Blend Labs Q2 2026 Earnings Call: Complete Transcript

On Thursday, Blend Labs (NYSE: BLND ) discussed second-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below. This transcript is brought to you APIs. For real-time access to our entire catalog, please visit for a consultation.

8 million, marking a 7% year-over-year increase. The company highlighted the commercial launch of its Autopilot product, which has shown promising early results in reducing loan processing times and improving conversion rates. Blend Labs emphasized its strategy of aligning revenue with customer success by moving towards a per funded loan model for Autopilot rather than seat-based pricing. 0, significantly increasing engineering throughput, which is expected to drive long-term efficiency and innovation.

Management provided cautious guidance for the remainder of 2026, noting macroeconomic headwinds like high mortgage rates but expressed confidence in long-term growth driven by strategic initiatives like Autopilot. The company repurchased 11 million shares in the second quarter, indicating strong confidence in its valuation and future prospects. Blend Labs is seeing a growing late-stage pipeline, particularly with large financial institutions, which is expected to support future growth despite current market challenges. Full Transcript OPERATOR Hello everyone.

Thank you for joining us and welcome to Blend Labs' financial results conference call for the second quarter of 2026. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again.

I will now hand the conference over to management for their prepared remarks. Please go ahead. Meg Nunnally, Head of Investor Relations Good afternoon and welcome to Blend Labs' financial results conference call for the second quarter of 2026. I'm Meg Nunnally, Blend Labs' Head of Investor Relations.

Joining me today is Nima Ghamsari, our Co—Founder and Head of Blend, and Jason Ream, our Head of Finance and Administration. Before we start today's call, I'd like to note that we will refer to certain non—GAAP measures which are reconciled to GAAP measures in today's earnings release and in the appendix of our supplemental slides. Non—GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for GAAP results. Unless otherwise stated, all financial measures we'll discuss today, including our profitability, refer to non—GAAP.

Also, certain statements made during today's conference call regarding Blend Labs and its operations, in particular, our guidance for the third and fourth quarter of 2026, other commentary regarding 2026, and our expectations about markets, our strategic investments, product development plans, and operational targets may be considered forward—looking statements under federal securities law. We caution you that forward—looking statements involve substantial risks and uncertainties, and a number of factors, many of which are beyond the company's control, could cause actual results, events, or circumstances to differ materially from those described in these statements.

Please see the risk factors we've identified in our most recent 10—Qs, our 10—K for the fiscal year 2025, and other SEC filings. We are not undertaking any commitment to update these statements if conditions change, except as required by law. The financial information presented on this call is based on continuing operations and prior periods have been recast to exclude operations that are now discontinued. Lastly, we will be providing a copy of our prepared remarks on our website by the conclusion of today's call and an audio replay will also be available soon after the call.

I'll now turn the call over to Nima. Nima Ghamsari, Founder & Head of Blend Thanks Meg, and welcome everyone. The second quarter was another disciplined, profitable quarter for Blend. Revenue came in near the high end of our guidance range and non-GAAP operating income came in above the high end.

And Jason will take you through all the financial details in a few minutes. 0, the agents we are building inside Blend to help us do our work to serve our customers faster, better, and cheaper. Let me start with Autopilot. The big news for us last quarter was that Autopilot became commercially available on July 1st.

If you're following along on the webcast, I'd invite you to advance this slide with the words Our AI Strategy Guiding our customers at the top. This is the first of two slides that I'll reference today and the charts on these slides are also available in the supplemental slides on our investor relations website. The chart shows cumulative loans processed by Autopilot from a standing start in February to more than 45,000 today. And it's still compounding — the curve is the proof behind everything I'm about to tell you.

During this four month window, more than 65 lenders activated Autopilot. They stress test it, surfaced the hard edge cases, and shaped what we shipped, and the preview data backs up why this matters. We're starting to see evidence Autopilot is driving faster clearance times, higher conversion rates, and potentially reducing fulfillment costs. Based on our preliminary data of these loans that have gone through our system, our customers are seeing a 10 to 15% improvement in pull-through rates and two to four days of cycle time improvement.

