Marchex (MCHX) Q4 2025 earnings call transcript

Good afternoon. Thank you for attending today's Q4 and full year 2025 March earnings conference call. My name is Tamia and I will be a moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad.

I would now have to pass the conference over to your host, Francine, Chief Operating Officer at March X. Good afternoon everyone and welcome to March X's business update in fourth quarter and full year 2025 conference call. Joining us today are Ross Horowitz, our chairman of the board. Troy Hartless, our president, and Brian Nagel, our chief financial officer. Before we get started, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements, including references to our financial and operational performance.

And actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements. Recent uncertainties that could cause these results to differ materially are set forth in today's earnings press release in our most recent annual or quarterly report file with the SEC.

Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update these statements to subsequent events.

During this call, we will present both gap and non-gap financial measures. A reconciliation of gap to non-gap measures is included in today's earnings press release. The earnings press release is available in the investor relations section of our website. At this time, I want to turn the call over to Russ.

Thank you, Frank. I'm going to start up with a few thoughts and then hand the call over to Troy, Brian, and then Frank again. The main item I'd like to reiterate is that we feel the company is at a very positive and complex point, both strategically and operationally. We come a long way in expanding our customer footprint, evolving our product and technology capabilities, and starting to create real sales momentum. With this progress and deeper strategic understanding, which is against the backdrop of the very real and very massive AI revolution, we think proprietary insight into what we believe may be a much bigger market opportunity, one where we have all beyond mainly providing strategic analytics to vertical market leading companies, to one where we accelerate delivering more comprehensive solutions that address high value impact needs across the entire customer acquisition and optimization journey.

At the end of the day, our customers fundamentally rely on our AI driven strategic insights to more officially drive growth-oriented customer acquisition. We believe there is a significant opportunity for us to rapidly expand the highly measurable AI-powered bundled solutions which provide the strategic insights our customers need, the automated actions those insights inform, and the outcomes those actions achieve. We believe that there are significant untapped opportunities within our existing customer base and within each of our current verticals. We believe selling such bundled solutions across this entire customer value chain can accelerate our business and make us much more valuable within our vertical markets, as AI opens new product possibilities that can help businesses grow meaningfully while driving efficiencies.

In March X, we view ourselves as a meaningful AI beneficiary based on how rapidly we are now able to leverage AI to develop and deploy new products into our customer base that can deliver high customer value as well as new company revenue opportunities. In fact, we're being relied on to help many customers navigate the rapidly evolving and complex world of introducing AI in evaluating agentic possibilities to impact customer acquisition and retention. We see significant new business potential in introducing agentic workflows for customers who are integrated on the new engaged platform. Additionally, AI is making our business more agile and efficient to operate. The combination of these factors, including our vast amount of first-party data and vertical expertise, our key elements and our improving outlook for meaningful business acceleration as we move through the year.

With that, I'll hand the call to Troy to briefly discuss the fourth quarter.

Thank you, Russ. In the fourth quarter, we achieved our goal of the primary completion of our technology platform migration by the end of the year. While this involved our migrating approximately 1,000 customers to the new platform and some resulting revenue dilution and offsets, we believe that we are now in a strong position with our ability to leverage new AI capabilities and more rapidly deliver innovative solutions to our customers. With this significant infrastructure project finally behind us, in 2026, we believe that we are well positioned to focus on accelerating our revenue growth and delivering margin expansion during 2026. Over the course of the past year, March X has significantly expanded our product platform capabilities for customers and prospects.

Over this time, we have launched our new unified user interface across March X's products week, new vertical AI capabilities, and various other new products and features. And there is much more to come over the course of 2026 and beyond. In addition, with the previously announced proposed acquisition of Arcania, March X and Arcania have created a collaboration framework. And we have been jointly developing and selling initial products that reflect the combined capabilities of the two companies. Product examples of this collaboration, which leverage March X's data and AI signals, and Arcania's AI tool sets and user interface include additional AI agents, which increase customer bookings and appointment rates, and AI verified outcomes, which drive increased revenue on a pay per event basis.

We are currently in trials with a handful of customers and expect to launch more next month and beyond. While these combined selling efforts are early, we have had initial positive indications of adoption of the combined solutions for March X's existing customers in the home services and auto services verticals. We believe our ability to sell these and other combined solutions, which reflect the bundling of AI-driven insights, actions, and outcomes to our installed customer base will be a meaningful revenue growth catalyst in 2026 and beyond. As a reminder, we have a core focus on select very large vertical markets, where the combination of our expanding AI capabilities built on years of operating with first-party data across the verticals.

Give us the ability to deliver unique solutions for world-class market leading companies. To that end, we deliver industry-specific AI solutions for automotive, auto services, home services, health care, advertising and media, as well as other industries and sub-verticals.

With that, I will turn the call over to Brian to provide an overview of the fourth quarter of financial results.

