Grindr Inc. Q1 FY2026 Earnings Call

Good day, everyone. My name is Dannie, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome you to the Grindr First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Tolu Adeofe, Director of Investor Relations. Thank you.

Hello, and welcome to the Grindr Earnings Call for the First Quarter 2026. Today's call will be led by Grindr's CEO, George Arison; and CFO, John North. They will make a few brief remarks, and then we'll open it up for questions. Please note, Grindr released its shareholder letter this afternoon, and this is available on the SEC's website and Grindr's Investor page at investors.grindr.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.

Thanks, Tolu, and hello, everyone. We delivered exceptional results in Q1 2026. Revenue grew 38% year-over-year with a net income margin of 21% and adjusted EBITDA margin of 45%. We have now shown repeatedly that when we improve the product, expand the value users get from Grindr and monetize thoughtfully, the business responds. Given our Q1 performance and what we can see today, we are raising our full year outlook and now expect at least $535 million in revenue and at least $227 million in adjusted EBITDA for 2026. I will focus on a few highlights. And as always, I encourage you to read our shareholder letter, which goes into significantly more details on these topics as well as a number of others. Our focus in 2026 is clear, making Grindr a more useful day-to-day, more personalized and more valuable across a broader range of user needs and intentions. That means continued work in the core app, including Right Now, Maps, Health Center, significant rearchitecture and broader deployment of gAI. We're also driving towards the global rollout of Edge, our new premium tier. Built around our gAI capabilities, Edge is designed for power users who want the most advanced experience current technology can offer. Based on user testing, we expect that Edge will command a significant premium to our current subscription offerings and anticipate that it should be our largest driver of revenue growth in 2027. As our offerings expand, Grindr's position in the market is broadening as well. We are staying true to and strengthening our core use case with Right Now while also becoming a broader and more durable category leader, serving one of the most culturally influential communities in the world across many use cases. That is what the Global Gayborhood in Your Pocket means: moving outward from what is core to Grindr and to gay life, building into a product, brand and platform that play a larger role in the lives of our users. Over time, we aspire to be not just a known brand, but a loved one, with greater cultural relevance, broader utility and the ability to expand into adjacent categories where our relationship with users gives us the unique right to win. Our recent Madonna partnership is a strong example of that strategy in action. It is a major in-app activation ahead of the global release of our new album, Confessions on a Dance Floor II, and exemplifies the content partnerships component of our product and business. It also is reflective of Grindr's position and culture. Our users do not just consume culture, they help shape what breaks and what matters. As we introduce more elevated experiences, Grindr is also becoming a more premium platform, one that's able to attract iconic partners and create new forms of value that strengthens the brand and expands our positioning well beyond that of a narrow-use-case app. We also continue to build our advertising platform as a meaningful driver of long-term growth. A strong free product remains essential to the health of our network. And this year, we are taking steps to improve the free experience meaningfully, including reducing certain ad triggers, expanding rewards-based advertising and rearchitecting the front end of our iOS and Android apps. Activations, reactivations and overall engagement remain strong, and retention is improving, notwithstanding pricing changes. These strong engagement results are clear indicators that the product quality is getting better. While our MAU growth remains strong, in a small number of international markets, we are also seeing MAU headwinds from two types of government actions. First, certain new age-assurance rules lead some adults, including those particularly focused on privacy, to drop out of the account sign-up or login flow prior to even entering the age assurance process. Separately, and far more troubling for our users, we face real pressure in certain countries with repressive policies against members of our community like Malaysia and Indonesia. We estimate that in total, MAU would have grown by an average of 400,000 more in 2026 than the current full year trajectory if we were not facing these two distinct factors. This is not financially material to us for reasons discussed in my letter. We are continuing to strengthen Grindr for the long term on behalf of shareholders, including nominating three new independent directors for election at our annual meeting, and as John will discuss, beginning execution under our expanded share repurchase program. Overall, I could not be happier with our fantastic start to 2026. The team is executing exceptionally well across technology, product, brand and the business more broadly. And I'm very proud of and grateful for their hardcore approach to everything we do. Because of their dedication, we believe Grindr is set up to deliver strong growth this year and next, and we are excited for what lies ahead. With that, I'll turn it over to John to walk through the results in more detail.