Furthermore, we estimate that Autopilot is automating four and a half hours of loan fulfillment tasks on average per loan. This is huge and our customers are just beginning to grasp the potential now that we are commercial. As of July 1st six lenders have already signed contracts that include Autopilot, including Onnity, which is one of the largest mortgage servicers in the nation, which is also building its own experiences on top of Autopilot through our Autopilot MCP server. On monetization, we're executing the plan we described in May with customers signing flat-fee one-year contracts for full access.

There's going to be a base level of intelligence built into our workflows, but the paid tiers are where the full product lives. We call our underwriting Intelligence, where Autopilot is reading documents, running calculations, reconciling against guidelines, and driving the full loan file forward. Over time, our intent remains to move the paid tiers to a per funded loan model just like the rest of our mortgage suite. And with seat-based pricing, which we don't think survives the agentic world — when software does the work you can't charge by the person, it doesn't make any sense.

And others are also moving the consumption models to get paid for the activity their AI generates, we made a different choice, which is we get paid on success. We get paid on the outcome, not for the tasks along the way, but for the outcome. So if Autopilot does 10 times the work on a file that never closes, our customers shouldn't pay 10 times more for it. And under our model, they won't.

Our revenue scales with our customer success, and that alignment is the business model we've always had. Agentic AI just makes it more valuable and more scalable. Since I get asked about the competitive landscape constantly, let me be direct about it. What gives Blend the right to win?

Our answer comes down to four advantages that are hard to replicate. First, where we sit. Blend is the borrower's first point of contact. And because we're there, we see the problems and we fix the problems as they come along.

More than half of borrowers apply outside of business hours, and over 90% of people who complete an application do so within 24 hours of starting. Autopilot catches friction the moment it happens at 10 pm on a Saturday, not Monday morning, at the exact moment the borrower intent is the highest and the engagement is the highest. Next, our data. The question behind every AI question I get is in a world where anybody can call a frontier model like Claude, is a software like ours replaceable?

We believe the answer is no. And the reason is our data models are converging and everyone has access to the same models, including us. But what isn't a commodity is what it takes to get the model to perform on a mortgage that has tons of context, tons of loan documents, guidelines, and lots of things that have to be taken into account to make the right next action on the loan. And that's a combination of 15 years of experience and tens of millions of loan application data processing through our platform, which you can't buy and you can't synthesize — 15 years of real borrower behavior.

And that compounds. I actually see this in our early Autopilot benchmarks against, you know, a typical Claude plus skills. And we see that Autopilot performs better in those tests and much better and much cheaper — about one third the cost. Third, the harness.

Autopilot is not a wrapper around a generic model. It runs inside of the infrastructure, the data layer, the integrations, the compliance architecture, orchestrating what the agent sees, what tools it can use, which guidelines to apply to a specific loan in front of it, and what happens when it isn't sure — it hands the file back to the loan team. People stay in control of the decisions that matter. And this harness is part of what makes Autopilot more accurate and cheaper than a generic harness.

And last, our relationships. We've spent 15 years building alongside lenders. And Autopilot was built the same way — with lenders, for lenders — and with Autopilot MCP, we've opened up our infrastructure so customers and other technology providers can build on top of us rather than around us. And when you step back, this is the bigger thesis.

Blend is and can be the agentic infrastructure for relationship banking. The original promise of banking was relationship — a lender who got to know you and could make a call based on more than just a credit score. That promise didn't disappear because bankers stopped caring — it disappeared because there's so much process and there's so much manual work and manual effort that has to go in to every single loan. But when Autopilot is handling that, that grunt work on the loans, and helping the people who, you know, historically did that, focus on the customer.

When Autopilot's handling those conditions, the follow ups, the questions that come in at two in the morning, and the loan officer bringing it back to the capacity of serving the customer. I started Blend with my co-founders back in 2012 with a simple thesis that the mortgage process should drive itself. Not because humans aren't needed, because the right technology can handle everything that does not require a human. And Autopilot is finally that thesis arriving.

And because of what we're seeing in mortgage — the most complex, most heavily regulated process in consumer finance — we believe the same infrastructure extends naturally to home equity, deposits, auto, card, personal lending, and I think probably broadly, given how much we've honed the harness and the evals around Autopilot, probably beyond that to other aspects of underwriting. Agentic AI doesn't replace and doesn't need to replace relationship banking, but it makes it possible to have our customers, the lenders, be even more focused on their customers once again at scale. Shifting gears.

