Transcript: PAR Technology Q2 2026 Earnings Conference Call

PAR Technology (NYSE: PAR ) held its second-quarter earnings conference call on Thursday. Below is the complete transcript from the call. APIs provide real-time access to earnings call transcripts and financial data. Visit to learn more.

3% organic growth. 3 million, up nearly $9 million from the previous year, aided by a specific hardware initiative. PAR Technology's strategy focuses on expanding platform advantages, reinvesting in AI, and expanding into new markets, with significant progress in restaurant and retail sectors. Management raised the full-year 2026 revenue guidance to $516-$523 million and adjusted EBITDA to $50-$53 million, reflecting confidence in growth momentum.

Operational highlights include successful deployments in key accounts like Burger King and Papa John's, and robust multi-product adoption among new customers. PAR Intelligence is set for significant expansion, with 20,000 sites live in Q2 and another 20,000 planned in Q3, positioning it for future revenue growth. The company is leveraging AI to enhance product offerings and operational efficiencies, aiming to integrate AI across its platform for improved customer outcomes. Full Transcript Alicia, Operator Good day, and thank you for standing by.

Welcome to the PAR Technology fiscal year 2026 second quarter financial results conference call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session you will need to press star 11 on your telephone.

You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that this call is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference call over to your first speaker today.

Please go ahead. Investor Relations Thank you, Alicia, and good afternoon everyone, and thank you for joining us today for PAR Technology's 2026 second quarter financial results call. Earlier today we released our financial results. com, where you can also find the Q2 financials presentation as well as in our related Form 8-K furnished to the SEC.

Before we begin, please be advised that our remarks today will contain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors which could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. For additional information on these factors, please refer to our earnings release and other reports filed with the SEC. Also today we'll be discussing and providing certain non-GAAP financial measures which we believe will provide additional clarity regarding our ongoing performance.

For a full reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures discussed in this call to the most comparable GAAP measure in accordance with SEC regulations, please see our press release furnished as an exhibit to our Form 8-K filed this afternoon and our supplemental materials available on our website. Joining me on the call today are PAR CEO Savneet Singh and Bryan Menar, PAR's Chief Financial Officer. I'd now like to turn the call over to Savneet for the formal remarks portion of the call, which will be followed by general Q&A. Savneet Singh, CEO Thanks, Chris, and thank you all for joining us today.

On our first quarter call we established clear financial and AI adoption targets and laid out what success looks like for PAR in 2026. Since then, we've been heads down executing against our three-pronged growth strategy, namely to: 1) extend our competitive platform advantages in core markets, 2) reinvest in product efficacy via powerful AI functionality, and 3) aggressively expand our total addressable market in areas where we can continue to leverage our inherent platform advantage. As Ben Graham famously said, in the short run the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it's a weighing machine. We plan to continue to stack weights on the scale at PAR.

We're always on offense. This is evidenced by our strong Q2 results and highlights, which I'll start with today before handing the call to Brian to discuss our financial results in more detail and provide our outlook for the remainder of the year. Q2 was a starting shot in the show-me market. We delivered results ahead of expectations, expanded our platform footprint across both restaurant and retail, grew our PAR Intelligence user base to roughly 20,000 sites, greenlit material TAM expansion initiatives in both restaurants and retail sectors, overhauled our cost structure, and strengthened our outlook for the remainder of the year.

Most central to the PAR thesis, we continue to prove the value and staying power of our platform strategy. Our customers are expanding their adoption across our portfolio, creating larger and more strategic partnerships. Our momentum is reflected in our ARR performance, our improving margin profile, and our growing pipeline of enterprise opportunities across both restaurant and retail markets. Let me start with a few highlights.

3% organic growth and setting us up for a meaningful acceleration in the second half. 3 million in Q2, an improvement of nearly $9 million from Q2 last year. 3 million of overperformance in the quarter driven by a specific hardware initiative by a large legacy enterprise restaurant customer. 5 million.

Our profit acceleration was done the right way, by leveraging the fixed scale of our operations while continuing to improve the unit economics of each product. As an example of this, across our core product base, the three-year blended ARPU CAGR sits at 8% while the average platform deal term length is roughly double that of a point solution. These strong Q2 results reinforce our confidence that we can continue balancing growth and profitability while investing in the strategic opportunities in front of us. Looking across the business, we're seeing encouraging momentum in nearly every major product category.

