Riskified Ltd. (RSKD) Earnings Call Transcript

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Riskified Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Stefan Schulstein, 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 Aglika 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.riskified.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 merchant go-lives, adjusted EBITDA profitability, adjusted EBITDA margins, non-GAAP operating expenses, free cash flow and expectations as to category and regional growth trends, which reflect management's best judgment based on currently available information and are not guarantees of future performances -- future performance. We intend all forward-looking statements to be covered by the safe harbor provisions contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 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 could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations. Additionally, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures and key performance indicators on the call. Reconciliations to 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.

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 4 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 of use, 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 life cycle 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 noncard payment methods continue to grow and proliferate, merchants are increasingly looking to us to create the underlying trust mechanism that is missing in. It is a large undertaking, but once done successfully, we believe meaningfully addresses the 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 some of the gaps with credit cards, allowing merchants to leverage a low-cost funding instrument with substantially reduced risk. And as merchants continue to offer alternative ways to pay, our platform allows them to meet customers where they are. And we believe we are well positioned to build and replicate this trust layer for noncard payments in a way that creates value for both our merchants and Riskified. The dollar value of ACH transactions we processed in the quarter was approximately 19x the value of transactions processed in the second quarter of the prior year. Furthermore, merchants are increasingly using Riskified's identity intelligence beyond checkout to improve the customer experience across the transaction life cycle. We had shared last quarter that we are enabling real-time risk scoring inside customer service workflows, especially as customer service evolves towards a 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 life cycle. Our AI assistant, ARIA, continued 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 workflow 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 multiproduct merchant base grew 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 2 trends I just discussed, more complex fraud and continued improvements 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 4 regions with 5 of our top 10 headquartered outside the United States, spanning 5 categories. We're encouraged by the pace at which we continue to add merchants to the platform, which builds towards future expansion opportunities. Upsell 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 U.S. 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 evaluate. A notable highlight this quarter with live sports, a dense global events calendar, which included the World Cup and the NBA finals drove elevated transaction volume across 2 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 the broader merchant category, strong momentum from the 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 multiproduct 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 Aglika for a deeper look at our financial results.

Thank you, Aglika, and everyone, for joining today's call. Unless otherwise noted, this discussion will reference non-GAAP financial measures. We have provided a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures in our earnings release. Our GMV for the second quarter was $41.3 million, reflecting a 13% increase year-over-year. We achieved second quarter revenue of $98.7 million, up 22% year-over-year, an acceleration from 7% growth in the first quarter and the strongest year-over-year growth in more than 4 years. Our GMV and revenue growth during this quarter was primarily driven by continued new merchants and upsell activity as merchants continue to recognize the value of our platform provides. Growth in the second quarter was broad-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 gaming of vertical with upsell activity across our existing base contributing as well. Tickets and travel grew approximately 23% year-over-year, an acceleration from 18% in the first quarter. Tickets was 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. Turning to our 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 continued strength 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 India delivered approximately 3% growth against a strong prior year comparable period 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 up 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 models. 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-GAAP 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 continued 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 a decline in interest income and increase in other expense, the latter primarily tied 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 0 debt. In addition, we continue to maintain a healthy cash flow model. In the second quarter, we achieved free cash flow 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 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 helped contribute to a 26% reduction in total shares outstanding 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're raising the full year guidance range across both revenue and adjusted EBITDA. We now anticipate full year revenue to be between $400 million and $410 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 go-lives and existing merchant upsells, our success in retaining our merchants and the broader macro environment. We're pleased with the strength of our second quarter results. Revenue growth accelerated to its fastest pace in more than 4 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, 0 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 Instructions] And our first question comes from Ryan Tomasello with KBW.

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, 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 Riskified's ability to continue to maintain solid CPV ratios just as the fraud you're insuring becomes more complex here.

Ryan, sure. Happy to take that. 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 flow. Some of the work on accounts, 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, possibly related to agentic 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 opportunity, 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 CPV, but will continue to improve over time, similarly to prior cohorts.

And then maybe one for Aglika on the implied take rate -- 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 mix 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 mix dynamics. But if you can also just talk about how we should think through the trends around gross margin into the back half?

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, it can fluctuate. But the way -- 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 is 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 why 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 sell. Again, this is an output of the model. And in any given quarter, the dynamics of the business, the different kind of growth existing merchants, the upsell and new logo opportunities can drive slightly different results. And then on your second question.

That was on gross margins.

The gross margin, of course. So I'm very excited about the market share gain 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 mix shift in the quarter. And as 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.

Our next question comes from Terry Tillman with Truist.

This is Connor Passarella on for Terry. Congrats on the strong results this quarter. Maybe just to start, you called out merchants increasingly using Riskified identity intelligence beyond the checkout and across the transaction life cycle. Could you maybe just give us a sense of where you're seeing the strongest demand today and whether you're starting to see intelligence -- identity intelligence open up entirely new budgets or buyers within customers beyond just the traditional fraud organization?

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, right? 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 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 go from a position where we don't really know who this new customer is that signing up to actually understanding it's 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.