the last 90 days, representing a total increase of more than 60% year over year.
• Sales Productivity -- 100% year-over-year increase in pipeline creation per seller, with average contract values up more than 40%.
• Quota-Carrying Headcount -- 198 sellers, representing an increase of 11% year over year.
• Multi-Use Case Adoption -- 90% year-over-year growth in customers using more than one use case, with those using five or more channels increasing 50%.
• Athena Voice Engagement -- 83% of customer interactions are now voice-based, which management noted as a primary interface for marketing and business intelligence.
• AI Revenue Concentration -- 70% of total revenue is generated by the 20% of customers who have comprehensively adopted the company's AI tools.
• Customer Retention -- 56 months for the average super-scaled customer relationship, up from 48 months two years ago.
• Share Repurchases -- $29.9 million deployed to buy back 1.6 million shares in the second quarter, with $89.4 million remaining on the current authorization.
• Political Candidate Revenue -- $7 million in the third quarter and $8 million in the fourth quarter, consistent with previous guidance for the midterm election cycle.
• Credit Facility -- $1 billion, including a $250 million term loan and a $750 million revolving credit facility to support capital flexibility.
• Software Development Automation -- 90% of all new code generated in the second quarter was automated using internal AI tools.

SUMMARY

Management reported that **Zeta Global Holdings Corp.** (ZETA +5.85%) is evolving from a specialized marketing technology firm into an intelligent AI infrastructure company. The company stated that its proprietary data cloud, covering 535 million individuals globally, serves as the foundation for its Athena AI layer and the newly launched Zeta Business Intelligence (ZBI) product. Strategic collaborations with OpenAI, Snowflake, and Palantir were identified as primary catalysts for market share gains and expanded enterprise opportunities. Management noted that the Palantir partnership, fully integrated as of July 31, 2026, has already resulted in multiple agreements for combined sales. Financial performance was characterized by 21 consecutive quarters of greater than 20% revenue growth excluding M&A, with management increasing full year expectations for revenue, profitability, and free cash flow based on high pipeline visibility and increased sales productivity.

• CEO Steinberg noted that the transition to an infrastructure model is driven by proprietary data, stating, "nothing you rent can be a moat around your business."
• Management reported that users interacting with the platform via Athena's voice interface are engaging at a 500% higher level than non-Athena users.
• The company integrated its data cloud with Palantir's Foundry architecture to allow for faster processing of enterprise data and natural language interactions.
• CFO Greiner introduced a new measurement framework for AI adoption, stating, "moats are ultimately proven by how long customers stay and how much more they spend over time."
• The company launched Athena for agencies at the Cannes Lions event, which management reported resulted in a record sales pipeline and over 100 executive meetings.
• ZBI is being utilized by a major sports and entertainment company to quantify the value of distribution partnerships and identify future streaming relationships.
• Internal efficiency gains were attributed to the "Spade" workflow management tool, which automated nearly 90% of new software code generation in the second quarter.

INDUSTRY GLOSSARY

• Athena: Zeta's AI intelligence layer that allows users to interact with data using natural language and voice commands to automate marketing workflows.
• ZMP (Zeta Marketing Platform): An omnichannel marketing cloud that uses AI and proprietary data to predict consumer intent and automate engagement.
• CDP (Consumer Data Platform): Software that aggregates and organizes customer data from multiple sources to create a unified profile of individual consumers.
• ZBI (Zeta Business Intelligence): A predictive intelligence tool that analyzes enterprise data to forecast business outcomes and assist in real-time decision-making.
• Super-Scaled Customer: A customer that generates at least $1 million in revenue for Zeta on a trailing 12-month basis.
• ARPU (Average Revenue Per User/Unit): A metric calculating the average amount of revenue generated per customer during a specific period.
• Foundry: Palantir's enterprise data platform used for integrating large-scale data sets and building analytical models.
• Ontology: In the context of Palantir and Zeta, a digital representation of an organization’s data that defines the relationships and logic between different data points.
• Rule of 40 / 64: A financial efficiency metric for software companies; Zeta's "Rule of 64" combines its revenue growth percentage and adjusted EBITDA margin.

Full Conference Call Transcript

Operator: Good day, and welcome to the Zeta Global Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Trey Campbell. Please go ahead, sir.

Trey Campbell: Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Zeta's Second Quarter 2026 Conference Call. Today's presentation and earnings are available on Zeta's Investor Relations website at investors.zetaglobal.com, where you will also find links to our SEC filings along with other information about Zeta. Joining me on the call today are David A. Steinberg, Zeta's Co Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer and Christopher E. Greiner, Zeta's Chief Financial Officer.

Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that statements made on this call, as well as in the presentation and earnings release, contain forward-looking statements regarding our financial outlook, business plans and objectives, and other future events and developments, Including statements about the market potential of our products, potential competition, revenues of our products, and our goals and strategies. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. These risks and uncertainties include those described in the company's earnings release and other filings with the SEC and speak only as of today's date.

In addition, our discussion today will include references to certain supplemental non GAAP financial measures, which should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for our GAAP results. We use these non GAAP measures in managing our business and believe they provide useful information for our investors. Reconciliations of the non GAAP measures to the corresponding GAAP measures, where appropriate, can be found in the earnings presentation available on our website as well as our earnings release and other filings with the SEC. With that, I will now turn the call over to David.

David A. Steinberg: Thank you, Trey. Welcome to the team. We are very excited to have you. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I will start with the headline. We delivered our 20th consecutive beat-and-raise quarter, Delivering the rule of 64 as a company and the rule of 49 excluding M&A. And in the second quarter, our year over year revenue growth accelerated to 44%, up from 35% in the second quarter of last year. This is the result of Zeta increasingly becoming the system of intelligence for our customers. The second quarter performance once again shows this strategy is working.

Second quarter revenue was $443 million representing year over year growth of 44%. that is up 28% year over year, excluding M&A revenue. Adjusted EBITDA was $92 million up 56% year over year with margin expanding 170 basis points year over year to 20.7%. And based upon this strength, we are once again raising the midpoint of our 2026 revenue guidance by $33 million. 20 consecutive beat and raise quarters reflects more than just strong execution. It is evidence of growing and durable demand for our platform that turns data into intelligence, intelligence into decisions and decisions into measurable outcomes. Investors have historically viewed Zeta as a mark technology company.

Marketing is where our platform was first applied and where we built our leadership position. But that description no longer fully encapsulates who we are today. Zeta has evolved into an intelligent AI infrastructure platform. Marketing is our first application not our limit. Our platform combines proprietary data, AI, workflow automation, and activation into a single operating system that helps enterprises make better real time decisions and take action. The foundation is our data cloud. Built on proprietary data covering more than 535 million individuals globally, trillions of signals, and 20 years of model tuning. And to be clear, this data is owned not rented. Because nothing you rent can be a moat around your business.

