PubMatic reported second quarter revenue of $78.6 million on August 6, 2026, beating its own guidance ceiling by $8.6 million and ending a three-quarter run of year-over-year revenue declines. The same afternoon, the company disclosed that Chief Financial Officer Steve Pantelick intends to retire after fifteen years.

The two announcements arrived nine minutes apart on the Business Wire feed, at 4:05 p.m. and 4:08 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Together they close a chapter that has defined the Redwood City supply-side platform since mid-2025: a period in which the company's product messaging ran conspicuously ahead of its reported numbers, and in which a single large demand-side platform's changed buying behaviour dragged the top line backwards for three consecutive quarters.

Revenue of $78,593,000 for the three months ended June 30, 2026 compares with $71,095,000 in the same quarter of 2025, an increase of $7.5 million or 11%, according to the company's Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on August 6, 2026. The result landed well outside the $68 million to $70 million range the company had guided to in May, and above the $69.03 million analyst consensus cited in the Investing.com transcript of the earnings call.

Shares reacted accordingly. The stock closed the regular session at $13.43, down 0.59% on the day, then rose to $16.23 in after-hours trading, a gain of 20.4% that carried it past its 52-week high of $14.04, according to the transcript.

What the quarter actually delivered

The headline figures were unusually clean for a company that has spent eighteen months explaining adjusted metrics.

Gross profit reached $52.7 million, up 19% from $44.5 million, a rate of expansion nearly double the revenue growth rate. Gross margin rose to 67% from 63%, a gain of 400 basis points. Cost of revenue actually fell, to $25.9 million from $26.6 million, driven by a $1.7 million reduction in depreciation and amortisation and a $0.2 million decrease in professional services, partially offset by a $1.4 million increase in data centre costs.

Adjusted EBITDA came in at $19.6 million, a 38% increase over $14.2 million a year earlier, at a 25% margin against 20%. Pantelick described it on the call as the company's 41st consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA, a streak the separate retirement release dates to 2016, more than four years before the initial public offering.

Net cash provided by operating activities was $20.2 million, up 36% from $14.9 million. Free cash flow, defined by the company as operating cash flow less purchases of property and equipment and capitalised software development costs, reached $13.7 million against $9.3 million, a 47% increase.

Non-GAAP net income was $5.9 million, or $0.12 per diluted share, compared with $2.5 million and $0.05 a year earlier. The non-GAAP figure adds back $8.3 million of stock-based compensation and $0.6 million of litigation-related expenses, then subtracts a $1.9 million income tax adjustment.

"We delivered a remarkable quarter, exceeding our guidance on revenue and adjusted EBITDA. We returned to double-digit year-over-year revenue growth ahead of schedule: revenue grew 11%, adjusted EBITDA increased 38% and free cash flow increased 47%," said Pantelick in the results release.

The tax line that erased the operating profit

One number in the statement of operations deserves more attention than the press release gives it.

PubMatic generated operating income of $579,000 in the quarter, its first positive quarterly operating result since before the DSP disruption began. Adding $1.2 million of interest income and $89,000 of net other income produced income before income taxes of $1,881,000.

The provision for income taxes was $3,083,000.

That produced a GAAP net loss of $1,202,000, or $(0.03) per diluted share. The 10-Q states the effective tax rate for the quarter was 164%, against a federal statutory rate of 21%, and attributes the gap to tax expense from non-deductible stock-based compensation and the Section 162(m) limitation on the deductibility of officers' compensation, partially offset by research tax credits and deductions for equity awards.

In other words, the company was profitable before tax and unprofitable after it, entirely because of how equity compensation and executive pay are treated. A year earlier, the same line ran the other way: a $862,000 tax benefit against a $6.1 million pre-tax loss. The swing between the two quarters in the tax line alone was $3.9 million, or a negative 458% change.

For the six months, the picture is less flattering. Revenue of $141.2 million is up 5% on $134.9 million. Operating loss was $14.7 million, net loss $13.7 million, and adjusted EBITDA of $22.2 million was actually below the $22.7 million recorded in the first half of 2025. The second quarter carried the half.

Where the growth came from

The channel disclosures are where the structural story sits, and they are more granular this quarter than in most.

Connected TV revenue grew 13% globally and represented approximately 20% of total revenue, or roughly $15.7 million. The regional split matters: the Americas grew 25% year over year, meaning CTV outside the Americas grew at a materially slower rate, or contracted. Pantelick attributed Americas strength to new CTV advertisers and expansion of premium inventory including live sports. The company says it partners with 28 of the top 30 global streaming companies.