Thank you, Troy. Revenue for the fourth quarter of 2025 was 10.8 million, which is down from 11.5 for the third quarter of 2025. We saw favorable impact of new sales and existing customer upsells benefit the company in the quarter. We also saw some offsets to that due to migration activities from our legacy platforms onto our new March X Engage platform.

For operating expenditures, we saw efficiencies throughout the business as we benefited from the realignment of the organization and the completion of certain technology platform initiatives during 2025. We anticipate that our gross profit margins can continue to improve over time, as we are carrying an overall lower cost structure going forward, which could enable meaningful future operating and financial leverage for the business as new products and features sell through.

On the balance sheet, cash decreased to 9.9 million from 10.3 million at the end of the third quarter of 2025. The decrease in cash was primarily due to the timing of customer payments at the end of the quarter, moving to guidance. Revenue in the first quarter of 2026 reflects the migration revenue dilution from the final platform switchover in December 2025, which impacted revenue run rates entering 2026. With this noted in the first quarter of 2026, we currently anticipate that revenue will be in the range of fourth quarter 2025 levels and that adjusted EBITDA will be 500,000 or more. Based on the growth initiatives previously noted by Troy and other positive factors, we currently anticipate that for the second quarter of 2026, revenue will be sequentially will sequentially increase as compared to the first quarter of 2026, with adjusted EBITDA potentially increasing to more than 1 million.

In addition, with our ongoing products and future launches on the new technology platform, we currently anticipate that we can see sequential quarterly revenue increases during 2026, and that over the course of the year, we can see revenue growth on a run rate basis in the 10% range from 2025 year end levels. We also currently anticipate that in the course of 2026, the combination of anticipated increasing revenue growth combined with lower overall operating expenses can lead to adjusted EBITDA margins of 10% or more.

With that, I will hand the call over to Frank.

Thank you, Brian. I would like to take a moment to provide an update on the Arkania transaction. In November 2025, March X announced that we had entered into an agreement and principle, or AIP, to acquire 100% of the stock of Arkania from its stockholders.

A special committee of March X's Board of Directors consisting solely of independent directors approved March X entering into the AIP, because certain of the sellers are related parties.

The AIP contemplates the parties entering into a definitive purchase agreement relating to the transaction. Conditions to entering into the definitive agreement include receipt of audited financial and receipt of a customary fairness opinion by a financial advisor selected by the special committee.

Arkania has engaged RSM US LLP to audit the Arkania financial statements, and the special committee has engaged Craig Hallum Capital Group LLC as its financial advisor.

Conditions to closing the transaction shall include approval of the transaction by a majority of March X's disinterested stockholders. The closing date in the event a definitive agreement is entered into and the transaction is approved by disinterested stockholders. It is anticipated to occur in June 2026. For your reference, Arkania is a performance based customer qualification and acquisition company which transforms consumer intent into AI verified outcome based results. Leveraging advanced AI signals, natural language analytics, and automated decisioning, Arkania detects consumer intent and advertiser value in real time. Optimizing customer acquisition campaigns dynamically across channels.

With machine learning models that continuously refine qualification accuracy in ROI, Arkania enables its customers to pay for verified AI-validated outcomes such as appointments, sales, and high intent conversations. We believe that our potential combination with Arkania is successfully consummated, would create a vertically focused AI-driven customer acquisition and outcome optimization platform, integrating deep insights, automated actions, and verifiable outcomes. Additionally, we believe that the expanded AI-driven product offerings across insights, actions, and outcomes could create more ways to win new business with the bundling of solutions, could create customer value, stickiness, and risk mitigation. We believe that the potential combined company could have the opportunity to achieve greater revenue scale and growth, higher margins, expanded market reach, and enhanced strategic flexibility, which could include, first, a potentially expanded addressable market with opportunity to cross-sell and bundle.

We believe the combined ability to sell insights, actions, and outcomes would meaningfully expand our addressable market into a new large vertical markets. Additionally, we believe we could have the ability to relatively quickly offer or bundle Arkania's outcome-based solutions to many of March X's insights-based enterprise customers.

Second, greater potential revenue scale and growth. March X believes that revenue run rates for the potential combined company are approximately 15 million quarterly or approximately 60 million annualized, which could grow in the 15 to 20 percent range in the course of 26.

Third, we see the potential for adjusted EBITDA expansion. We believe that our adjusted EBITDA margins are anticipated to trend up to 10 percent of more in 2026, and that Arkania could contribute additional positive adjusted EBITDA beyond these levels. And finally, rule of 30 to rule of 40 trajectory. For reference, the rule of 30 to 40 metric represents the combination of annual revenue growth rates plus adjusted EBITDA margins.

If we're able to achieve the anticipated revenue run rate growth in the 15 to 20 percent range, and combine this with improving adjusted EBITDA margins and double digits, the combined company could be positioned to potentially achieve these rule of 30 to 40 metrics over time, which we believe helps highlight the unique opportunity the combined company if consummated.

