RSKD Riskified Ltd.

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Riskified Ltd. Q2 F2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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Operator
Conference Operator
Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Riskified Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question, please press star 1-1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Stephan Shulstein, Head of Investor Relations.
Stephan Shulstein
Head of Investor Relations
Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. We are hosting today's call to discuss Riskified's financial results for the second quarter of 2026. Participating on today's call are Eido Gal, Riskified's co-founder and chief executive officer, and Agi Dotcheva, Riskified's chief financial officer. We released our results for the second quarter of 2026 earlier today. Our earnings materials, including a replay of today's webcast, will be available on our investor relations website at ir.riskofbuy.com. Certain statements made on the call today will be forward-looking statements related to, without limitation, our operating performance, business and financial goals, outlook as to revenues, gross profit, gross margin, pipeline generation, pipeline conversion, Timing of New Merchants Go Live, Adjusted EBITDA Profitability, Adjusted EBITDA Margins, Non-GAAP Operating Expenses, Free Cash Flow, and Expectations as the Category and Regional Growth Trends, which reflect management's best judgment based on currently available information and are not guarantees of future performance. We intend all forward-looking statements to be covered by the safe harbor provisions contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act 1995. These forward-looking statements reflect our expectations as of the date of this call and, except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to revise this information as a result of new developments that may occur after the time of this call. Please refer to our annual report on Form 20-F for the year ended December 31, 2025 and subsequent reports we file or furnish with the SEC for more information on the specific factors that cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations. Additionally, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures with key performance indicators on the call. Reconciliations for the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are available in our earnings release issued earlier today and also furnished with the SEC on Form 6-K and in the appendix of our investor relations presentation, all of which are posted on our investor relations website. I will now turn the call over to Eido to begin.
Eido Gal
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Stefan, and hello, everyone. Before I begin, let me welcome and introduce Stefan Schulstein as our new Head of Investor Relations. Stefan is an experienced investor relations executive and his primary focus will be on fostering strong relationships across the investment community as we continue to drive shareholder value. I am very pleased with our Q2 results where we delivered the strongest revenue growth in over four years. Revenue grew 22% year-over-year to $98.7 million. Non-GAAP gross profit grew 13% to $45.4 million and adjusted EBITDA increased 84% to $3.9 million. Given this momentum, we're once again raising our full-year outlook for revenue and adjusted EBITDA. I want to thank our team for driving these results for our clients and shareholders. We believe this accelerated growth is a result of an increasingly complex fraud environment driving more demand to our expanded platform. Allow me to elaborate. Fraud risk for our merchants continues to grow. It's getting more sophisticated and moving faster. And we believe agentic tools are part of what's accelerating that. Bad actors are creating fake identities that sign up, hijacking real accounts, and driving fraudulent activity across digital wallets, cards, ACH, peer-to-peer transactions, tokenized transactions, and 3D secure flows. And it's not limited to checkout. as the same activity shows up in refund and return abuse, chargeback disputes, and friendly fraud. Across that large and increasingly complex surface, we're seeing loss rates rise industry-wide. These complexities are leading merchants to increasingly look for more effective ways to manage fraud while maintaining a leading customer experience. At the same time, merchants are increasingly frustrated stitching together multiple point solutions. Know Your Customer Screening, Identity Resolution, Account Security, Transactional Fraud Screening, Shipping and Returns Abuse Detection, and Dispute Representment are all part of the stack merchants need to manage. And we hear a clear preference for a single platform, and a platform approach isn't just simple. We believe it performs better because the signal from one part of the transaction lifecycle strengthens the defense in every other part. That's the flywheel we've talked about before. Turning to our platform. Our risk intelligence platform applies insights from our global merchant network, identity graph, and AI capabilities across the e-commerce journey, from account creation and login through checkout to post-purchase refunds, returns, and disputes. The platform brings together account, checkout, policy, and dispute intelligence, all powered by a shared network