Our restaurant vertical delivered a strong second quarter, securing the pipeline and backlog for the back-half acceleration we spoke about on our last call. What stands out most is the continued success and durability of our platform strategy. Customers select PAR for its integrated solutions rather than purchasing individual products. An integrated product ecosystem is a perfect foundation to be the core restaurant AI partner of the future, as performant AI features require multiple systems working together in real time; a standalone AI wrapper or point solution cannot replicate a feature that bridges point of sale, inventory, labor, and guest data.

PAR's end-to-end fully connected stack is the clear gold standard. Multi-product attachment on Q2 new engagements sits at nearly 100%. Wins included Guthrie's Chicken, Starcoo, Japan Nukes, Burgerville, FIFO, Brady's, and Badass Coffee, all included multiple products across point of sale, loyalty, ordering, payments, and back-office solutions. Operationally, our deployment teams executed at scale.

On the PAR POS side, we remain ahead of plan on Burger King activations and continue to see potential upside beyond our current year-end target. Additionally, we completed key development milestones with Papa John's upcoming platform deployment and are well positioned to kick off their implementation plan later this year. Separately, PAR Ops delivered its strongest quarter ever, activating nearly 700 locations. Looking ahead, we enter the back half of the year with substantial operator product backlog, identifiable expansion opportunities, and a healthy pipeline.

Combined, these factors position us to reach our ARR targets with additional upside if execution continues at the current pace. Now to go over Engagement and Ordering within Punchh. Growth remains solid despite the planned churn we experienced in Q1. The business continues to showcase strong margins, expanding customer utilization, and generating opportunities through site expansion, pricing actions, and new products.

We are highly confident in the long-term value proposition of Punchh, as loyalty programs remain central to guest engagement and personalization strategies. With respect to PAR Ordering, we delivered our best-ever quarter in Q2, closing six new deals. What's especially notable is that three of those wins came from customers migrating off the market's largest legacy ordering provider, reinforcing the competitive strength of our offering. Customers increasingly want fewer vendors, tighter integrations, and a simpler operating environment.

Our single digital cockpit with PAR Ordering is exactly that, allowing you to manage all your digital menus in one place. Every ordering deal this quarter included other PAR products, whether that was point of sale, Punchh, payments, or a combination of all three. A specific highlight this quarter was seeing growing traction from our catering capabilities. Catering was a component of two of our six PAR Ordering wins, and that's particularly meaningful because catering was our largest roadmap investment last year.

We're now beginning to see those investments translate into customer demand and commercial results. It's a great example of how disciplined product investment can create new growth vectors over time, not only increasing ARPU but separately enhancing overall product competitiveness. The relative competitive availability is evidenced by PAR Ordering delivering win rates above 50%, the highest success rate of any major product in our portfolio. Given the demand environment we're seeing, combined with the fact that payments is attached to every ordering deployment, we feel very confident in our ability to continue to grow this business consistently quarter after quarter.

On the holistic product innovation front, we continue to meaningfully accelerate deployment across the organization. Compared to a year ago, we've increased delivery velocity roughly threefold. Simply put, we're building and shipping product faster than ever before, which allows us to respond more quickly to customer needs and extend our leadership position in the market. Another area where we are seeing progress is AI.

Our strategy has always been to leverage the unique data, workflows, and operational context that already exist across the platform. As customers adopt more of our products, the value of AI capabilities increases because they are trained in a richer and more connected view of restaurant operations. We're beginning to see that play out in the market. We're also preparing for significant expansion regarding PAR Intelligence.

With over 20,000 locations planned to go live in the third quarter, these deployments validate what we're hearing from our customers: they want practical AI that helps operators make faster decisions, improve guest engagement, and drive measurable business outcomes. As previously expressed in our Q1 earnings, we view 2026 as an adoption year for PAR Intelligence, and the focus remains on embedding AI into customer workflows, proving value at scale, and expanding usage across our install base. We're moving from a platform that reports what happened to one that optimizes in real time.