With that, I will hand the call back to Russ for closing remarks.

Thank you, Frank. I want to close out today's call by thanking all of our investors, partners, and other stakeholders for your ongoing support. Additionally, I want to deeply thank our employees for their unique expertise, sense of urgency, and continued commitment while we execute on what we believe is an increasingly dynamic opportunity. And with that, I'll hand the call back to the operator for Q&A.

Thank you. So we'll now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one or your telephone keypad. If for any reason at all you would like to remove that question, please press star followed by two. Again, to ask a question, please press star one.

Yeah, look, so far the joint sales calls have been very positive and very much strategically operational. You know, we so far prioritize creating and selling the products that bring together the best of the combined capabilities of both March X and Arcadia and where the customer data clearly highlights how the customer problem, our unique solution to it and the value impact that we can deliver. And when we've had just a short amount of time to get this started, we actually already have multiple orders in hand from the installed customer base for these new products. You know, and we think as we grow the list of customers adopting these products and then start stacking the wins together, we're going to see a very positive cumulative revenue effect.

In today's release, we specifically referenced that we're out there selling conversational AI agents in AI verified outcomes on a paper event basis into the auto services and home services verticals. This is going to be continuing expanding with additional customers and also moving to other verticals as awesome.

It's a really good question and it's when we spend a lot of time, you know, assessing. If you think about our business overall, our top 50 customers represent about 80% of our revenue. And when we look at the new product capabilities, we believe that they are very relevant and very applicable to the vast majority of both top 50 as well as other customers beyond the top 50. You know, in the past, March X has stated our belief that we have a $100 million revenue opportunity over time. On a combined basis, we believe that the $100 million revenue run rate is much more tangible and achievable, much sooner, even with just the existing customer base.

The joint sales efforts so far are validating that these are the right initial revenue goals and the right prioritized approach. So with everything we've learned so far, we just view this all as a profitably focused print to $100 million in revenue run rate.

And how are you thinking about the current stock valuation? Well, yeah, I'll start with the second question first. Clearly, we don't feel the current stock doesn't reflect our value or even the incremental value we believe were in the process of both creating and validating. But we understand it's up to us to deliver the financial results and provide the customer and product stories for people to understand our value impact and to start seeing us the way we're really now seeing ourselves, which is a dynamic and unique company. And specifically, we're an exciting emerging AI growth story. So we think we're at an inflection point.

We know the burden is on us to prove it with our results. But getting to the first part of your story, kind of with all this in mind, we've just recently hired a new IR firm, Onto Wilkinson, to help us get a lot more active in reaching out to new investors and helping us tell our story and make sure that we're really landing this in the way we think is differential and unique. So we're going to be much more active, particularly with the Arcadia transaction potentially closing shortly. Beyond that, when we think about our stock, throughout our history, we've had times where we've done stock buybacks. We've done self-tender offers. We've declared regular and special dividends.

And as a reminder, right now, we do have an existing three million share buyback program authorized. So we're going to continue to assess all of our options. But again, first and foremost, under any scenario, we know the best way to get our value recognized is to outperform and communicate well. So that's what we're focused on right now, particularly since our May reporting cycle is only six weeks away. And we're excited for May to come because we think we're in a position to hopefully reinforce with some of those stories and some of those points of progress and pointing to how the results kind of unfold through the course of the year.

Thanks, Scott.

Thank you. The next question comes from Mike Lattimore with Northland Capital Markets. You may proceed.

Yeah, on the first one, bookings were similar to the prior quarter. And when you look at the seasonal impact, we view that as a favorable result. And when you look at the trajectory kind of beyond the quarter, but month to month, particularly as we're getting out there with new solutions, we see accelerations of bookings as we're ending Q1 and going into Q2 in a way that we think can potentially meaningfully move the map.

Yeah, right now call volumes have been relatively consistent in the past at times. We've spoken about those as being a bit of a drag that we need to overcome as part of our growth. But right now, not as much the cases it has been historically. Right now, the primary variables are customer expansion, upselling the new products and getting the benefits or stacking effect of what we're starting to see unfold based on the joint efforts to go sell the combined capabilities. Beyond that, we are having success with some upsells. And I do believe that we are in a position to win more new customers on the traditional products. But the real catalyst that we see is with these products that really unlock the strategic insights, you do action and outcome based products.

And we're getting a lot of validation with the early sales efforts. And we see the opportunity significantly expand within the existing base, which is the quickest way again for us to really favorably move the map on our financial results.

Thank you. Thank you. There are currently no more questions remaining at this time. So we'll pass it back over to the team for closing remarks.

Look, I just want to thank everybody for participation in the call, the very thoughtful questions. And again, reiterate with our investors and stakeholders the appreciation for your ongoing support. And we look forward to seeing and hearing you again very shortly with our forthcoming May announcement as well. Thank you, everybody.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your