intelligence and identity layer. We believe that the recent improvements that have been driving the most demand are expanded checkout fraud coverage. As non-card payment methods continue to grow and proliferate, merchants are increasingly looking to us to create the underlying trust mechanism that is missing in them. It is a large undertaking, but once done successfully, we believe meaningfully addresses a fundamental trust issue that hurts adoption of these alternative payment methods. For example, with ACH, We have built a risk layer that enables instant payouts, closing self-to-gaps with credit cards, allowing merchants to leverage a low-cost funding instrument with substantially reduced risk. Enhanced merchants continue to offer alternate ways to pay. Our platform allows them to meet customers where they are. We believe we are well-positioned to build and replicate this trust layer for non-card payments in a way that creates value for both our merchants and risk-affiliates. The dollar value of ACH transactions we processed in the quarter was approximately 19 times the value of transactions processed in the second quarter of the prior year. Furthermore, merchants are increasingly using Riskify's identity intelligence beyond checkout to improve the customer experience across the transaction lifecycle. We had shared last quarter that we are enabling real-time risk scoring inside customer service workflows especially as customer service evolves toward the mix of human and conversational AI agents. Additionally, we have now helped one of our newer merchants create a dynamic customer risk profile which allows safer customers to transact faster and at higher dollar amounts. We believe we are well positioned to deliver additional value to our merchants as our identity database has billions of nodes across the transaction lifecycle. Our AI assistant, Aria, continues to gain traction this quarter. We have embedded Aria across our wider platform, giving fraud and risk teams a highly effective tool that helps them investigate activity, understand emerging trends, and take action more quickly. This helps our merchants optimize workload and gain additional insights into their customers. Feedback from our merchants has been overwhelmingly positive. These results are enabled by using our differentiated data assets which we believe makes it more powerful than other solutions that don't have access to our underlying data. Our multi-product merchant base, we're approximately 50% year over year. That consistency is the clearest evidence that this platform strategy is working. Merchants aren't buying one tool, they're expanding into more of the network which allows for additional upsell opportunities and drives retention. On to new business momentum. The two trends I just discussed, More complex fraud and continued improvement in our platform drove a significant acceleration of new business this quarter. This new business was diversified across geographies and across both new and existing merchant categories. New logo acquisition was a significant contributor this quarter. We added new logos across all four regions with five of our top ten headquartered outside the United States spanning five categories. were encouraged by the pace at which we continue to add merchants to the platform, which builds towards future expansion opportunities. Off-sale activity within our existing merchant base was also healthy this quarter, reinforcing the durability of our platform as merchants continue to expand their use of our products. Our pipeline is robust, with the US still the largest contributor and strong momentum across APAC. From an industry perspective, We saw healthy activity within travel, payments, and fashion, and a particularly strong pace of conversion as many of the opportunities we discussed last quarter converted into new business. Our competitive win rates remained above 75% in the second quarter, further evidence of the differentiation of our platform relative to the alternatives that merchants are valid with. A notable highlight this quarter was live sports. A dense global events calendar, which included the World Cup and the NBA Finals, drove elevated transaction volume across two connected parts of our business. In tickets, our established base benefited directly from this volume, reinforcing what we believe is the vertical's role as a durable growth driver. In our money transfer and payments category, which we have renamed Digital Finance to reflect a broader merchant category, struck strong momentum from this same dynamic. with particular strength in event contracts and gaming. We are particularly pleased with our expansion into newer categories within digital finance enabled by our platform innovation. Putting it all together, this was a quarter that reflects both the strength of the market opportunity in front of us and our team's execution in capturing it. Fraud keeps growing more complex and merchants are converging on the unified platform we've spent years building. That combination is showing up in our results, strong revenue growth, accelerating new business, and a multi-product base that keeps deepening. It's why we're raising our outlook for the second time this year. We enter the second half with the platform, the pipeline, and the momentum to keep delivering for our merchants and our shareholders. I'll now turn it over to Agi for a deeper look at our financial results.