As an example, customer loyalty initiatives can quietly leak money through promo abuse, misconfigured offers, unproven renewals, unclaimed funding, silent customer drop-off, and operators usually find out weeks later, if at all. We're building a system that catches this continuously and delivers a fix, not just the finding. This works because the data already lives in PAR, growing sharper with every order, every loyalty event, and every new site. The operator sets intent and approves the action, protecting margin and growing basket size, visits, and upsells without growing the team.

As adoption grows, we believe 2027 becomes the inflection point where AI contributes more meaningfully to revenue growth through premium capabilities, expanded product attach rates, and deeper customer engagement. The combination of data, scale, and workflow integrations creates a long-term competitive advantage and further strengthens the value proposition of the PAR platform. Now, moving on to retail, this segment also continues to perform exceptionally well. We are particularly encouraged by the scale of opportunities we are pursuing today.

On the platform side, we launched Bola Energy as well as two other enterprise retailers during the quarter. The PAR Intelligence footprint expanded to roughly 17,000 PAR Retail sites in the quarter, surpassing our initial adoption goal and moving us rapidly into optimization ahead of future monetization of PAR Intelligence. On the R&D front, PAR Retail completed a full rollout of agentic AI to all developers. This will improve engineering productivity and accelerate innovation.

Now turning to our newest product, and to PAR Intelligence, Bridge. We're encouraged by the progress we've made since closing the acquisition in late March. What we're seeing is a rapid transition from integration to execution, with early proof that Bridge is not just another product in our portfolio, but an increasingly important part of the data intelligence foundation that will power PAR's long-term AI strategy. 3 million in new committed ARR from two signed customers, including an existing PAR restaurant customer.

Importantly, both customers have signed agreements extending through 2029, demonstrating confidence in the value Bridge delivers and underscoring the long-term opportunity we see ahead. These early results validate both customer demand and how Bridge will become a central component of the true future of future AI monetization. The story is not simply about Bridge itself; it's about the unique data foundation we're building across PAR that enables better insights, stronger customer outcomes, and a differentiated AI platform for restaurants and retailers.

Turning now to PAR's TAM expansion efforts, our business unit leaders are evaluated in part on their ability to place bets that increase our ARPU or bring us into new product categories entirely. I touched upon some of these initiatives already, including PAR Intelligence and Bridge, where we are seeing sizable cross-vertical potential and traction. In addition, on the restaurant side, we are shortly launching both an AI-native kitchen display system as well as an AI-powered audio technology for drive-thru.

On the retail side, we have existing customers engaging us on technology expansion initiatives across their forecourt and backcourt systems as a system orchestrator rather than an integrator. Before handing the call to Brian, I'd like to cover a few summary points. One of the most encouraging developments in the first half of this year has been our ability to improve profitability while continuing to grow. Several operational initiatives are driving that progress.

First, our point of sale business is benefiting from ongoing support efficiency improvements and automation initiatives. Our agents are using intelligent tooling to handle more volume per person while putting the customer first with a focus on speedy resolution. Second, Ordering is beginning to experience the benefits of scale as fixed costs are leveraged across a growing customer base. Here again, intelligent tooling has had a material impact in driving efficiencies.

Third, we are pushing aggressively on AI investments and closely tracking and optimizing the relative spend-to-efficacy ratio. 9 million per year of estimated time savings and workflow optimization across our team in functions including sales support, customer success, product implementation, finance, and engineering. Our focus remains on converting efficiencies to realizable impact, whether direct dollar savings, deployment speed and capacity, or per-product person support coverage. These efforts are contributing to meaningful operational operating leverage and helping create a clear path towards our long-term profitability objectives.

Separately, the breadth of our pipeline and our TAM expansion initiatives gives us confidence in both our near-term outlook and our long-term growth trajectory. With that, I'll turn the call over Bryan Menar, Chief Financial Officer Thank you, Savneet, and good afternoon, everyone. In Q2, we continued to execute to our 2026 operating plan, delivering both total revenue and adjusted EBITDA that exceeded the high end of the guidance we introduced last quarter. We continue to drive organic growth across our products and the verticals we serve, and our disciplined management of OPEX is allowing the incremental margin contribution to flow through to the bottom line.

3 million in Q2, up 158% compared to Q2 prior year. Now to the financial details. Total revenues were 133 million for Q2 2026, an increase of 19% compared to the same period in 2025, inclusive of subscription service revenue growth of 16%.