Mobile app revenue grew more than 40% and accounted for approximately 25% of total revenue, around $19.6 million. Pantelick credited mediation platform integrations flagged in the prior quarter, product work, and expansion of the global app publisher base. On the call he described this as running ahead of internal expectations.

Emerging revenues, the line that contains Activate, Commerce Media, Connect and AI solutions including AgenticOS, grew approximately 100% year over year and reached approximately 15% of total revenue, an all-time high. At 15% of $78.6 million that is roughly $11.8 million, against approximately $8.8 million and 14% of revenue in the first quarter, when the same line grew more than 80%.

Total display revenue grew 12%, which Pantelick attributed primarily to mobile app rather than open web.

Taken together, CTV, mobile app and emerging revenues represented approximately 60% of total revenue and grew nearly 40% as a group. Both executives framed this as roughly double the share those categories held three years ago.

Geography and the quiet EMEA number

The Form 10-Q disaggregates revenue by the publisher's billing address, and the regional pattern is not uniform.

United States revenue was $41.6 million against $39.4 million, up 5.6%. EMEA reached $25.0 million against $24.0 million, up 4.0%. Asia-Pacific was the outlier: $10.3 million against $6.3 million, an increase of 65%. Rest of world contributed $1.7 million.

APAC now accounts for 13.1% of quarterly revenue, up from 8.8% a year earlier. That regional shift is not mentioned in the press release, the fact sheet, the prepared remarks or the earnings presentation. It is visible only in Note 12 of the quarterly report. For a company whose two largest regions grew in the mid single digits, APAC supplied roughly $4.1 million of the $7.5 million total increase, or 55% of the growth.

The six-month figures make the point sharper still. United States revenue for the half was $75.0 million against $77.5 million, a decline of 3.2%. The first half growth story is entirely EMEA and APAC.

Verticals and the buyer mix

The top ten advertising verticals grew 15% in aggregate. Five of the ten grew at double-digit percentage rates, led by shopping, health and fitness, and personal finance. Food and drink, arts and entertainment, and travel were softer.

Asked about prediction markets by James Heaney of Jefferies, Pantelick placed the category inside the mid-market DSP cohort rather than breaking it out, and Goel added that prediction market advertisers had bought heavily around the World Cup on the live sports inventory. Neither quantified it.

Spend from mid-market focused demand-side platforms grew over 25% year over year and accelerated against the first quarter. Supply path optimisation represented over 55% of total activity on the platform, unchanged as a proportion from the first quarter of 2025 despite six years of investment in the category. Direct buying through Activate more than doubled year over year.

The company also disclosed that it generated several million dollars of incremental revenue across channels from the World Cup, Amazon Prime Day and political advertising, without separating the three.

The DSP that stopped mattering

Eric Martinuzzi of Lake Street asked directly about the large demand-side platform whose changed buying behaviour had suppressed reported revenue for a year. Barton Crockett of Rosenblatt returned to it later, asking whether the drag was finished.

"Yeah, that is now, Barton, fully behind us," Pantelick said.

Goel characterised the relationship as intact. "The relationship with the DSP remains positive and healthy. We continue to do significant business together, but as Steve pointed out, our DSP base has diversified significantly," he said, arguing that demand-side growth is now dispersing into vertical specialists, mid-market and SMB buyers, performance CTV and performance mobile app rather than concentrating.

The accounts receivable concentration data in the 10-Q complicates that picture. As of June 30, 2026, three buyers accounted for 29%, 15% and 15% of accounts receivable, a combined 59%. As of December 31, 2025, the same three positions were 24%, 16% and 14%, a combined 54%. Buyer concentration on the balance sheet increased over the six months, even as management described diversification. No single publisher represented more than 10% of revenue in either period.

The other retention metric moved down. The 10-Q reports a net dollar-based retention rate of 98% for the trailing twelve months ended June 30, 2026, against 102% for the equivalent period a year earlier. A figure below 100 means the cohort of publishers present in the prior year generated less revenue in the current year, before any contribution from new publishers. The company calculates this measure annually and it appears in no other document in the earnings package.

Impressions, compute and the deliberate shrink

The most technically interesting operational disclosure concerns impression volume, and it points in two directions at once.