Agi Dotcheva
Chief Financial Officer
Thank you Eido, team, and everyone for joining today's call. Unless otherwise noted, this discussion will reference non-GAAP financial measures. We have provided a reconciliation of GAAPs and non-GAAP financial measures in our earnings release. Our GNV for the second quarter was $41.3 billion, reflecting a 13% increase year-over-year. We achieved second quarter revenue of $98.7 million, up 22% year-over-year. and Acceleration from 7% growth in the first quarter and the strongest year-over-year growth in more than four years. Our GNV and revenue growth during this quarter was primarily driven by continued new merchant and upsell activity as merchants continue to recognize the value of our platform provides. Growth in the second quarter was growth-based across all of our categories led by digital finance and tickets and travel. Our digital finance category grew approximately 180% year-over-year, driven primarily by the ramp of multiple new merchants onboarded in the quarter to the event contracts and gainings of Vertical, with upsell activity across our existing base contributing as well. Tickets and travel grew approximately 23% year-over-year, and acceleration from 18% in the first quarter. Tickets were the primary driver, with growth accelerating meaningfully as same-store sales momentum strengthened across our largest ticketing merchants, and travel continued to deliver growth, even with a tough year-over-year comparison. Our fashion and luxury vertical grew 4% year-over-year, driven by new and upsell activity, as well as same-store performance. Looking ahead, we continue to expect our tickets and travel, digital finance, and fashion and luxury categories to collectively approximate 80% of total billings for the year with digital finance to significantly exceed the company's average growth rate throughout the remainder of 2026. 32-hour regional performance, billings grew across all regions during the second quarter. The United States, our largest region, grew approximately 38% year-over-year, up from 10% in the first quarter, reflecting continuous trend in tickets. and the addition of new merchants in digital finance. APAC grew approximately 42% in Q2. We continue to see healthy underlying demand in the region and expect more balanced growth as the year progresses. Other Americas grew approximately 21% year-over-year, up from 11% in the first quarter, primarily driven by new business activity, and EMEA delivered approximately 3% growth against the strong prior year comparable periods in the travel vertical. We believe that our continued growth across geographies is a testament to the success of our global expansion strategy. Our gross profit for the second quarter was $45.4 million, reflecting a 13% increase year-over-year. The growth was primarily driven by the contribution of new business onboarded led by our digital finance category, where we continue to expand into new verticals. This was further supported by strong same-store activity in our tickets of vertical, which benefited from elevated live sports during the quarter. Our gross margin in the second quarter was 46% attributable to ramping of new merchants, which typically begin at lower margins and improve over time. Performance across our existing merchant base remained healthy, resulting from ongoing enhancements to our core machine learning model. As a result of our second quarter performance, we're now raising our expected full-year gross profit growth to a range of 11% to 14%, or 12.5% at the midpoint. We expect gross profit growth in the third quarter to be similar to the growth in the second quarter. Moving to operating expenses, non-GAF operating expenses totaled $41.5 million for the quarter, or 42% of revenue, compared to 47% in Q2 of 2025, reflecting sustained cost discipline as our business scales. On a constant currency basis, OPEX would have been $4.1 million lower, or approximately 39% of revenue, primarily driven by the continuous appreciation of the Israeli shekel. We continue to expect quarterly non-GAAP operating expenses to range between $42 million and $43 million. We delivered adjusted EBITDA of 3.9 million, representing an 84% increase compared to 2.1 million in Q2 of 2025 and demonstrating the efficiency of our scaling cost structure. On a GAAP basis, second quarter net loss improved 22% year-over-year to a loss of 9.1 million compared to a loss of 11.6 million in Q2 of 2025. GAAP net loss was impacted by its decline in interest income and increase in outer expense. The latter primarily ties to foreign currency fluctuations. Moving to the balance sheet, we ended the second quarter with approximately $223.6 million of cash, deposits and investments and continue to carry zero debt. In addition, we continue to maintain a healthy cash flow model. In the second quarter, we achieved free cash flows of $12.9 million. We expect to exceed $40 million of positive free cash flow in 2026. During Q2 of 2026, we repurchased approximately 13.7 