Athena serves as the intelligence layer allowing customers to interact with that foundation using natural language and embed AI directly into their everyday workflows. It truly allows customers to focus on outcomes versus navigating the platform. Our activation platform then turns those insights into actions across channels while continuously learning and getting smarter via the results. This has contributed to the strength of our net revenue retention. And with Zeta Business Intelligence, a.k.a. ZBI, we are also extending beyond helping enterprises to acquire, grow, and retain customers to a fourth use case, enabling organizations to transform business and customer data into intelligence, insights, and real time actions.

To be clear, this is not static dashboards or old school business intelligence used to explain what happened. ZBI helps predict what happens next and acts on it in real time. A major sports and entertainment company uses ZBI today to understand its fans, share of entertainment spending, engagement across live events, and streaming. This helps quantify the value of current distribution partnerships identify the most attractive future streaming relationships, and strengthen its negotiations at renewal. A leading energy drink brand uses ZBI to quantify the incremental value it drives for retail partners, including customer growth, spending, and long term value. This helps demonstrate the brand's impacted retailers and identify opportunities to deepen distribution, and partnership investment.

Taken together, these capabilities position us as the intelligent AI infrastructure layer. That sits at the center of enterprise decision making. This transformation has been accelerated by 4 strategic catalysts. First, is our OpenAI partnership. Our collaboration with OpenAI validates the AI strategy we have been building for years. Enhances Athena's capabilities, and creates new commercial opportunities. As foundation models continue to improve and become more widely available, we believe the durable advantage will come from what is built around them, proprietary data, governance, workflows, and decisioning systems that turn intelligence into outcomes. Those decisioning systems are our own inference models smaller purpose built models that we have been training on the data cloud since 2017.

OpenAI powers Athena's voice, The decisions run on our models, and no large language models ever touch the data in our data cloud. The second is Athena. Launched earlier this year, Athena is fundamentally changing how customers interact with the Zeta platform. Athena is true voice enablement and fully conversational Instead of navigating dashboards or conducting manual analysis, customers can simply ask for outcomes. The platform knows their business, decides, acts, and learns from every single result. That dramatically lowers the barrier to adoption and expands use across teams, channels, and use cases. We have seen that users who interact with Athena through voice exemplify this rapid adoption.

Over the last 60 days, Athena's voice users are interacting with the platform at a 500% higher level than non Athena users. We are also realizing the benefits of AI within Zeta In the second quarter, 90% of our new code generated was automated. Helping our teams to innovate faster and continuously enhance the platform for our customers. The third is Snowflake. We deepened our existing partnership with Snowflake. And we now have over 100 shared customers. Reinforcing Zeta's role in the enterprise data ecosystem. Where customers increasingly want to connect data environments with intelligence and activation. Zeta is uniquely positioned not only to help customers store and analyze data, but to act on it. And the fourth is Palantir.

Our partnership with Palantir significantly expands Zeta's enterprise opportunity. Palantir provides the ontology, governance, and enterprise AI infrastructure that large organizations require Zeta contributes proprietary customer intelligence, proprietary data, identity, decisioning, and activation. And we have reached 2 important milestones in this partnership already. Our data cloud was fully integrated with Foundry as of July 31. And we have already received multiple agreements for our initial combined sale with several other meaningful opportunities in flight. Together, these 4 catalysts are accelerating Zeta's transformation and strengthening our position as the intelligent AI infrastructure layer for the enterprise. We believe the defining characteristic of an infrastructure platform is not just innovative technology.

It is a platform that becomes more valuable the more customers use it. Every decision it powers makes the next 1 better. And because those decisions run on our own inference models, not rented tokens, We make millions of them a day with infrastructure economics. That is the flywheel driving our results. And we are seeing it play out across our existing customer base. A leading telecommunications provider recently expanded its relationship with Zeta into real time personalization, adding, grow, and retain use cases to its existing footprint. It is a powerful example of our land and expand model. Start with 1 use case, prove value, and expand across the customer life cycle.

Athena is beginning to accelerate that dynamic to give investors greater visibility into its impact Christopher will provide more detail on our initial framework for measuring key metrics like revenue contribution, adoption, and usage later in this call. We will continue to expand on our reporting around these metrics in the back half of this year. GAAP is a powerful example of our platform evolution. As part of its broader AI led transformation, Gap selected Zeta to help architect its next generation marketing stack. With Athena at the center of how customer data, decisions, and execution come together. Our role extends well beyond powering individual campaigns.

We are helping Gap to remove silos, unified decision-making across its iconic brands, and build a more intelligent marketing engine that learns, adapts, and acts in real time under a multiyear agreement as GAP's system of record. That is what it means for Zeta to become the transformation agent for the enterprise. This momentum was also evident at Cannes Lions, which served as an important proof point for the growing market interest in Zeta and Athena. We launched Athena for agencies, hosted more than 100 executive meetings, and delivered 37 live Athena demonstrations, resulting in a record sales pipeline coming out of the event.

The conversations we began in Cannes will continue at Zeta Live, where we will provide an even deeper look at the future of Zeta and intelligent AI infrastructure. Zeta Live will be in New York City on October 8. I am excited to announce we already have 2 incredible headline speakers Olympic gold medalist entrepreneur, and founder, Lindsey Vonn, entrepreneur and global superstar, Kevin Hart. Zeta Live has always been our opportunity to show customers partners, and investors where we are going next. This year, we expect to introduce the next generation of Athena, continuing the extension of Athena as a superintelligent agent. Answering questions, empowering workflows to a system of intelligence that knows decides, acts, and learns.

The opportunity in front of us is no longer just about monetizing marketing. it is about helping enterprises turn fragmented data into intelligence. Intelligence into decisions, and decisions into measurable growth and cost savings in their businesses. The past year has been an inflection point for Zeta, bringing together capabilities, and investments we have been building for years. Yet we are still in the very early stages of this opportunity. AI is changing how enterprises operate how software is consumed, and what businesses expect from their technology platforms.

For Zeta, that creates an opportunity to expand our role from helping customers execute marketing programs to becoming the intelligence layer that enables them to move faster, make smarter decisions, and drive better outcomes across the enterprise. We continue to be the disruptor in this new ecosystem. As always, I wanna thank our customers, partners, and shareholders for their continued support, and to Team Zeta, thank you for your hard work. Your commitment and belief in what we are building together. Now let me turn it over to Christopher to discuss our results in greater detail. Christopher?

Christopher E. Greiner: Thank you, David. I will echo by welcoming Trey to the team. As we announced last week, Trey is perfectly suited to help lead Zeta's evolution into an intelligent AI infrastructure company. And I am thrilled to see Matthew Pfau step up to lead FP and A for Zeta. In my conversations with investors, 1 thing is clear. A new framework for investing in companies is emerging. Investors are prioritizing their time with companies gaining share and delivering durable predictable growth. They are increasingly screening for companies generating free cash flow and positive GAAP earnings. And they are ultimately backing companies with defensible AI moats proven by results. Zeta embodies each of these characteristics.