Thanks, George, and hello, everyone. Q1 was strong across the board, as George highlighted. Revenue grew 38% to $130 million. Adjusted EBITDA was $58 million or a margin of 45%. The performance was driven by strength in core app revenue, including our pricing changes, but also better conversion and retention as well as ads. App-based revenue grew 33% year-over-year and ad revenue was up 68%. In ads, we have our first big year-long direct ad campaign, which will take our ads revenue up into the mid-to-high teens as a percentage of total revenue for 2026. That's netted against moderation in third-party ad loads that we began implementing in the first quarter in connection with our priorities around user experience and ecosystem health. In 2027, we expect ads as a percentage of total revenue to normalize back to the 15% range that we've historically delivered. Adjusted EBITDA grew 44% to $58 million or a margin of 45%. The strong result is an outcome of both the revenue outperformance and the timing of planned expenses. In our March call, we communicated that we planned higher investments this year in support of our priorities for the business. While these investments began to flow through the P&L in the first quarter, we expect to see that pick up in the second quarter as we execute on planned product and tech development initiatives as well as marketing in support of the brand initiatives George highlighted. Turning now to share repurchase activity. This is detailed in our shareholder letter, but I'll call out that we retired 8.3 million shares of our common stock in the first quarter. Across December and the first quarter, we've deployed approximately $140 million in authorized repurchases. We've used a variety of mechanisms, including prepaid written put options, an accelerated share repurchase, and forward repurchase transactions so that the capital deployed so far will settle over time through the third quarter of this year. We have $350 million remaining in our current buyback authorization. Now for our guidance. We are raising our 2026 outlook to include revenue of at least $535 million and adjusted EBITDA of $227 million, a $10 million increase from our February outlook. The increase in estimated revenue reflects stronger payer conversion, which is continuing into the second quarter and the lift from the brand campaign. Keep in mind that we expect our growth rates will moderate in the second half of this year, in particular, in the fourth quarter as we anniversary the rollout of our pricing increases. A higher adjusted EBITDA outlook reflects the stronger revenue picture and continued strong AI leverage in engineering, offset somewhat by the planned investments we discussed, which are starting to increase in the second quarter. Overall, we are excited about the strength of the business, and we'll manage with discipline as we execute on our plans for the year as we always do. And with that, operator, let's open up the call for questions.

Our first question today comes from Nathan Feather at Morgan Stanley.

Congrats on the strong quarter here. Can you provide a little bit more color on what you're seeing in the testing so far for Edge, both in terms of consumer receptivity to the individual features along with the price receptivity? And then even though it's going to be the major driver for 2027, how should we think about the rollout timing here?

Nathan, good to talk to you. Great question. We have a lot of data on Edge from the testing that we've done. So I'll split that into two things. On the product side, a bunch of the features that are all in Edge have actually been tested for quite some time in 2025. And so we feel really confident about the product experience that we've created and about the features that we've built and that users will like them, and it will be a really great thing for the product overall. Where we are really focused on now is pricing. So we've done one pretty big price test in an English-speaking country, not in the United States and got really good results, which tell us that Edge will be priced at a significant premium to what we offer today, incrementally more. And that gives us a lot of confidence that Edge is a very good home run. And what we're now spending time on is determining whether Edge can be a grand slam with a higher price point. But the key to that is having better clarity around how we want to position it in the product and the marketing that we want to do around it. Edge is not designed as a product for mass consumption. It is built for a small number of power users on Grindr. I think someone's asked me in the past, and I said anywhere between 0.5% to 1 percentage point of our MAU being in Edge after several years, I would view as a really powerful outcome. And so we're now looking at that kind of marketing piece of it and how to position it into the market and how to then price it based on the value that users are getting. The value equation is really the critical thing for us. So we feel really good about where Edge is headed. We are going to put another test into the market later this spring or perhaps in June. And then based on those results, we'll have a better sense on when we want to launch it. For us, the really critical thing is to have it be ready for 2027. That would imply late 2026 or early 2027 launch. But we're doing so well this year and everything is firing in such a strong way that there's no rush to put Edge into the market. We think that getting it right and making sure that it can be as big as it can be and unleashing its full potential is where we would win the best.

Great. That's helpful. And then just one more for me. 1Q revenue growth, really strong, but also kind of tracking well ahead of the full year guidance. John, can you give me a sense of the shape of revenue growth over the course of the year? And then what are the major puts or takes that could lead revenue growth in the back half to be a little bit higher than we're expecting here?