PubMatic processed nearly 92 trillion impressions in the quarter, an increase of 18% over the second quarter of 2025. In June 2026 the platform handled approximately 1.0 trillion ad impressions daily, each auction resolved in a fraction of a second. Each impression carries 764 independent data parameters, according to the quarterly report, and the company coordinates over a hundred billion real-time auctions and nearly a trillion bids globally per day.

Against that annual expansion, the sequential movement went the other way by design. Gross impressions processed fell 2% quarter over quarter while monetised impressions rose 4%.

Pantelick framed the reduction as intentional. The company is reallocating compute and processing resources toward products that generate the greatest economic value, reducing the number of gross impressions processed to unlock cost savings and repurpose compute capability. Management expects the monetisation rate to keep rising in future quarters.

That reallocation has a visible financial signature. The press release states that cost of revenue per million impressions processed decreased 20% on a trailing twelve-month basis. The 10-Q states the same metric decreased approximately 18% for the three months ended June 30, 2026 against the prior-year quarter. The two figures cover different periods and are not contradictory, but the release does not label the trailing measure as distinct from the quarterly one, and a reader comparing across documents will find two numbers for what appears to be the same efficiency claim.

The deliberate reduction in gross impressions also sits against the Excess Inventory Fee enforcement notices publishers began receiving in early June 2026, which charged publishers for sending volumes of inventory the platform declined to monetise. Neither the release nor the call connects the two, but they describe the same underlying economics: the platform is narrowing what it will accept and process.

Headcount fell while sales headcount rose

Total headcount declined year over year in the quarter. Pantelick attributed the reduction to AI and automation increasing efficiency across engineering, marketing, customer success and finance, and said the savings funded expansion where the company wanted it.

"In the quarter, on a year-over-year basis, we were able to increase our investment and headcount in these go-to-market areas that Rajeev just described by 12%, while our total headcount was slightly down," he said in response to a question from Simran Biswal of RBC.

Total operating expenses grew 4%, to $52.1 million from $49.9 million, against 11% revenue growth. The composition shifted. Technology and development was essentially flat at $9.1 million. Sales and marketing rose 4% to $26.1 million, driven by a $0.8 million increase in personnel costs. General and administrative rose 8% to $16.9 million, primarily on a $0.7 million increase in business taxes and $0.3 million in personnel.

Stock-based compensation fell to $8.3 million from $9.8 million, a 15% reduction, with the largest declines in sales and marketing and in technology and development.

AgenticOS: the adoption numbers and what they omit

The product narrative that has dominated PubMatic's communications since January now carries larger numbers attached to it.

Since AgenticOS launched on January 5, 2026, the company reports delivering more than 80 fully autonomous, end-to-end campaigns globally, up from more than 30 a quarter earlier, now including all five global agency holding companies. More than 4,000 AI-powered deals have been transacted to date, up from just over 1,000 at the first-quarter report. The platform includes more than 20 agents for media buyers and publishers.

"Since launching AgenticOS in January, we've delivered over 80 agentic campaigns, including with all five global agency holding companies. This is up from 30 campaigns just a quarter ago," Goel said.

Both the campaign count and the deal count are cumulative since launch, not quarterly run rates, and the company does not disclose a quarterly figure for either. Against a platform processing 92 trillion impressions in the quarter, 4,000 deals remains an adoption indicator rather than a scale metric. The campaign counts also match, to the number, the figures PubMatic published one day earlier alongside its agentic guardrail architecture, which reported the same more-than-80 and more-than-4,000 totals.

Because emerging revenues are reported as a single line combining AgenticOS with Activate, Commerce Media and Connect, the revenue attributable to agentic products specifically cannot be isolated from products that predate them. Asked by Barton Crockett how much of the business now runs through Activate and how much arrives without a DSP on the other side, Pantelick declined to break it out.

"We're not currently planning on breaking them out specifically until they get to a certain size. Clearly, as a category, emerging revenues at 15% of total revenues is becoming more and more material," he said. He also restated the company's estimate of its global market share at about 4%.

Asked by Naved Khan of B. Riley whether AgenticOS is charged as a feature or monetised through lift, Pantelick described a two-step model: AgenticOS opens new business and new channels, and Activate, the direct buying interface, generates a buying fee when a transaction occurs. The economic argument is that the advertising dollar then sits entirely inside PubMatic's environment.

Rob Coolbrith asked how quickly agentic execution might take share of programmatic budgets. Goel invoked the diffusion-of-innovations framework and placed the market firmly at the front of the curve.

