Full Transcript: Grindr Q2 2026 Earnings Call

On Thursday, Grindr (NYSE: GRND ) discussed second-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below. This content is powered APIs. For comprehensive financial data and transcripts, visit The full earnings call is available at Summary Grindr reported strong financial performance with a 33% year-over-year revenue increase to $138 million and a 42% adjusted EBITDA margin.

The company is raising its full-year guidance to approximately $540 million in revenue and $232 million in adjusted EBITDA, driven by strong user response and AI-driven operational leverage. 5x, and the launch of new products like 'Right Now' and 'Edge'. The Madonna partnership was highlighted as a major cultural event, demonstrating Grindr's ability to blend product, culture, and commerce. Future growth is expected to be supported by continued product innovation and strategic marketing efforts, particularly targeting Gen Z and maintaining a robust free user experience.

Management emphasized the importance of maintaining ecosystem health and handling bad actors with advanced AI technology. Full Transcript Megan, Operator Good day everyone. My name is Megan and I will be your conference operator today. At this time I would like to welcome you to the Grindr second quarter 2026 earnings call.

All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time and you have joined via the webinar, please use the Raise hand icon which can be found at the bottom of your webinar application. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Tolu Adiofe, Head of Investor Relations.

Tolu Adiofe, Head of Investor Relations Hello and welcome to the Grindr earnings call for the second quarter 2026. Today's call will be led by Grindr CEO George Arison and CFO John North. They will make a few brief remarks and then we'll open it up for questions. com.

Before we begin, I will remind everyone that during this call we may discuss our outlook, future performance and future prospects. You should not rely on forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today.

Some of the risks that could cause our actual results to differ from views expressed in our forward-looking statements have been set forth in our earnings release and our periodic reports filed with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025 or any subsequently filed quarterly reports. During today's call, we will also present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures.

Additional disclosures regarding non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most closely comparable GAAP financial measure are included in the earnings release we issued today, which has been posted on the Investor Relations page of Grindr's website and in Grindr's filings with the SEC. With that, I'll turn it over to George. George Arison, CEO Thanks Tolu and hello, thank you everyone for joining us today. Grindr delivered another outstanding quarter and continued to build on the momentum we have established over the last three years.

Our users are responding even better than we expected to the significant product work underway across the app, driving strong organic momentum and exceptional second quarter results. Today we are raising our full year guidance to approximately $540 million in revenue and approximately $232 million in adjusted EBITDA. What excites me most is that we are able to invest more aggressively in the future of Grindr than ever before, while creating stronger operating leverage with AI. We are delivering on our product roadmap and expansion efforts with less headcount growth than we expected, particularly in engineering.

As always, I encourage you to read our shareholder letter for greater detail, but I believe three areas best explain the quarter. First, AI. Over the last several quarters we have been terraforming Grindr into an AI-native company, which is changing how we build software. Engineers are increasingly architecting, directing and reviewing AI synthetics rather than writing code themselves.

5x from July 2025 to April 2026. With roughly the same size team before GenAI, we estimate that producing that much output would have required roughly 200 additional engineers and about 60 million in annual cost. This is also assuming we could have found that quantity of exceptional engineering talent, which has historically been the true limiting factor. With this technological evolution, our exceptional engineers can now focus more of their time on creativity, judgment and architecture, while AI increasingly handles implementation.

That is why I call this AI Terraforming. It's a bit like creating oxygen on Mars. Second, product. Many of the product initiatives we have been investing in are beginning to reinforce each other.

The free experience continues to improve. AI and better data are making the product more useful. Users are increasingly feeling the benefits of the work we have done over the last several years to simplify and rearchitect our code base. We also continue to make strong progress in both Right Now, which remains one of the most important opportunities to strengthen Grindr's core use case, and Edge, our AI-enabled tier that will be a key driver of our revenue growth in 2027.

Third, Madonna. Even a couple years ago, no one would have expected one of the world's biggest cultural icons to launch a major album through Grindr. Today that feels natural. That incredible moment in Times Square—where an estimated 50,000 people showed up after hearing about Madonna's performance just 30 minutes earlier through Grindr—demonstrated our unique ability to bring together product, culture, commerce and real-world experiences in a way that no other social connections platform can.