Yes, Nathan, thanks for the question. So I'd break it into a few topical comments to help frame it for you, and we alluded to this in the prepared remarks. We've certainly got a benefit from the pricing increases that we introduced at the end of last year. That was planned and baked into our forecast. I think we have a little bit of upside there in the quarter because we didn't see the typical churn to the degree that we would with pricing increases happening. So there was a little bit of a benefit there. The direct ads business we talked about has that large benefit this year with the campaign with one of our key partners. And that came in a little faster than we expected in the first part of the year. And so there's going to be an impact in the back half of the year as a result. And those are the two big drivers that pushed things ahead for us in the first quarter and led us to be confident enough to raise our outlook for the year. But on the back end of that, it's exactly what you flagged, which is that we're going to see a deceleration in the third and the fourth quarter. Some of that's a function of having a really good fourth quarter last year where we outperformed. So it's a tougher comp. And some of it's the product cadence and how things are going to launch this year, which is exactly what we're expecting. We did also mention that we're investing in the future. So our margin is an important thing to talk about as well. We're expecting that to be impacted through the year because we're bringing on people, and we're investing in products and things that are not revenue generating that are going to set up 2027 and beyond. And so that's all kind of what's in the thinking and happy to dive into that in more detail with you offline if we can be more helpful from a modeling perspective, but we are anticipating a bit of a deceleration in the third and particularly the fourth quarter to get to that implied full year number, which is exactly what we're anticipating. George, maybe can talk a little more about some of the specifics around the product side.

Yes. So if you look at Grindr's history over the last five years, usually a step change in revenue, new revenue has come from something significant that we've launched on the product side because we are a product-driven revenue company. So if you look at, say, 2021, we launched more profiles that led to a big step change in revenue growth. In 2022, we launched Boost mid-year that led to big growth in 2022 and then in 2023. In 2024, we launched weekly pricing for Unlimited that drove growth in revenue. So for our business to continue to grow revenue in a significant way, we need to launch the next big thing in a reasonable time frame. The last big thing we launched was the price change, which was a way for us to monetize the value that we have created for users over the last two to four years. And the results of that have been really strong. Churn is down, reactivations and activations are up, which is not what you'd expect to happen when you raise prices, but I think it speaks to the fact that we have created a ton of value in the product and in our paid tiers and users are recognizing that. So, given that we started the price increases in Q4, then for us to have another step change in revenue growth in Q4 of this year, we would need to launch some big product. That next big product is Edge. And as I spoke earlier, we feel very confident about how well Edge will do, but we might not launch it in Q4. And that would lead to deceleration in Q4 and then acceleration looking into 2027. And that year, obviously, is looking really good from that point of view as well.

Our next question comes from Andrew Boone at Citizens.

I would love to ask about two things, one near term and then maybe one more that's strategic. George, how do we think about Match and Sniffies in the competitive environment now that Sniffies may have a larger balance sheet and funding behind it? And then as we think about your platform evolution here, it's really clear that there's a bigger picture strategic view. Can you bring us more into financial terms for us and talk about the benefit that we should expect in terms of shareholders from the broadening of the platform and what that could mean from a financial lens?