And the second quarter's results make this evident. Q2 was our 21st straight quarter of greater than 20% revenue growth excluding M&A and political candidate revenue. Our increased second half revenue guidance continues that trend. Q2 was also our highest ever free cash flow, paired with positive GAAP net income showcasing the quality of our earnings and driving the largest full year guidance raise to free cash flow and GAAP EPS in our history. And we are listening to shareholders. We are introducing an initial framework to measure adoption and monetization of Zeta's AI, 1 underpinned by revenue. Because moats are ultimately proven by how long customers stay and how much more they spend over time.

I will cover all of this in detail along with updates on our pipeline, sales productivity, and drivers behind our increased Q3 and full year guidance. Let's start first at the top line. For Q2, revenue came in at $443 million up 44% year over year or 28% excluding M&A. That beat our guidance by $23 million or 5%, driven by faster growth in both superscaled customer count and ARPU. Each exceeding the growth rates in our 2028 model: Superscaled customers grew to 197, up 17% year over year, more than double our 4% to 8% 2028 model growth rate driven by demand for Athena. Customer gains were especially strong in consumer and retail, telecom, and health care.

Superscaled quarterly ARPU expanded to $1.8 million also up 17% year to year and above our 12% to 16% long-term 2028 model. And we are seeing some interesting usage dynamics unfold in ARPU. First, theme engagement is increasingly voice first. 83% of customer interactions are now spoken. Reinforcing our thesis that natural language will become the primary interface for marketing and business intelligence use cases and has the propensity to drive higher utilization on the platform. Second, the OneZeta sales initiative is gaining speed. Customers using more than 1 use case are up 90%. Year over year. Customers using 5 or more channels are up more than 50%. Year over year.

Cross sell and upsell deals won in the quarter were up 43%. And we saw double digit revenue growth across email, CTV, and social, as well as double digit revenue growth across all 3 marketing use cases, retain, grow, and acquire. And third, demand for the platform was broad based across industries. 8 of our top 10 grew more than 20% year over year on a trailing 12 month basis, with consumer and retail, financial services, automotive and health care all accelerating from last quarter. Also notable in the quarter was the significant expansion of the sales pipeline and strength in seller productivity. At the end of Q2, the total sales pipeline was up more than 60% year over year.

And up over $100 million compared to just 90 days ago. On a per seller basis, pipeline creation is up more than 100% year over year, as OneZeta and Marigold cross selling take hold. This is driving higher average contract values on deals won in the quarter. Up more than 40% compared to last year. And overall deal sizes in the pipeline increased more than 25% year over year, driven by higher attachment rates across channels and use cases. All while quota carrying headcount increased by just 1 versus last quarter to 198 up 11% year over year. That gap between pipeline growth and headcount growth speaks to the strength of sales productivity.

And importantly, this growth and revenue upside came with impressive operating leverage. Specifically, we generated $92 million of adjusted EBITDA, up 56% year to year and a margin of 20.7%, an increase of 170 basis points versus last year and $5 million better than the midpoint of our guidance. Marigold restructuring actions and integration savings drove total Zeta expense-to-revenue ratio efficiencies across R&D, G&A, and sales and marketing. Improving 3.18 thousand and 250 basis points year over year, respectively. GAAP cost of revenue came in at 41% as expected. This was 10 basis points better sequentially and 300 basis points higher year over year, reflecting strong social channel adoption by agencies. Cash grew even faster than adjusted EBITDA in Q2.

Net cash provided by operating activities was $69 million up 65% year over year with free cash flow of $58 million, up 73% year over year. A margin of 13.1%, and free cash flow conversion of 63%. We also generated positive GAAP net income in the second quarter of $8.2 million compared to a net loss of $12.8 million in the same quarter last year. Resulting in GAAP earnings per share of $0.03 In the second quarter, we prioritized using cash to repurchase shares, deploying $29.9 million to buy back 1.6 million shares. And year to date, as of July 30, we have spent $74.6 million on share repurchases with approximately $89.4 million remaining on our authorization.

Dilution in the quarter was just 0.1%, and we remain on track to hit our normal course net dilution target of 3% to 4% for 2026. Finally, we closed a new $1 billion credit facility including a $250 million term loan A, and a $750 million revolving credit facility that remains undrawn. Giving us the capital flexibility for M&A, share repurchases, and disciplined investment. To that end, we have been investing in AI for nearly a decade. So today's introduction of metrics showing how AI adoption drives deeper platform usage, longer customer relationships, and higher net revenue retention is not new, it is just more visible than ever. Superscaled customer adoption of AI is ramping nicely.

Since Athena's launch for enterprise customers 130 days ago, more than 40% of our super scaled customers are already monthly users, And together, they have generated thousands of campaigns using Athena. And customers who comprehensively adopt our AI using it for audience creation, activation, and other means contribute a disproportionate share of revenue. This shows up in several ways. Across our total customer base, including 20% of customers who have comprehensively adopted our AI tools account for roughly 70% of revenue. Among super scaled customers, the 50% who have comprehensively adopted our AI tools drive 75% of super scaled customer revenue.

And these AI super users grew 4x faster than the 80% of customers still early in their AI adoption journey. But it is not only AI adoption that is ramping. it is also leading to longer customer relationships. Superscaled customer relationships now average 56 months, up from 48 months a couple of years ago, and that is based on data going back to 2018. In addition to longer customer relationships, we are also seeing them spend more generating higher net revenue retention among AI adopters. Customers who have most comprehensively adopted our AI tools have a year to date net revenue retention that is 400 basis points above overall Zeta.

And more than 20 percentage points above customers still ramping in their adoption of our AI, showing that adoption is translating into stronger, more durable expansion. With tailwinds from AI adoption, higher sales productivity, and strong operating leverage, we are once again raising our top and bottom line guidance for the third quarter and full year. In doing so, we will maintain our typical conservatism, building in a 2% to 5% cushion that assumes minimal go-get revenue from partnerships, and uses 2028 model growth rates for customer and ARPU growth.

To be clear, if new customer additions and ARPU growth exceed our 2020 model growth rates, driven by rapid Athena AI adoption or newly announced partnerships, that would push us towards the high end of that 2% to 5% range. For the full year 2026, we are increasing the midpoint of our revenue guidance by $33 million to $1.818 billion, representing growth of 39% or 25% year over year excluding M&A and political candidate revenue. For the third quarter, we now expect revenue of $471 million at the midpoint, up $10 million from our prior guidance. Representing growth of 40% or 23%, excluding M&A and political candidate revenue.

You will note we are continuing to maintain our original second half guidance for political candidate revenue in Q3 and Q4 of $7 million and $8 million respectively. For adjusted EBITDA, we are increasing the midpoint of our 2026 guidance to $405 million up $8 million from our prior guidance representing a year over year increase of 45% and a margin of 22.3%, up 90 basis points year to year. For the third quarter, we now expect adjusted EBITDA of $115 million at the midpoint, up $3 million versus our previous guidance.

We are also increasing the midpoint of our 2026 free cash flow guidance to $255 million, $20 million higher than our previous full year guidance representing year over year growth of 55% and a margin of 14% and a conversion of 63%, tracking well towards our 2028 conversion target of 65%. Finally, we are raising our full year GAAP EPS guidance to a midpoint of $0.10, well above our prior range of $0.02 to $0.04. it is worth noting this guidance increase excludes the impact of a potential onetime tax benefit from the release of a valuation allowance that has a reasonable probability of occurring later this year. Which could represent additional material onetime upside.