million shares at an average price per share of $4.67 for a total consideration of $63.9 million, which contributed to a reduction of 8% in total shares outstanding. From the inception of our buyback program through the end of Q2, we have repurchased approximately 72 million shares for a total of 351 million, which helps contribute to a 26% reduction in total shares standing over that period. We believe that our strong balance sheet and liquidity position are strategic assets that provide us with the flexibility to navigate a range of operating environments. We intend to remain disciplined and thoughtful in how we deploy capital to create long-term shareholder value. Now turning to our outlook. As a result of our continued execution, we are raising the full-year guidance range across both revenue and adjusted EBITDA. We now anticipate full-year revenues to be between $400 million and $407 million, or $405 million to the midpoint, reflecting the outperformance of our second quarter results and increased visibility supported by early execution and elevated transaction volume from live events. We expect third quarter revenue growth of approximately 27%. We currently expect adjusted EBITDA to be between 33 million and 39 million, or 36 million to the midpoint, up from our prior range of 28 million to 34 million. representing a margin of approximately 9% at the midpoint up from 8% implied in our prior guidance. The primary factors that may determine where we fall within each range are consistent with what we shared last quarter. The timing and ramping of new merchant goal lives and existing merchant upsells, our success in retaining our merchants and the broader market environment. We're pleased with the strength of our second quarter results. Revenue growth accelerated to its fastest pace in more than four years and profitability continued to expand alongside it. We generated meaningful free cash flow while continuing to return capital to shareholders through our buyback program and we raised our full year guidance for both revenue and adjusted EBITDA for the second time this year. With a strong balance sheet, zero debt and a favorable market environment, We're well positioned to keep executing through the second half. Operator, we're ready to take the first question.
Operator
Conference Operator
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 1-1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. One moment for questions. And our first question comes from Ryan Tomasello with KBW. You may proceed.
Ryan Tomasello
Analyst, KBW
Hi, everyone. Congrats on the solid quarter. I guess clearly it sounds like the increasingly complex fraud environment is driving really solid demand for the business. Maybe just to put a finer point on that, Eido, would you describe the momentum you're seeing on the new logo front as A steady continuation of the trends you've already been observing over the last several quarters, or did this last quarter and the first half of the year represent a more notable inflection in the pipeline, maybe as AI proliferation starts to hit a more critical mass? And then on the flip side of that, if you could just talk about your confidence in risk-advised ability to continue to maintain solid CTB ratios, just
Eido Gal
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
I think it's a convergence of a few factors. So we've really spent the past few quarters expanding the product platform in a way that solves some of the newer fraud MOs and kind of creates more value. I would say globally and across a multitude of categories. If you think some of the things we've done around identity and leveraging that to create kind of smarter and more customized flows, some of the work on account, definitely everything around policy, the multi-payment method duality at checkout fraud. So you have this expanding and unique platform on the one hand. And then on the other hand, you do have An increase in the fraud environment, you know, possibly related to genetic tools where the sophistication and the velocity is kind of clearly increasing. And while we have had positive momentum over the past few quarters and we've called it out, I think this quarter definitely kind of everything clicked. And you can see that in the numbers and the pipeline that we've been building, we were able to convert. We were able to convert it. relatively quickly, saw good expansion globally, saw good upsell opportunities, saw a lot of new logos leading to some of those future upsells. So I do think some kind of fundamental issues and kind of just all aligning to good timing right now. To the second part of your question, yes, we continue to feel confident about our ability to solve the problems of fraud and definitely more so than any single individual merchant can. I think that's one of the unique value points. and we'll think we'll continue to see that newer categories and newer geographies can start at higher CTP but will continue to improve over time similarly to prior cohorts.