"We're definitely still in the phase of the early adopters. What I think is very promising is that all of the clients that we've run agentic campaigns or execution with, they've all come back for much more, right? It's working," he said.

He then restated a public forecast. "I've said publicly that I think by the end of 2028, about 25% of our ecosystem will be traded agentically, and by the end of 2030 it'll be 50%," Goel said.

That projection sits well above the industry sizing offered three weeks earlier by Magnite chief executive Michael Barrett, who capped 2027 agentic spend forecasts near $700 million industry-wide. The two figures are not directly comparable, since Goel is describing a share of PubMatic's own ecosystem and Barrett a dollar total across the market, but the difference in confidence is the point of disagreement between the two largest independent sell-side platforms.

Buyer-side proof points

The company put forward three named performance comparisons.

Level Agency ran a controlled test of AgenticOS against its incumbent DSP. The company reports that AgenticOS delivered in excess of two times more reach per dollar on qualified audiences, accelerated campaign setup and activation, and delivered retargeting at scale within days against the one-to-two-month ramp typically required by DSP-led campaigns. The earnings presentation puts the same test at a 53% higher video completion rate and a 54% more efficient CPM against the incumbent. Level subsequently increased ad spend with PubMatic.

"What AgenticOS delivered changed how we're thinking about where the open internet can compete for client budgets, and that's exactly the kind of adaptive advantage and innovation we're always looking for," said Patrick Van Gorder, Chief Partnership Officer at Level Agency, in remarks quoted by Goel.

Programmatic trading desk Klever, working for direct-to-consumer wellness brand Rouge Care Therapy, used AgenticOS to expand from social channels into premium CTV and delivered a 5x return on ad spend, double the client's original objective.

Smadex, a performance CTV platform for apps and games and a business unit of Entravision, increased spend on PubMatic more than tenfold year over year, with 75% of the incremental spend flowing into CTV.

Havas Media and Telefónica launched what the company describes as Spain's first fully agentic CTV campaign, achieving an 18% lower CPM than target while exceeding impression goals by 23%.

Two further campaign claims appear only in the fact sheet: ThinkResult recorded 90% faster campaign setup in a first agentic campaign across India, and Amnet delivered a 25.7% uplift in video completion in France's first agentic campaign.

None of these figures carries a stated denominator, sample size, or methodology. They are vendor-reported case study outcomes rather than measured platform averages, and the fact sheet and the earnings presentation attach different efficiency percentages to the same Level Agency test depending on which metric is being cited.

Decision Fabric, creators and live sports

Three product lines introduced during or shortly before the quarter carry the company's expansion argument.

Decision Fabric, introduced on June 1, 2026, allows advertisers, DSPs and technology partners to deploy proprietary models directly inside PubMatic's infrastructure, an architecture the company describes using the term containerisation. Running partner models closer to inventory, data and the point of auction removes traffic shaping and latency constraints. Launch partners named in the release are MiQ, Chalice AI, SWYM.ai and InPowered.

Goel positioned it as a structural rather than incremental capability. "Decision Fabric is our containerization solution, and it allows curators and DSPs to run their models directly in our infrastructure," he said, describing an arrangement that gives buyers more time to reach a bidding decision, permits a more complicated model, and hosts the whole process on PubMatic hardware. He added that the capability remains early.

He tied it to a thesis about where competitive advantage in programmatic buying now sits. "I think the competitive advantage of the past that was built around the software user interface and the lock-in that that created with buyers, that's very rapidly eroding," Goel said.

The Creator Marketplace, launched June 18, 2026, extends the same infrastructure to creator-led media companies. Goel cited creator-led video at 26% of all TV and video viewing and put the global creator economy at approximately $250 billion, describing the category as an entirely new class of publisher rather than a new format.

Activity on the Live Sports Marketplace, which launched in July 2025, more than doubled year over year. A partnership with Gracenote brings real-time content intelligence, including contextual signals and live sports schedules, directly into the platform at the point of auction. Goel named the US Open, NFL, NBA, MLB and NCAA as events moving further into programmatic distribution. The company was recognised with The Drum's Technology Innovation Award for live sports buying.

Supply additions

Two premium supply relationships were named. PubMatic added Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, a broadcaster that opened its video-on-demand inventory to five demand-side platforms on June 22, 2026, with PubMatic among them. It also announced a strategic partnership with Sony Pictures Entertainment as preferred sell-side platform, giving access to what the company describes as hundreds of millions of monthly users across PlayStation and Sony Bravia televisions.