With that, I will close where I began. Demand for Zeta is robust and durable. And we are expanding our platform organically and through partnerships to accelerate share gains. That durable demand and record pipeline improves our visibility. Giving us the confidence to raise guidance across the board. That visibility supports disciplined investment, and our balance sheet is well positioned to support our growth priorities. And focused execution drives greater profitability and cash generation, which has us pacing ahead of our long term ZEDA 28 model. With that, I will hand the call back to the operator, so David and I can take your questions. Operator?

Operator: If you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. A voice prompt on the phone line will indicate when your line is open. Again, press star 1 to ask a question. And our first question comes from Jason Kreyer with Craig-Hallum.

Jason Kreyer: Great. Thank you, guys. Congratulations. Another great quarter. Christopher, you talked about OneZeta and how that is accelerating the adoption of multiple use cases. I think you said 90% growth in multi use case customers in the quarter. What do you think that looks like over the next several quarters? How does Athena continue to optimize customers and maximize both channels and use cases?

Christopher E. Greiner: Great question. And thanks, Jason. The short answer is I think we have got continued runway because of OneZeta and the Marigold cross selling continued driving both multiuse case adoption, which as you said, was up 90% year-to-year, but also 5 or more channel usage was up 50%, and cross sell and up sell deals within the quarter itself is up 43%. If you look at the trend for ARPU growth over the last couple of quarters, it is been nicely above our 12% to 16% long-term model, and I see that continuing.

And we are seeing Athena really just the tip of the spear. it is just getting started. it is 1 of the single most powerful tools we have ever had for cross selling against use cases and channels, Jason.

Jason Kreyer: Maybe a follow-up for you, David. On the ZBI, can you just talk about how you go to market with customers? Look, what does that cross sell conversation look like? And what are the key functions in ZBI that are really speaking to customers?

David A. Steinberg: it is interesting because the we have had customers that have been using the ZBI for a few months now, before we announced it because we really wanted to get use cases in and tried it. So the use cases I gave in my prepared remarks are real world use cases that they are paying us to develop and create with them. What we are seeing is that customers no longer want static business intelligence. They are not looking to have large numbers of people come in, put data into a user interface, spit out a static report. What they are looking for is how do they make real time decisions? How do they better negotiate?

On contracts that they are in flux on? like broadcasting for sports networks. How do they figure out how to better invest marketing dollars and develop retail partnerships, like with energy drink companies, and so on and so forth. So we are actually getting pulled into the ZBI use cases more than we have been selling them in. And we are now sort of doing a combination of both together.

Christopher E. Greiner: Jason and investors in the call, we have included slides in the earnings supplemental to David's point to bring those existing customer BI use cases to life. it is actually slides 32 through 38, and David mentioned there is dozens of customers spanning real estate intelligence, customer experience, market sizing, loyalty growth, business expansion, and business measurement, just to name a few.

David A. Steinberg: Wonderful. Thank you, guys.

Operator: If you find that your question has been answered, you may remove your cell from the queue by pressing *2. We will go next to Matt Swanson with RBC Capital Markets.

Matt Swanson: Great. Thank you so much. David, we talk a lot about that transition from you know, Zeta who to Zeta why to Zeta now? Can you just talk a little bit about when you get names like OpenAI and Palantir and Snowflake? You know, it is probably about as good of a trio of partners in this day and age as you could find. How that helps you in your go-to-market process of skip the evangelizing, but also what it can do for initial deal sizes.

David A. Steinberg: Yeah. Thanks, Matthew. I would tell you that it has been game changing for us. I mean, the 2 engagements that we signed with Palantir happened in real time. The Palantir guys walked us into 2 of the largest advertisers in the world, and literally, we walked out with some of the largest test case and use cases we have ever had as a company based on the fact that they chose us to be their marketing platform partner.

And if you listen to Alex's remarks yesterday, they are over indexing on partnerships 1 of the interesting things that I do not think people understand is that the Palantir relationship will be 1 of the biggest we have ever done because there is not a boardroom today that does not know who they are and is not interested in use cases that they can do with them, with us as their marketing partner, it is become an incredible entry point. And if you look at the number of customers they published just yesterday, that is the number of marketing we effectively have in partnership with them.

Add into that the OpenAI relationship, which has been 1 of the biggest we have ever signed, and the Snowflake evolution, we are seeing more at bats than ever. If you saw the 17% growth in superscaled customer count, that is not even the beginning. Of what we are gonna be doing with these new partnerships. In the evolution from Zeta Who to Zeta Now, these are game changing even when we are not in the room. With the Palantir OpenAI and Snowflake people. When we are out there, we are coming into meetings now, and everybody is the first thing I get is, wow. How did you get that deal done?

And I have to say to them, which 1? And we all laugh and sort of move on. But I think this is sort of as they said in the movie, Casablanca, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Matt Swanson: that is great. And then I think we touched on it a little bit when you are talking about the ZBI and the different uses for data. But when you talked about how your platform is just currently being utilized for marketing, but it is not necessarily a marketing platform. How far do you think some of those adjacencies can go in terms of use cases? And have you seen within any of your larger customers any use cases that really have, you know, made you think about product development?

David A. Steinberg: Yeah. Well, every day, we are we are getting asked questions by our largest clients. Can you help us fix this problem or answer this question? In a way that we have never thought of? And it is causing just an incredible amount of excitement. I think it is important to note that if you look at the first quarter of this year, we were super proud to announce that using our internal workflow management tool, Spade, we were able to literally automate 75% of all new code generated. If you look at the update, the actual number for Q2 was 89.6%. I think we rounded it to 90% in my prepared remarks.

But this is changing the game for how we take interaction with clients and turn it into product development almost in real time. And if you look at this very large sports league that is using us, We were looking, and we were in the room with them and their CMO, and they are like, listen.

How do we better negotiate our streaming rights with the 2 partners partnerships that are coming up for bid, and how can we equate viewership and mind share for their they own multiple products, multiple leagues that are owned by 1 holding corporation, how do we help them to better show it is not just who is watching it in that moment, but it is the halo effect that comes for the broadcaster by having them on And we were able to put together a solution in hours that came back and they believe will result in millions of dollars of incremental revenue to them on the renegotiation of those streaming contracts.

So it then becomes a flywheel because then we get part of the marketing for those streaming rights. So it really becomes a major flywheel in and around the company, Matthew. Thank you.

Operator: And we will go to our next question from DJ Hynes with Canaccord Genuity.

David Hynes: Hey, thank you guys. Congrats on a nice quarter. David, maybe we can just follow-up on the last point. I mean, ZBI and Business Intelligence is a massive category. Right? I mean, you talk about getting pulled into this, and there is a lot of different directions you could take it. How do you think about formally productizing some of the use cases? How do you sequence which ones make sense first? Just high level thoughts on kind of the multiyear playbook would be interesting as you think about building out that fourth use case.