Ryan Tomasello
Analyst, KBW
Great. And then maybe one for Agi on the implied revenue take rate on GMV in the quarter that I think drove some strong outperformance to street models since GMV growth was only slightly ahead of, I think, where folks were modeling. Maybe if you could just help us understand the drivers there and how we should think about the trajectory of GMV versus take rates in the back half of the year, if there's any mixed or seasoning dynamics to call out on the take rate. And then also on gross margins, I think those were down decently year over year, I assume, on mixed dynamics. But if you can also just talk about how we should think through the trends around gross margin into the back half.
Agi Dotcheva
Chief Financial Officer
Thanks. Thank you for the questions, Ryan. So on the take rate, I always like to say that we look at this as an output of the business. So it's not something that at any point in time can fluctuate. But the way for specifically for this quarter, it's really a function of the higher risk profile of the new business that we added. And I do see it in terms of the quarter mostly as a timing effect. as we continue to add more merchants and diversify and add more business, the take rates will potentially kind of like continue to fluctuate but maybe slightly lower than what we see this quarter. So I do expect GMV and revenue growth to diverge for the rest of the year, maybe like at a slightly lower spread than what we saw. Again, this is an output of the model and in any given quarter, The dynamics of the business, the different kind of existing merchants, the upsell and new logo opportunities can drive slightly different results. And then on your second question.
Eido Gal
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
That was on gross margins. The gross margin, of course.
Agi Dotcheva
Chief Financial Officer
I'm very excited about the market share again this quarter. It's very exciting to be able to accelerate our revenue growth and also kind of to add nicely on the gross profit growth. And this is the way we drive the business. This is kind of like the main KPIs. And when I think about the gross margin on any given quarter, it can fluctuate depending on the mix shift, which we did see this quarter with some of the kind of more activity in the ticketing space, which tends to have a slightly lower gross margin. and also significantly higher weight from new business. But it's more of a mixed shift in the quarter and Eido kind of shared on the CDB. We've seen some new business just come at a lower gross margin initially, but there's nothing structural to that. We do expect all cohorts to kind of improve over time.
Timothy Chiodo
Analyst, UBS
Great, thank you.
Operator
Conference Operator
Thank you. Our next question goes from Terry Tillman with Truist. You may proceed.
Connor Passarella
Analyst, Truist
Great. Good morning, Tim. This is Connor Passarella on for Terry. Congrats on the strong results this quarter. Maybe just to start, you called out merchants increasingly using risk-advised identity intelligence beyond the checkout and across the transaction lifecycle. Could you maybe just give us a sense of where you're seeing the strongest demand today and whether you're starting to see identity intelligence open up entirely new budgets or buyers within customers beyond just the traditional fraud organization?
Eido Gal
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
I think one of the more interesting things about leveraging identity is you're able to leverage your risk knowledge to create a better experience for the good customers. So kind of the smartest and most forward-thinking merchants are not just saying, hey, how can we block fraud? They're kind of saying, hey, how can we leverage this understanding about who the customer really is and provide them a better checkout or shopping experience. And that could be anything from how do we create an instant refund instead of waiting for this package to be delivered? How do we make sure that all our systems, you know, kind of support systems, CRM systems understand who this identity is so that as we interact with them, we can provide them a white-glove service if they deserve it? How can we, you know, go from a position where We don't really know who this new customer is that's signing up to actually understanding it's, you know, a really important relationship for us and maybe the limits or the transfers or others restrictions that are set on the account can be set differently based on the identity. So we definitely think that's expanding the conversation and Really putting people in a position where they understand a great risk tool is not just about blocking fraud, but it's creating a better experience based on the understanding of where fraud happens.
Connor Passarella
Analyst, Truist
Great, thanks for that. And then maybe just as a follow-up, as revenue growth is accelerated, you also raised the adjusted EBITDA guidance. Does the performance this quarter change anything on how you think about the trade-off between reinvesting behind the stronger growth opportunity and allowing incremental revenue to flow through to margins. Thank you.