Great. Thanks for the question. So on Sniffies, I'll start with a congratulations. We've gotten to know the Sniffies team over the last couple of years. I've spent time with Blake and his brother and I'm very happy for them. They were looking for liquidity, and I'm very glad that it happened in this way. I'm also a little bit happy for Grindr because this investment really speaks to the work that we've done in getting the public market used to a company like Grindr. If you look at where we are today versus where we were 3.5 years ago, the world has fundamentally changed. And so I think our team has done a fantastic job in letting people understand what Grindr is and how big the opportunity space here is. I don't know if people know, but about a decade ago Match really wanted to buy Grindr. The team was behind it and they got blocked by the Board. So it's notable that we're now past that and there was acceptance of investing in Sniffies. As far as the competition for us, we always pay attention to competition and Grindr had plenty of competition from the day it started. Grindr was not the first digital gay product. Manhunt and Adam4Adam were by far the dominant platforms when Grindr launched. And ever since then, Grindr has had competition. We always pay attention to competition and it matters. But from our perspective, what really matters is us being the product that people go to first in wallet and spend the most amount of time in and are most engaged with. By every metric that we have internally, that has continued to be the case. And in some respects, it is accelerating. In the time period that I've been at Grindr, the amount of time people spend on the app has only increased. So we feel really good about our position in the market and what we need to do going forward. Sniffies is a different product, and it serves a very specific use case. Sniffies entered the market when Craigslist eliminated personals out of concern for sex trafficking and that opened up space for cruising for people who were using Craigslist before. That's the space Sniffies has captured. We have a much broader set of use cases that offer users many different things. We feel we're in a good place. There's room for more than one product. People use more than one product and that's probably okay. We are focused on executing our strategy, and we're speeding up, not slowing down. On your second question on the platform, when I joined Grindr and in the year before I joined when I was learning more about Grindr, the assumption I would hear was the best way for Grindr to make more revenue is to get more people to become payers. And there is logic to that: Grindr was at sub-6% payer penetration and our peers in the straight category are at 15%, maybe even 20%. So it would make sense that you could convert a lot more people to become payers. And we've done a bunch of that; we've gone from sub-6% to 8.5% plus while MAU has grown significantly. If we had stayed static, we'd be over 10% payer penetration today. Ultimately, the free experience on Grindr is critical. That's the reason everyone comes into the product on a regular basis as they become adults. From our view, the better way to monetize going forward is to create value-added experiences at a premium level. Hence, why we're building Edge and other premium experiences inside the product. Creating a more upscale experience for our brand will help a more elevated and premium experience in the product. That will be the primary way we drive revenue growth in '27, '28 and beyond. By the way, none of this is new; it's what we set out to do at Investor Day. We're executing roughly on the timeline we expected.

And George, I'll just hop in. On the longer-term margin question, that's not the primary focus for us. There's a world in which we could continue to turn levers within the business to improve the EBITDA margin, whether it's more payer conversion, getting more productivity out of people, or figuring out direct payments so we don't pay so much in fees to the App Store. There are things that can be done, but that's not the primary focus. Growing the revenue base overall and diversifying the revenue base in different ways is where the focus is, and we're consciously investing and taking a view to the future, both this year and beyond, to continue to create the growth avenues for Grindr, which is more important to us. So I would much rather see an improving growth rate as opposed to an improving margin percentage.

Our next question comes from Andrew Marok at Raymond James.

Maybe first on the age-assurance issue. We've seen some other companies in the digital media ecosystem have variable results with how they are impacted by age restrictions or age checks. So what are some of the key learnings you've seen in the geographies where they've been required so far? And how can they inform future potential implementations to minimize the friction of engagement or sign up based on the particular concerns of the Grindr community? And then maybe second on advertising. Great to hear about the full year campaign. Was there anything in particular that got this company to come on and make a big campaign? Or was it just timing and how the pipeline of those bigger deals might be?

Thanks for the questions. On age-assurance, I always want to start by saying Grindr is an 18-plus product. We don't want anybody under 18 using Grindr, and we are strong proponents of App Store or phone-based age verification, and we've endorsed federal legislation that would mandate that at the national level, and we've supported legislation in California, Texas and Utah that's achieved that as well. That's really important. I'm a dad and I don't want my 6.5-year-olds on Grindr, and I don't want them touching Grindr until they're 18, and that's something we believe in strongly. The approach some countries have taken internationally at mandating age verification at the app level comes with many challenges to the user. It means a user has to validate their age in multiple apps, which increases the risk that their information will be exposed. We have a set of users who are extremely privacy conscious, often people who are still in the closet and very discrete. These adult users simply choose to drop out of the process before they go through the age verification flow. We actually have a pretty good age verification flow. We use facial recognition to determine if you are of age first and only if that technology is unable to determine that you are over 18 do we then put you to a secondary flow where you have to show ID. But even that process alone gets some people to drop off, and these are adults, not under-age users. We think the App Store or device-level verification is a much better approach, and that's what we'll keep advocating for. We'll comply with laws as they happen. It has impacted MAU growth. To be clear, MAU is still growing nicely, but MAU would have grown by a larger amount this year if these rules were not in place in some countries. I would expect more countries will adopt similar rules, though we'll continue advocating for device-level verification. On advertising, to step back a bit: we've had incredible success with that business. We went from roughly a $30 million business in 2022 that was decelerating and didn't have a clear path to grow, to a business that, based on our guidance, will be over $90 million this year. So that's tripling the business in a four-year period, which the team deserves huge congratulations for. At Investor Day, we said advertising would be roughly the same percentage of revenue as in 2022, about 15%. That meant the ad business had to grow faster than the core business, and it has achieved that. I'm proud of the team. Where I've been disappointed is getting the direct ad business, where brands come and work directly with us, hasn't been as successful as I'd like. We hear from brands they want to reach our audience — tastemakers with high disposable income — but they're not always willing to put dollars on Grindr. That's work we must do from the brand perspective, from a technology perspective in the app, and from a data perspective to show advertisers what they get in return. Grindr is a great place to build brand; it's not a direct-response channel because people are in a different mindset on Grindr and not looking to transact. That requires a different pitch for brand advertising. I'm bullish we'll win in the direct advertising business over the long term, but it'll take time. That doesn't mean the ad business can't grow; we expect it to keep growing and to stay around the 15% baseline. There's still a lot of growth in Rewarded Video, which makes the user experience better. With this particular advertiser, we'd been working on them for almost two years, and they had advertised with us during that period. It's the same advertiser that had a big push in Q4 of 2024 when we had a revenue uptick. We have a relationship with them and we're happy they're advertising, but I wouldn't expect something similar to repeat in 2026. Hopefully we can create more opportunities for bigger direct advertising partners in 2028 and beyond.