We're showing that, as the global gayborhood, Grindr can play a much larger role in gay life without moving away from our core. In fact, the strength of our core is what gives us the opportunity to do more. Overall, thanks to our team and our users, our business is firing on all cylinders. I continue to believe the opportunity ahead for Grindr is much larger than the market has historically given us credit for.

Thank you to our shareholders for your continued support. With that, I will turn it over to John for detailed financial results. John North, Chief Financial Officer Thanks George and hello everyone. The second quarter was an outstanding quarter across the board.

As George highlighted, revenue grew 33% year over year to 138 million. Adjusted EBITDA was 58 million, representing a margin of 42%. The performance was driven by continued momentum in core app revenue reflecting strong conversion, ARPU and user retention, as well as robust ads performance. App-based revenue grew 30% year over year to 113 million, supported by solid demand across our Extra and Unlimited tiers and strong consumables performance.

Advertising revenue grew 44% to 25 million, driven by strength in programmatic advertising performance and the continuation of our large year-long direct brand campaign. We continue to expect advertising revenue to run in the mid to high teens as a percentage of total revenue for full year 2026. This comes even as we are balancing a disciplined approach to third-party ad loads in connection with our priorities around user experience and ecosystem health. As previously discussed, we expect ads as a percentage of total revenue to normalize back near the historical 15% range in 2027 and beyond.

Adjusted EBITDA grew 27% year over year to 58 million, a 42% margin. This strong result reflects top-line outperformance combined with the operational leverage unlocked by our AI terraforming efforts. Operating expenses, excluding cost of revenue, were 71 million, up from 53 million in the second quarter of last year, with a portion of the uptick driven by one-time marketing expenses for our Madonna partnership. Our strong revenue growth more than offset this investment.

Turning to share repurchase activity, during the second quarter we executed another accelerated share repurchase for an upfront payment of 60 million. As of quarter end, this and certain other repurchase transactions remain in progress with settlement expected to be completed in the third quarter. We have approximately 300 million remaining under our 900 million share repurchase authorization and will maintain flexibility to buy back shares opportunistically.

Given our strong growth through the first half of the year, positive user response to core app improvements, and higher-than-anticipated AI-driven operational leverage, we are raising our full year 2026 outlook today. We now expect full year revenue to be approximately 540 million, up from 535 million, and adjusted EBITDA to be approximately 232 million, up from 227 million. In the second half of the year, as we previously discussed, we expect growth rates will naturally moderate in the third quarter and fourth quarter as we anniversary the global rollout of our subscription pricing changes and lap more difficult comparisons from the second half of 2025.

Overall, we are pleased with how the business is performing. The structural leverage we're seeing allows us to reinvest in high ROI growth initiatives like Edge while both returning capital to shareholders and expanding our bottom line. We intend to carry this momentum for the rest of the year. With that, operator, please open the call to questions.

Megan, Operator We will now move to our question and answer session. If you're viewing the webcast, you can submit a question via the Ask a Question tab on the top right-hand side of your screen. If you have joined via the webinar, please use the Raise hand icon which can be found at the bottom of your webinar application. When you are called on, please unmute your line and ask your question.

We'll now pause a moment for the queue to assemble. Our first question will come from Nathan Feather with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead everyone.

Nathan Feather, Analyst at Morgan Stanley Thanks for taking the question and congrats on the strong performance here. If I may. You know, first you talk about broadening Right Now. Can you drill a little bit more into the changes in the product experience you're making there?

Then help us think through how Right Now adopt and utilization has evolved over the past few years that product's matured. George Arison, CEO Hi Nathan, good to talk to you. Right Now was the first product that we started working on after the current management team came into place with the idea that people who join Grindr join for many different intentions and users that wanted a more immediate or soon to happen connection that's more casual were feeling like they couldn't have as easy of a time finding other people who wanted that given that some people didn't want that.

And so Right Now is a way for people to express that kind of need directly and connect with other people who have that interest. We have very good usage on Right Now. We're really happy with how much traction that product has gained over the last year and a half or so. At the same time, we've gotten feedback on things that users want to be different.