David A. Steinberg: Yeah. And, obviously, as usual, great question, D.J. What we are seeing is that our data cloud is able to really help enterprises to make better decisions around certain things very, very quickly. We are seeing big examples inside of retail. What products should they be moving into retail? How do they use co op dollars and marketing dollars to get better shelf space? And how to create deeper and more meaningful relationships with the end customer So it starts with the business intelligence around a retail use case, You then end up identifying meaningful opportunities for them to move inventory around geographically which retailers they should be doing more with, maybe which retailers they should invest less with.

And then we end up being able to market to the end user to drive them into the retailer on behalf of the product and vice versa. So, yes, we are seeing logical productization much like we have talked about in the past where, DJ, you have heard us say, yes. Our platform can help almost any vertical. But the more industry expertise our salespeople have across the 15 verticals that we operate in, the better they can sell, the higher the sales productivity per rep, and so on and so forth.

We are seeing multiple use cases by vertical that we are building into the ZBI and every new request from every customer becomes productized immediately, and that goes back to the ability to do 90 of your new code on an automatically generated basis. So it is really building a very interesting flywheel as we are growing the ZBI, not just from a revenue perspective because you know, by definition, it is our fastest growing use case right now because it was starting from a smaller number. But the reality is it is becoming products every moment of every day that we are adding them in from a client question perspective.

David Hynes: Yeah. Very clear. And, Christopher, maybe a more tactical question for you. Look, obviously, we are heading into US midterm cycle. I am just curious what you are seeing in terms of political advertising demand. How much visibility you have there today and kind of how that feeds into the guidance?

Christopher E. Greiner: Look. From a guidance perspective, D.J., we have held to that consistent political candidate guide of $7 million in the third quarter, and $8 million in the fourth quarter purposely because we wanted what to come through in the numbers. Was as the strength of the business unfolds in the actuals, the raise is all tied to the strength of the core business as well. The visibility is good in terms of we expect it to be very robust. It comes into the pipeline pretty late. Because these can be programs that spin up quickly, and we execute even more quickly. We get paid ahead, which nice, so it is good for free cash flow.

But we are optimistic that the number we have in there is conservative. And we have got for the full year guide, it is maintaining our normal level of conservatism. So despite this being the largest raise of the year of 33 million revenue, it still maintains our normal 2 to 5% cushion.

David A. Steinberg: I think it is also important to note we raised revenue by $33 million. We raised free cash flow by $20 million. So you are seeing a disproportionate percentage of incremental revenue into this business at this point dropped to the bottom line, you saw 170 basis point increase in operating margin. And you saw a meaningful increase in free cash flow at 73% growth. Yep.

Christopher E. Greiner: Thank you, guys. Thanks, D.J.

Operator: And we will move next to Ron Josey with Citi.

Analyst: Hi. This is Jake Hallock on for Ron Josey. I Congrats on the great quarter, and thanks for taking my questions. So my first is on the OpenAI partnership. So curious how deeply is OpenAI integrated into Athena and Zeta's broader platform? Could you help us better understand the capabilities Zeta brings to OpenAI's AdOps And is there is there a direct revenue opportunity associated with either side of that partnership?

David A. Steinberg: Yeah. So that is a that is a 3 big questions, Jake. But let's start with OpenAI powers the voice component of Athena. No large language models ever see the data in our data cloud or our client's data. We keep all of that totally and completely safe. And now the data cloud is built on Foundry with Palantir's ontology. So you are looking at a really interesting use case. What does OpenAI bring to Athena? It personalizes Athena.

So now Athena gets to know the user at the enterprise better and can begin to understand what questions they have before they even ask them and help them better navigate to outcomes instead of having to navigate a platform the entire way. As it relates to the integration to their ad platform, we are actively serving ads, and it is a meaningful revenue opportunity. It is also scaling very, very quickly. I think it is also, as Christopher pointed out, part of the conservatism we have put in going into the year, where we really have not included pretty much anything from either Palantir or OpenAI. As it relates to our forward guidance.

Analyst: And next week, we have a follow-up meeting with OpenAI. We have got 20 people in a room literally brainstorming what else can we do together. I think they consider us 1 of their most important enterprise partnerships, and we certainly look at them in the same way. Thanks. that is so helpful. And I know it is a 3 parter, but can I just sneak in 1 more here? You did, like, appreciate the update on the 90% of new code. Generated through AI.

And Athena operating largely on in house inference Could you just touch on how those capabilities and that AI code is changing your product development speed, it is just I mean, accelerating it at a pace that I never thought humanly possible, Jake. When you look at the fact that yes, we increased operating margin by 170 basis points, we added engineers in the quarter. We did not eliminate engineers in the quarter. So fact that we are even able to add horsepower to that while simultaneously having 90% of all new code being auto generated is pushing sales cycles I am sorry.

Pushing development cycles, I should say, to what would have been years at 1 point to what is now months and new products inside of the ZBI as we productize it to hours versus what could have been months in the past. I think when we get to Zeta Live on October 8, we are gonna have a massive unveiling that I am incredibly excited about. that is a product offering that will continue to evolve Zeta as a company in a very meaningful way And it is something that would have taken years that we are now gonna be able to have done in months. Thanks a lot, David. Appreciate the color.

Operator: And our next question comes from Elizabeth Porter with Morgan Stanley.

Elizabeth Elliott: Great. Thank you so much. So I just want to do another follow-up ZBI and how that is changing some of the market opportunity. We used to talk about Zeta having 1% of the marketing wallet. But an opportunity to be closer to 10%. Just as you are going kinda beyond marketing to the broader business intelligence how should we think about the wallet share that is up for grabs? And that changes with ZBI? And just as a follow-up, how should we think about the sales cycles as you expand more of a CMO focused product to just broader touch points across the organization?

David A. Steinberg: Elizabeth, let me start by saying welcome back. We have missed you. Thank you. Welcome. From a ZBI perspective, I and I wanna be clear. We are still looking to get to 7 to 10%. Of our clients' marketing wallet share. that is not changing. We believe that we are on our path to building a $10 billion business with a 30% operating margin, with the vast majority of that dropping to free cash flow. On the marketing component of our business, alone. When you look at the ZBI, and the opportunity that it is opening what we are seeing and what really happened, Elizabeth, is we started getting pulled in that direction by our clients at first.

That then accelerated massively with the Palantir partnership. Whereby putting our data cloud on top of Foundry, and the ability to onboard seamlessly our clients' data in ways that we could not before and using their ontology in a way that we could not have done with Palantir as a partner, that is opened up this new use case from a productization perspective. I think we are gonna look at 2 different sales cycles. I think we are gonna have existing clients that are gonna adapt or adopt the ZBI very quickly.

Then I think we are gonna have new clients that we are gonna go out and get where you are gonna start with the CIO or the CTO, and that could take a little longer. As you know, our normal product cycle is anywhere from 90 to 1 hundred and 80 days. I think this will be very you know, maybe start out on the longer end of that for new customers. But we will start on the shorter end of that for existing customers. And quite frankly, we have seen much, much faster than that from an adoption perspective from existing customers who are adding ZBI as their third or fourth use case. Does that make sense? That does.