Asked by James Heaney about Roku following its acquisition of Fox, Goel used the relationship to argue a broader shift. "Roku is a great example of that, where we monetize a significant portion of their inventory, and we'll expect that to expand and continue with Fox," he said, framing formerly closed platforms as increasingly willing to monetise through open infrastructure.

The company reports serving approximately 2,000 publishers and app developers worldwide, against approximately 1,960 a year earlier, an increase of roughly 2%. The premium supply base now spans more than 100,000 streamers, mobile apps and websites. Intelligence is drawn from more than 300 data partners, named in the prepared remarks as including Comscore, Nielsen, Experian, TransUnion, PayPal, Intuit, Klarna and Walmart, combined with proprietary bidstream data.

Guidance, capital expenditure and the NVIDIA line

Third-quarter guidance calls for revenue of $75 million to $77 million, described by Pantelick as 12% growth at the midpoint, and adjusted EBITDA of $17.0 million to $19.0 million. The EBITDA range assumes a negative foreign currency impact predominantly from the euro and pound sterling.

The midpoint of $76 million is below the $78.6 million just reported. On a year-over-year basis the guidance implies continued double-digit growth; sequentially it implies a decline of roughly 3%, consistent with a third quarter that lacks the World Cup and Prime Day contributions that lifted the second.

Cost of revenue and operating expenses are expected to rise by a low single-digit percentage sequentially in the third quarter. For the fourth quarter, management expects an adjusted EBITDA margin similar to the fourth quarter of 2025, which it says produces meaningful full-year margin expansion.

Capital expenditure guidance for the full year was raised to a range of $20 million to $25 million. Pantelick tied the increase to GPU-centric infrastructure, increased AI workloads and what he described as strategic innovation with NVIDIA, and said the company expects those investments to generate incremental revenue with a payback of approximately 12 months or less.

Political advertising is expected to build through the balance of the year. "We don't think it's going to be as large as it was in the 2024 presidential cycle, but we are very optimistic about us getting, I would say, probably more than our fair share based upon all the capabilities that we built," Pantelick said, indicating a back-end-loaded contribution weighted mostly to the fourth quarter.

Momentum into the new quarter was described in general terms only. "Overall, we haven't seen any material softness. I shared that the July was fairly healthy in terms of momentum," Pantelick said.

The Google case is not in the numbers

One forward-looking item was explicitly excluded from all guidance.

"None of our expectations or guides assumes any resolution of the DOJ case against Google. All of that would be upside to our market share background," Pantelick said in response to Crockett.

PubMatic filed its own civil action against Google LLC in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on September 8, 2025, seeking injunctive relief and damages for monopolistic and anticompetitive behaviour in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for open-web display advertising. The 10-Q states the proceedings are in their early stages and that the company is unable to predict the ultimate outcome.

The $594,000 of litigation-related expenses added back to adjusted EBITDA in the quarter, and $1,032,000 across the six months, represent external legal fees net of insurance recoveries associated with pending litigation arising outside the ordinary course of business. There were no such expenses in either 2025 comparison period. The company describes the matter as discrete and not representative of underlying operating performance.

The Southern District of New York granted partial summary judgment on October 27, 2025, ruling that findings from the Eastern District of Virginia establishing Google's monopolisation would bind Google in private litigation, allowing follow-on plaintiffs to proceed toward damages without reproving liability.

Cash, buybacks and the balance sheet

PubMatic ended the quarter with $137.5 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities, and no debt. Net working capital was $115.7 million. Total assets were $700.0 million against total liabilities of $461.3 million.

During the quarter the company used $21.5 million to repurchase 2.1 million Class A common shares, equal to 4.2% of fully diluted shares as of June 30, 2026. Across the six months it repurchased 3,118,823 shares for $30.3 million.

Since the repurchase programme was authorised in February 2023, PubMatic has bought back 15.5 million Class A shares for $211.4 million. As of June 30, 2026, $63.6 million remained available under the programme, which is authorised through December 31, 2026. The board expanded the authorisation twice, adding $100.0 million in February 2024 and a further $100 million in May 2025 on top of the $175 million originally approved.

Cumulative cash generation since the start of 2021 through the second quarter of 2026 stands at nearly $450 million in net cash from operations and more than $246 million in free cash flow.