As one example, people say Right Now, even the name implies that I need to connect this moment. You're in the Right Now kind of period for an hour also implies that you have to connect this moment. Whereas some people are saying, well I want to be able to connect soon. It could be tomorrow or the day after, but not in this very moment.

And so we are taking that feedback from users and are going to make some changes to the product to be responsive to that. I think that's a normal kind of process that you normally go through with the product. You launch one version, you get feedback and then improve on it, which is how we tend to build products in general. And I think all these things are going to make the product even better and lead to more people using it.

Some of the other things we've done recently is we now allow people to post in Right Now without tying that post directly to their Grindr profile. Because there are people who want to be able to say, hey, I am in Right Now mode. I'm willing to engage people in that, but I don't want people to know on my regular profile that I'm in Right Now, which I think was really well received as well. And so overall, pretty happy with the product and really happy with the roadmap that we have for what we want to do to make it better.

Nathan Feather, Analyst at Morgan Stanley Great, that's helpful. 5x increase in engineering output is really interesting. And I haven't seen too many companies really try to frame the actual uplift they've seen through a lot of this AI tool utilization, I guess. Can you help us frame out one, How you're calculating that in the kind of methodology there?

And then, two, how should we think about token costs and how you're balancing between open and frontier models to balance that with profitability? George Arison, CEO So we looked at how much was shipped in a period of time when we had our team working on things before we started to really push adoption of AI coding. I don't want to say it was like none at all, because we did have some AI coding at the time, but very minimal. This is in July of last year.

And then we compared that to how much stuff are we producing as engineers across various metrics in the month of April. 5x more. 5x because we just thought it was unreasonable to expect things to have changed that much. And then also just looking at the number of projects that people are working on at the same time now versus the number of projects that people are working on before, you can't really compare them.

I think it's reasonable to say that you would be doing more things than you were doing. But what we're now doing is a totally different way of thinking. I remember when I took this job, I met with a very prominent CEO, kind of as a mentorship meeting. And I told him, hey, these are the things I want to do at Grindr over the next few years.

And my guess is in three to four years, I'm going to need a team of about 250 to 300 engineers. And he's like, no, you won't, and let me tell you why. And really pushed on the idea that AI coding would take over. And kind of, he was right and I was right.

For all the things that we're doing, you actually would have needed about a 250, 300 person team in the old world. But with AI coding, you actually. So it's a really incredible kind of outcome for us. We are of the view that people should use all the tools that are out there and not really worry about the cost of them as long as the ROI that we want to see is there.

And ultimately that has to do with management. If you manage the business really tightly, which we do, I don't think there's a risk that people are going to go and waste time and work on things that are not worth it and or just kind of have agents running in the background for no reason, as has happened in other places. And so we encourage all tools possible. Historically, we've used a lot of Cursor and a lot of cloud code.

In the last few weeks we've actually seen a ton of adoption for Devin, which I think is quite exciting for what it's worth. And most of what we do are from frontier companies. We have deployed open source models in our system for other things, but not for coding in an aggressive way yet. Nathan Feather, Analyst at Morgan Stanley Okay, great, that's helpful.

And one more: back half has a relatively large implied step down. It's been the case through the year, but just help us think through the puts and takes here. And as we head into 27, can you stack rank, maybe qualitatively, what are the major drivers of revenue growth that could hopefully lead to an acceleration versus at least back half levels. John North, Chief Financial Officer Thanks for the question, Nathan.

Our guidance, really, our philosophy certainly hasn't changed. And I would say our expectations for the back half of the year are pretty consistent with how we started things all the way back in February. To your point, you communicated it well. I mean, we've anticipated the second half of the year is going to see some deceleration, which is, you know, really just an artifact of a couple of things.

One is pricing increases that were put in place on subscriptions at the end of last year, beginning of this year, which is sort of a one-time pickup for the year. But there was not anticipated further increases in pricing in the back half of the year. So that was one factor. The other was just anniversarying a pretty strong finish to 2025.

And in particular we saw acceleration in revenue growth each quarter last year. And so the comparisons are a little more tricky. And that was all kind of what we thought about. And our philosophy around guiding to what we had line of sight to with a high degree of confidence hasn't changed.