Thank you very much.

Elizabeth Elliott: I wanted to do a quick follow-up on Athena for agencies. It sounds like you had a lot of high interest in France this summer. When we think about the base of agencies, is there a certain proportion that is a good client base for Athena, for agencies? Is there any sort of specific sub segment? Or do you really think that most agencies could adopt Athena over time? And what are you learning about the onboarding cycle that could potentially drive some faster penetration?

Operator: So to answer your question, I was shocked because I thought it would really start at the midsized agencies from an entry point perspective.

David A. Steinberg: We are actually seeing the larger agencies adopt it faster and at scale. Very, very quickly. it is it really changes the game for them from a navigation perspective. And the ability to showcase for their customers our data cloud and the ability to drive substantially higher return on marketing spend. As you know, Elizabeth, we always talk about sort of we deliver according to Forrester 600 to 700% return on marketing spend, We are seeing clients who are adopting Athena at substantially higher rates than that.

In partnership, with a very large agency that adopted Athena, and a very large airline, we are seeing that airline today at a 1.4 thousand% return on marketing spend post the agency bringing Athena in and us putting together the project together. So I actually thought it would be small to midsize. it is starting very, very large. And it is scaling, quite frankly, a little faster than we expected. Great. Thank you.

Operator: And we will move next to Arjun Bhatia with William Blair.

Arjun Bhatia: Alright. Thank you, and I will add my congrats on a great quarter. David, let me start with you just on Palantir. It sounds like, obviously, you did the tech migration and you are on board on Foundry, but it also sounded like you are closing some deals already on the cross-sell. So would be curious to hear just what that pipeline looks like into Palantir's commercial customers, And just as you look across different verticals, are there any inside that commercial base that get you more excited than others from an opportunity perspective?

David A. Steinberg: Yeah. I will I will be honest. I have publicly said that I plan on doing the first 20 deals in partnership with Alex Karp, who is become a very good friend of mine, who is 1 of the top guys at Palantir reports directly into Alex's office. And we have been going out. And I would tell you that if I put the numbers of the deals we are working to into our pipe pipeline, it would artificially skew our pipeline up too much at this point. It is that big an opportunity. So I am sort of working on it on an internal pipeline that I am running in my own office at this point.

I am embarrassed to say I am doing it inside of Claude. But the reality is that this is that may be the biggest opportunity we have ever had in front of us Certainly, biggest opportunity we have ever had from a partnership perspective. And as you know, we have 15 different verticals that we operate against. Not 1 of them is a massive concentration. So when I look at their client base, I started by saying, why do not we just start with the, you know, 20 customers who spend $1 billion a year on marketing to consumers and the list was so much longer than 20.

We had to pare it back to start going out there and getting into it. The 2 the 2 deals we closed were at a 100% hit rate. Net with 2, close 2. We have got some other very large ones in flight. And we see this as a meaningful and very large opportunity that, as Christopher said, is not baked into the numbers just yet.

Arjun Bhatia: Alright. that is great to hear. And then, Christopher, maybe 1 for you, I guess, maybe for David also. But the we would we would love to hear sort of your updated thoughts on capital deployment, with the new credit facility. And I think you pointed out M&A as obviously a potential use case which you have been sort of consistent on, but I am curious if there is any sort of change in the type of acquisitions or assets you are looking at in the market?

David A. Steinberg: Christopher pointed to me, so I will answer it. What I would tell you is we are gonna continue to focus on our 5 pillars of M and A. That is not going to change. Although, you can look at the fact that for us at this point, we have to continue to evolve the type of deals we have done or will do because some of the smaller deals we have done over the years just would not move the needle for us at this point. I will tell you, Arjun, you have heard me say this many times over the years, I believe transformative M and A transforms both companies for the worse.

So we are not looking to go do 1, like, huge transformative deal. We will continue to do small to midsized deals we are adding great human capital, great data sources, incredible products that our clients wanna buy, and clients that wanna buy our products. And so on and so forth. This does give us optionality around the buyback. It could cause us to accelerate it in the short run, depending on how the stock trades. But the reality is it puts us in a position that we have a lot of flexibility as a company I mean, you can see the cash position is also very, very strong.

At the close of the quarter, and we are projecting I am pretty sure this will be a record free cash flow quarter for us. Right? Yeah. So, you know, we last quarter, you can do the math. We bought more than 50%, I think closer to 75 plus percent. Of our free cash flow and share repurchasing last quarter. We are going to continue to buy the stock back at these prices because we think we continue to be the best investment we can make with our free cash flow is purchasing back our existing shares. Right. Very helpful. Appreciate the color. Thank you.

Operator: And we will move next to Carolyn Valenti with Goldman Sachs.

Carolyn Valenti: Hey, team. Thank you so much for taking the question. So new AI products have generally taken a while to ramp in usage for many software companies. Are there a couple of key things you would point out that you think have made your customers adopt new AI tools faster than what we are seeing in the rest of the market?

David A. Steinberg: First of all, Carolyn, congratulations. We are Carolyn, I am sorry. Congratulations. We are super happy to have you covering us. Return on investment. I think 1 of the things you see in our business strategy is our ability to show a return on investment is second to none. Most AI products where you are making a large investment, into whether it is infrastructure, software, or technology, take years for enterprises to show return on investment. Our 4 use cases show massive return on investment as we talked about, our marketing use cases show a 6 to 700% return on marketing spend effectively day 1.

And if you look at the ZBI, we cannot quantify it just yet, but we are giving real time business decisioning that drives massive incremental profits into our clients in real time. So I think that is been 1 of the big differentiators for us versus companies that are out there selling very expensive technology that will take years to pay off.

Carolyn Valenti: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Thank you. And then just 1 more from me. We are hearing more companies talk about headless architectures as a way to kind of potentially disrupts the UI or traditional UI. How do you think about this in the context of Zeta? What makes sense for you? what makes sense for you?

David A. Steinberg: I mean, listen. We have been no code for many years around here. So when you look at what they are talking about as it relates to headless, that is not something that I think we end up dealing with on either side. I do not think it becomes a competitive force for us, and I do not think it is something that we would move into quickly from our front. What we are really focused on is what percentage of our new code can we generate and make generally available to our clients? And we have gone from what was 75% to 90% in the first quarter of this year to the second quarter of this year.

That puts us in a massive competitive advantage. As our competitors are trying to catch up to where we were, a year, 2 years ago, we are already moving to where they will not be able to get for many, many years. And I think our no code architecture has allowed us to do that.

Carolyn Valenti: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Operator: And we will take our next from Terry Tillman with Truist Securities.

Terrell Tillman: Hi, this is Luca Gudes on for Terry. Thanks for taking my questions. To start, considering the big strategic win with Gap, how is RFP activity and what are you seeing in terms of large MarTech replacement cycles? Potentially aiding revenue and business in the second half or helping enhance visibility into 2027.