If you're following along the webcast, I'd ask you to advance this slide with the words Our AI Strategy Transforming how we work at the top. This slide gives you a glimpse of how Blend itself is transforming and how it is going to look in the future. 0 is the last four years where we were creating a profitable, long-term, sustainable entity. 0 is an agentic-first company.

And that doesn't mean just for our products, but that also means how we work internally. And last quarter I described this pattern. An agent will, you know, in the end say to Blend, take the first pass of the incoming work, especially the grunt work that I described earlier, before a team member even touches it and applies their judgment. So I won't repeat all that today, but I want you to look at the graph.

And the graph shows one specific team in the company, which is actually one of our biggest teams, which is the engineering team. And if you look at the gray line and you look at pull requests, which is the gray line, in 2025 it was pretty flat throughout the year and during the holidays it trailed off. And then you look at the blue line. 6x the throughput — when I, and I don't if you remember, but I told you in May that we were running roughly one and a half times compared to what we were doing in January.

And so, and that was the average, that was just three months ago. 6 times. It's a profound thing to think about, which means if we continue at this pace, we could be doing 10 times as much throughput on the engineering team by the end of this year as we did the end of last year. And I think that will continue to compound as an advantage for us to turn into velocity of fixing customer bugs, handling customer feature and enhancement requests, building the new things like Autopilot that power the future of our industry at a faster and better pace.

And that's really important because the essence of any software company is how do you serve your customers and create value for your customers. And I think that trend will continue to steepen as we adopt further AI within our organization and as the models get better over time. But given the success that we're seeing in engineering, the next phase that we're doing, and what I believe is our job, is to take this to the whole company. And so this past quarter we expanded our efforts in agentic-first approaches and we expanded to our go-to-market organization where agents now are reviewing support tickets that come in immediately.

And if it's a bug that needs fixing, it can open a pull request. If it's a simple response that they want or a configuration change, it can draft that up for a human to go and click, yep, that's right. Or no, that's wrong, I need to change that. And it's also doing work on our customer calls and helping draft coaching notes and follow-ups that used to take the team's hours.

And in our finance organization where agents are doing the first pass of work on parts of our closing process, in every case, the process is the same. The agent takes the first draft, a person reviews and approves. And in some cases over time, I think where it's less of a security issue or less of a code issue, or less of something that's something that doesn't even need a human approval, I think eventually over time we'll even not need human approvals for some of those things, but different functions that I'm talking about. But it's one operating model of how I think the future of agentic technology is.

And it's still early days, but this is one of the most active topics inside Blend right now. Our leadership team is meeting regularly about it because becoming an Agent First Company is an operating decision, not a side project. It's a whole company effort to figure out how would we reimagine this amazing company and customer base from the ground up. Because we now get that opportunity because we're profitable, we have our house in order, and all these technologies are accelerating right in front of our eyes.

And I said in May that we aim to be in the top 1% of all companies on agentic AI adoption. And that's still the goal. We're tracking our progress by function. We're taking it one piece at a time.

And I expect to share more with you in the coming quarters as this rollout matures. Lastly, I want to talk about growth because I know that's a question on everyone's mind. Well, to start with the bad news, the macro is not helping us right now. 8% in recent weeks because of wars and things that are going on that are outside of our control.

And that keeps activity in the market, especially refinance activity, but also purchase activity, muted. And so I've always said we can't control the macro. I just want you to be aware of it because we're obviously paying close attention to it and it might sort of mute future quarters like Q4 if we expect a certain amount of refinance activity and it doesn't come because rates are high — just more being aware of it. But that's okay.

Our ultimate goal is, has been, and is to generate long-term sustainable growth regardless of the macro environment. In the quarter, we signed 14 new deals and expansions and there's two that I want to highlight. The first is a new logo with a large credit union that included Autopilot right out of the gate. So I think this will be the new norm with our customers as they sign with us.

We have some more deals in pipeline that have the same shape, but it's the first time a customer chose Blend and chose Autopilot as part of that initial package. Agentic AI is becoming table stakes and our customers want it and need it, in fact, to be the best versions of themselves. And I think, like I said, it's a preview of how many of our deals are going to look going forward.