Eido Gal
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
Right now, I think internally, we're still focused on efficiency and making sure that we're able to leverage AI capabilities to kind of drive more with less. Obviously, we're going to balance that with the large opportunity ahead of us. And, you know, we're happy we were able to execute on both fronts at the same time.
Operator
Conference Operator
Thank you. Our next question goes from Chris Kennedy with William Blair. You may proceed.
Eido Gal
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks for taking the question. You talked about some of the macro tailwinds in the business and some of the strong upsell activity. Can you just give us your latest thoughts on the expectations for net dollar retention and your visibility into that metric going forward?
Agi Dotcheva
Chief Financial Officer
Thank you for the question. Our expectations for net dollar retention remained around 105, no change from what we had before. Specifically for this quarter we saw very strong tailwinds coming from the ticketing space and it drove a nice kind of growth in this area. At the same time we saw kind of travel while continue to grow a little bit softer than what we saw earlier in the year. And all in all, I would say that the majority of the growth at this point is kind of being driven by new business and that's driving like the higher growth rates that we guide it to.
Eido Gal
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
Okay, thank you for that. And then can you just give us an update on the expectations from the revenue contribution from newer products as you extend beyond chargeback guarantee? Thanks for taking the questions.
Agi Dotcheva
Chief Financial Officer
As we currently kind of project, we're still in the ballpark that we shared earlier in the year. There's no change in that as well. And we're just very happy with the continued addition of new merchants that are continuing to kind of grow and using more than one product.
Eido Gal
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
Understood. Thank you.
Operator
Conference Operator
Thank you. And as a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 1 1 on your telephone. Our next question goes from Timothy Chiodo with UBS. You may proceed.
Timothy Chiodo
Analyst, UBS
Great. Thanks a lot. I want to talk a little bit more on the Marketta partnership that you recently announced. This is a good example of Riskified's technology working on the issuer side. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about number one, the mechanics associated with this and how the technology helps the issuing banks. And then number two, The mechanics or how the revenue model might work or if we should think about this as more of a distribution channel, if there's a rev share, any of those kind of mechanics would be appreciated. Thank you.
Eido Gal
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
Hey Tim, I'll take that. Thanks for the question. When we talk to merchants, they increasingly focus on what we call the post-authorization approval rate. You can either look at approval rates before you send the payment through the authorization stream or afterwards. And obviously you have the merchant, the transaction, the initial risk decision by a vendor like us, and then it needs to go through the entire payment chain and funnel. And throughout that entire payment chain and funnel, there are various points where the transaction can be blocked. And it can be blocked because someone entered the wrong CTV code, it can be blocked because there's not enough funds in the account, or it can be blocked because someone further upstream from Riskified and the merchant decides that this transaction might be fraudulent or higher risk. Because we really see our solution, our focus is on maximizing end-to-end conversion for our clients, we really try to think, hey, so what other avenues do we have? And it's not just about being the most accurate at identifying fraud for the merchant, it's also helping other and other partners in the payment ecosystem make smarter decisions. So the relationship with Marketa provides us an ability to share data and risk information in a way that allows them to increase off rates on behalf of our merchants. So basically if the card was issued by Marketa or the processor there, we would expect by several percentage points higher off rates. The value that creates for Riskified is in the competitive situations or where we come to new merchants, it helps create a more differentiated offering. It's not just about the multi-product when we talk about the unique use cases like policy or like the identity we talked about. It also allows us to show them that on the actual operate that obviously they care about very much, we can create a differentiated approval expectation through these types of partnerships. So we monetize it directly through the merchant by increasing win rates and having better retention there.
Timothy Chiodo
Analyst, UBS
That's very clear. Thank you for that explanation. I really appreciate that. Thank you.
Operator
Conference Operator
Thank you. I would now like to turn the call back over to Eido Gal for any closing remarks.
Eido Gal
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you everyone. We're really excited about the momentum in the business and we look forward to updating you on the quarters ahead.
Operator
Conference Operator
Thank you. This concludes the conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.