Christopher E. Greiner: Hey. Thanks for the question. Just real quick. RF activity is very strong. You heard about the pipeline stats that we shared. that is built into the greater than 60% year over year pipeline growth. I think it also speaks to how the average contract value in the pipeline is up. Because more of it is RFPs. I will turn it quickly to David to talk about broadly what is driving that environment.

David A. Steinberg: Yeah. I mean, we are right in the middle of what looks to be a marketing cloud replacement. Cycle. And Gap was a perfect example. Gap had been with 1 vendor, Salesforce, for quite some time. There were 3 other vendors that we displaced in addition to Salesforce to become the system of record inside of Gap. And when you look at these very large organizations, they do not want to use 4, 5, 6 different vendors, including a software provider or a professional services firm, activation platforms, data, CDP, all separate, these very large enterprises want next generation technology. And today, we are the only marketing cloud that has data and AI as native foundational to the application layer.

So as other entities have to step out of their platform through API and integration to use AI and then to get to the data sources and then back to the AI and then back to the platform, that latency destroys return on marketing spend Our foundational platform can answer in a millisecond what other platforms cannot answer at all. To be quite frank. So we are actually seeing RFP velocity go up and we are seeing closing go up as we saw in this quarter.

And we have a record pipeline right now. it is by far the largest we have ever So I think we are very well positioned for where the market is and where it is going. Great to hear.

Terrell Tillman: And if I could sneak 1 more in. Given the increased adoption with Athena, and AI enabled workflows, can you help us think about the puts and takes on gross margin performance in the back half of 26? Thank you.

Christopher E. Greiner: The gross margin performance in the back half of the year is largely dependent upon mix. So we talked about how the quarter came in where we expected given where the direct mix was in the quarter of 72%. Where that efficiency plays in, by the way, not just in R and D, but also across g and a and in sales and marketing as well, is we saw in the quarter, and we expect to continue to see very strong unit economics on our expense to revenue ratios That showed up in very strong adjusted EBIT margin. We are continuing to see efficiencies in CapEx, which then obviously flowed through the higher free cash flow.

And then the good work on dilution and on stock based compensation generated a very positive GAAP net income. Awesome. Great to hear. Thank you.

Operator: And we will go next to Jackson Nichols with KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Jackson Nichols: Hey, guys. Thank you for taking the question. David, maybe to start with you. How are you thinking about the opportunity for Athena heavy users today to post Foundry infrastructure pivot? And what does that mean for these heavy users on the new on the new platform? And what is the biggest risk in the coming months during the transition to with the move to Foundry?

David A. Steinberg: Well, so to be clear, the transition's done. it is seamless to our clients. We rearchitected the data cloud on top of it. And adopted their ontology. So, it is a massive benefit. To answer your question. So when you look at Athena, at the top of our tech stack is now gonna be Athena powered by OpenAI. She will then interact with this, Zeta in addition to the data cloud. Every time the Zeta platform and the data cloud access data, it will now be inside of Palantir's architecture, which moves extremely faster than the architecture we were working on before. So we will be able to answer more questions smarter and faster.

We will be able to onboard new clients' data faster and with better orientation, which will allow for higher levels of intelligence faster. As you know, the longer a client has worked with us traditionally, the smarter the platform has gotten, the faster the return on investment. With Athena and Foundry, we are seeing that happen faster. Instead of taking years of managing questions, it can now take days to get to the same level of return on marketing spend and the same intelligence that used to take us years. And that, I think, is gonna drive much faster adoption.

And once again, heavy users had a 400 basis point higher net retention rate than our other clients for Athena today. I think you are gonna see that number continue to evolve.

Jackson Nichols: That makes a ton of sense. Thank you. And maybe for Christopher, what kind of usage trends of Athena are baked into the superscaled ARPU growth to achieve the organic guide What we have line of sight to?

Christopher E. Greiner: So and that, by the way, same is said for the partnership agreements. We talk about the multiple layers of conservatism What we built in the guidance is what we signed already. So we are not leaning into anything on a go get perspective on either AI adoption or newly signed partner agreements that are still yet to be closed in the pipeline. Awesome. Thank you.

Operator: And up next is Koji Ikeda with Bank of America.

Analyst: Great. Thanks. Appreciate you taking the question. I was maybe I was hoping you could maybe put a finer point on what is working well in terms of driving improvements in sales rep productivity. And then can you help us think about the outlook for quota carrying rep headcount for the remainder of the year to address the pipeline you talked about? Thank you.

Christopher E. Greiner: Yes. So first off, 1 Zeta continues to be gaining speed. So we launched OneZeta, you know, call it 15 ish plus months ago. And we are starting to really see the benefit of our sellers attached more channels and more meaningfully more use cases into their deals. We talk about pipeline creation per rep being up around 100%. that is a big source of it. Also, know, we are called 6 months now from acquiring Marigold.

All the hard work on the integration has been done both within the, within the G&A sales and marketing r and d structure, Now we are starting to see the benefits of the cross sell and the upsell activity namely really around their loyalty products and selling Zeta's acquire and grow use cases in I feel like, you know, we are at a place where we have got the right tenure of reps, meaning the right balance between those who in their first 12 months, 12 to 24 months, and greater than 24 months, where the type of productivity we are seeing now can really continue to go throughout the year.

David A. Steinberg: I also think our hyperfocusing by vertical by salesperson has really unlocked a massive opportunity. That was sort of an moment for us, Koji, where we start to see when we bring in people who have industry expertise in a vertical and they sell their broke productivity goes through the roof. Got it.

Analyst: Thank you very much.

Operator: And we will go next to Richard Baldry with ROTH Capital Partners.

Richard Baldry: Thanks. Can you talk about in the generative engine optimization (GEO) side. Do you think that is helping you win client wallet share? Or that dollar really sort of moving from 1 channel to another? You know, because we never did search engine optimization, it is a 100% upside to us, Richard. So the other thing we are finding is that new clients are really excited about that. And we are 1 of the very few companies that has an API integration into Claude ChatGPT, and Gemini.

So we are able to help across all of those in real time through 1 GEO user interface (UI), and then we are able to serve the marketing obviously, into Gemini and into OpenAI as a subset of that. So you are able to really move the flywheel in a way that I do not think others are able to do. I think new customers see that as a, quote, shiny new thing. And think it is very exciting. And we are seeing existing customers adopt it as a part of their marketing strategy.

And, actually, be if you think about how fast moving those generative engine corporations are that you are partnering with and Palantir you know, itself is a different use case, how fast that company is moving. You have really grown without adding a lot of headcount in recent years. Do you think there is a point at which to try to keep up to those opportunities, you need to add a bit more to the to support the fast growth in those areas.

David A. Steinberg: We are just not seeing that right now, Richard. We are seeing product in the company go up at a rate that I did not think possible. Not only are we seeing, as I said, 89.6%, call it 90%, of our new code generated. We did a really interesting deal this quarter where we signed 1 of the first sort of ubiquitous enterprise agreements with OpenAI, where all of our employees now have access to all of OpenAI's products. And not only are we doing that, we are doing it in a way where the used cost for everybody is baked in. So we have got a use cost for everybody.