Our final question today comes from Logan Whalley at TD Cowen.

First, to ask about discrete mode and how you think users will engage with that feature looking forward? Do you expect this opens up a new use case with the app or maybe just changes how people engage with the app? And then, secondly, on your plans for incremental hiring in the middle of the year, where do you expect that headcount effort will be directed within the business?

Great. I'll take the first one, and then John and I can split the second. On discrete mode, discrete is for Right Now specifically. It's not a way to be discrete on the app overall. We already have a way for people to browse the grid without showing up on the grid if that's what they want. This is for Right Now. What we heard from many users in surveys and feedback was that they want to post in Right Now but don't want their posting in Right Now to be connected to their profile on Grindr because many people have friendships on Grindr and for discretion reasons they don't want to tell everyone they know that they're posting in Right Now, which is reasonable. The discrete mode enables that: a person can post on Right Now, receive messages from other people who are in Right Now or interested in Right Now, but will not have that connection to their regular profile visible, so they keep discretion. That's something people wanted. I think it will be a good feature to make Right Now a better product for people who want that. There's a lot we're doing with Right Now that I'm not yet ready to publicly discuss that will further improve the experience. We have a large percentage of brand users who use Right Now multiple times a week. We're happy with that and think we can make it better. Regarding hiring, we've been behind on the number of people we need for some time. I am known to run a lean operation. Grindr has over $2.7 million in revenue per head at the end of last year. We felt we need more people and had an aggressive hiring plan for the year. We're doing well on hiring, but I don't think we'll end up hiring everyone we envisioned, and that's reflected in the EBITDA margin or in the EBITDA raise we gave for the year. One reason we won't hire everyone is because how we work is fundamentally changing. We've said our engineers report being 1.5x more productive than they were nine months ago. Small product teams of four are producing as much work in a week as teams of 10 or 20 previously produced in a month. That's driven by AI. The roles of engineer, product manager, designer, and data scientist are collapsing in that they're now doing many parts of that work: a designer can code and function as a product manager or a product manager can code and design. We're transforming this business to be AI-native. It's changing how we work and the productivity of teams. As a result, given how lean we are, we don't have the same headcount problems many other companies have. We still need more people but will be judicious in who we bring on board because we want them to be AI-native to fit the new mode of working.

I would just add the 39% to 42% EBITDA margin is healthy. As we discussed earlier, even as the CFO, if you told me I could grow revenue or grow margin, I would choose revenue right now. Margin optimization isn't the most important thing. The plan we had contemplated hiring and investing in the future and that it would impact margin, which it did. But given how the plan has evolved and improved productivity, we've been able to increase margin. We're also investing in other places, including marketing. You see us doing culturally relevant events like the White House Correspondents' Dinner or partnering with Madonna on our album launch. Those are marketing investments that improve our cultural relevance and what we bring to the community. We've been testing these things, and as we achieve success we have more confidence to invest more in marketing because it's working. There is a case to optimize for margin all the time, but that doesn't give us the trajectory to execute the vision George has laid out to round out the app and expand the number of modalities to reach revenue and users.

That concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.