If power users go over a certain amount of token usage, the platform actually refers to their manager to approve additional token utilization. I think as we are building productivity tools like that, we are seeing sales productivity explode. At the same time, we are seeing total AI cost for the company internally well under 1% of revenue, and we think that is something that is going to continue. So I spend a lot of time on this, as you know.

I mean, I think we will add headcount, but I think we will add headcount at a slower pace than we grow revenue, and we will continue to grow EBITDA and free cash flow at a much faster rate than we are growing revenue. If that makes sense. Yeah. David is exactly right. We have actually had a headcount just grown revenue much faster. And even though that AI based use is up, across the company, unit costs for that AI are down almost 40%. And that is because of the relationships we have been able to negotiate.

Richard Baldry: Congrats on a great quarter. Thanks, Richard.

Analyst: Once again, I am so proud of the team.

Operator: And we will move next to Scott Randolph Berg with Needham.

Scott Randolph Berg: Hi, everyone. Nice quarter. I will skip the 17 Palantir questions, and move to something a little different, I guess. Just kidding, Scott. You do not want to talk about Palantir? Oh, I do. We will speak on a plane coming up pretty soon, I am sure, David. But, my question is on your expansion opportunity, especially within your super scaled customers. The slide in your deck, in your presentation deck in the quarter, I thought it kind of interesting that you have been kind of range bound on the ARPU for your super scaled customers over the last 7 quarters? it is kind of bounced around from $1.6 million to 1.8 million is kinda back and forth.

We know you guys are doing a good job of expanding with some of your customers. I am trying to help under just trying to better understand that dynamic, I guess. Or some of your new customers may be coming in with a slightly lower ARPU on that superscale level to just kind of balance that out? Or there maybe the metrics not reflecting some, you know, maybe numbers or some expansion deals that we are maybe expecting in the back half of the year?

Christopher E. Greiner: it is it is more the latter, and I will go quick just so we can get other questions in. But there is a slide 8 in our earnings supplemental. what is masking that, Scott, is that as new pilots and proof of concepts become super skilled, so they cross that 1 million threshold, they are still a distance from where our more mature, those superscaled customers that have done platform call it 2, 3, 4 years that have a ARPU that is 4, 5, 6 times greater than those that are in their kind of early part of the journey.

So what you will see on the slide is the average size in terms of ARPU of a customer who is been on the platform less than 12 months is 700 k as opposed to those that have been on the platform 4 more years that is now approaching 4 million per. So are actually seeing those superscaled customers get bigger, become a bigger and bigger part over overall revenue. And have a greater and greater share of our net revenue retention.

Scott Randolph Berg: Thanks for taking the question. I will jump in the queue.

Operator: And we will go next to Clark Wright with D.A. Davidson.

Clark Wright: Awesome. Thank you. It was great to see better than expected organic growth results this quarter. How much of this growth is coming from continued success with agencies versus your direct enterprise sales motion?

David A. Steinberg: I think it is really well spread out, Clark. We continue to see the agency business at approximately 20% of revenue. And we continue to see direct to enterprise at approximately 80% of revenue. So we have not seen that skew meaningfully. But we are seeing meaningful and organic growth across both those components.

Clark Wright: Awesome. Helpful. And then there was a sequential step down in direct revenue from 75 to 72%. What caused that this quarter? And is that something we should expect, going forward to be at that level?

Christopher E. Greiner: I was just about to add to David's, answer. What drove that was new sales and expansions with agencies. In fact, just within this quarter, since we closed and within the timing of this earnings call, we closed and expanded with another very large holdco. And as you probably know, Clark, those newer agency signings tend to begin with social. And social is a channel grew very rapidly in the quarter again. And, you know, drove the integrated platform revenue mix to be higher. And then as a as a byproduct of that, the direct platform mix to be, at 72%.

But it was where we expected based upon how we saw the pipeline it is driven by very strong agency adoption of social as the initial channel. Got it. Thank you.

Operator: And we will go next to Naved Khan with B. Riley Securities. Your line is open.

Ethan Widell: Hi there. This is Ethan Widell calling in for Naved. Thanks for taking my questions. To start, it is it is great to see that you have had really strong uptake with Athena since making it generally available. But it sounds kind of like new costs having scale at the same pace as usage. If usage does continue to scale, how should we maybe think about the way that cost scales or token cost pass directly onto customers or does usage become a cost of revenue consideration?

David A. Steinberg: No. So we I would tell you that we have done an agreement with OpenAI where we have a tremendous amount of visibility into our cost. And in this particular product, it is not focused on token utilization. So it is focused on a sort of a license for the product that is fully embedded into Athena. I feel very comfortable that we will be able to continue to keep our total AI cost well under 1% of our revenue while simultaneously growing revenues at, obviously, substantially faster paces than that, Ethan. Understood. that is really helpful to hear.

Ethan Widell: And then separately, so 8 of your top 10 industries grew over 20%. Can you maybe speak to how those areas are pacing so far in June and July?

Christopher E. Greiner: I wanna get first of all, the performance within our quarter in 2Q was pretty linear. And I would expect third quarter to be the same way. I do not wanna get into projecting third quarter, but what I can tell you is the momentum that they have. We talked about within 8 of the 10. And by the way, 1 of those 2 that did not grow over 20 was advocacy, and that obviously has a lot of tailwinds going into the second half of the year. So I would expect that to be 1 of those greater than 20s next quarter.

But there were several of our industries that actually accelerated in their growth from a trailing 12 month basis ending the first quarter where we ended in June. Those were consumer retail, financial services, automotive and health care. All sub industries with know, obviously, a lot of marketing spend behind them.

David A. Steinberg: Obviously, we would not have raised the quarter by $10 million if we did not think we had a lot of visibility into the quarter, Ethan. So I as Christopher said, we do not want to comment on 1 month, but nothing that happened in July would lead us to believe that we should not have raised the quarter and the year as much as we did, or we would not have done that, if that makes sense.

Ethan Widell: Understood. Yeah. that is really helpful. Thank you for the color, congrats on the strong results.

David A. Steinberg: Thank you so much.

Operator: And that concludes our Q&A session today.

David A. Steinberg: I will turn the conference back to David A. Steinberg for closing remarks. I just wanted to close on how incredibly proud I am of the Zeta team. To be able to continue to execute 20 for 2020. 20 quarters as a public company, 20 quarters beating and raising.

To continue to execute over that period of time with that level of excellence, to continue to see accelerated sales growth, to be able to do partnerships with 3 of the world's most important companies within just a few months If you had told me a few years ago that we would be in a position to announce partnerships like OpenAI, Palantir, and Snowflake, I would have I would have been blown away by that alone. That shows what is happened to Zeta as a brand because none of them would have trusted us if they did not trust our brand and they did not trust our business.

So thank you again to all of our Zeta people, to all of our clients, and especially to our partners. We appreciate everything that you guys are doing for us and with us as a company. Have a nice day, everybody.

Operator: And that concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.