Investing activity shifted markedly. Net cash used in investing was $34.1 million for the six months against $0.1 million a year earlier, comprising $3.5 million of non-marketable equity investment purchases, $10.2 million of capitalised internal-use software, and $17.4 million of net marketable securities purchases. Cash and cash equivalents fell to $120.0 million from $145.5 million at year-end, with $17.5 million now sitting in marketable securities that were zero at December 31, 2025.

The CFO transition

The retirement release, issued three minutes after the results, sets out a phased departure rather than an exit.

Pantelick will continue as Chief Financial Officer into the first quarter of 2027, then serve as a senior adviser through July 1, 2027. The company has initiated a search for his successor. The Form 8-K filed the same day states that the terms of his compensation arrangements in connection with the transition have not yet been finalised and will be disclosed in a future filing once agreed. The 10-Q records the announcement as a subsequent event in Note 14.

Pantelick joined in 2011, recruited by Goel when PubMatic was a small private company. Under his tenure the company completed its 2020 initial public offering, roughly doubled revenue, generated approximately $450 million in operating cash flow, returned nearly half of that through more than $211 million of share repurchases, and maintained a debt-free balance sheet.

"Today, I believe PubMatic is in the strongest position I have seen in my fifteen years here, which is what makes this the right time to begin planning my retirement," Pantelick said in the release.

Goel's statement in the same release was personal rather than operational. "Steve has been my partner in building PubMatic for fifteen years," he said. "I've relied on his judgment through every major decision, and the trust he has earned, inside PubMatic and with our investors, is one of the company's great assets."

On the call, Pantelick closed his prepared remarks with a note that departed from the financial script. "As Rajiv mentioned, I plan to retire early next year. It wasn't an easy decision," he said, describing a global public company with revenue nearly doubled since the IPO, zero debt, and 41 consecutive quarters of positive adjusted EBITDA.

Four analysts opened their questions with congratulations before turning to the numbers, an unusual pattern for a quarterly call.

The transition is not the only leadership change. Megan Ramm joins as Global Chief Revenue Officer on Monday, August 10, 2026, filling a role the company had been searching for since announcing a global CRO search alongside its preliminary first-quarter figures on April 22, 2026. Goel described her background as direct-to-brand and performance advertising, with established relationships across large brands.

The pairing is notable in timing. Magnite's CFO David Day announced his own planned retirement on May 6, 2026, effective September 30, 2026. Both of the largest independent sell-side platforms are changing finance leadership within roughly a year of each other.

Competitive context

The results landed one day after Magnite reported second-quarter revenue of $192.8 million, up 11%, with contribution ex-TAC of $189.6 million up 17% and CTV contribution ex-TAC of $97.1 million up 36%. Magnite posted net income of $19.4 million and adjusted EBITDA of $70.6 million at a 37% margin, and raised full-year contribution ex-TAC growth guidance to 13% to 14%.

On a reported revenue basis Magnite remains roughly 2.5 times larger. Both companies grew 11% in the quarter. Magnite converted that growth into GAAP net income; PubMatic did not, for the tax reasons described above.

The comparison has narrowed since PPC Land's analysis of the two companies' first-quarter results, when PubMatic revenue was falling and Magnite was growing. That analysis argued the AI narrative was running ahead of the financial evidence. The second quarter is the first period in which the reported numbers move in the same direction as the messaging.

Crockett put the demand-side comparison to management directly, noting that The Trade Desk's revenues had flattened in the same period while PubMatic's accelerated, and asking whether a structural shift between DSPs and SSPs was underway.

Goel argued that it was, citing the movement of decisioning into the sell-side platform, the compression of the transaction between publisher and advertiser, and Decision Fabric as a second front. "Now with AI, with Decision Fabric, the UI, the value, or the lock-in from that UI layer is now eroding. Instead, I think advertisers and publishers are saying, 'Well, hey, where's the greatest performance? What's going to generate the most ROI and the most yield?'" he said.

The Trade Desk reported full-year 2025 revenue of $2.896 billion with growth decelerating to 18% from 26%, and guided second-quarter 2026 revenue to at least $750 million, implying roughly 8% growth.

Why this matters for media buyers and publishers

Several disclosures in this package have practical consequences beyond the share price.

The impression narrowing is a supply-side policy change with buyer-side effects. A platform that deliberately processes fewer gross impressions while monetising more of them is applying a value filter before the auction. For publishers, that means inventory the platform judges unlikely to monetise may not be processed at all, an economics already visible in the Excess Inventory Fee. For buyers, it means the addressable pool inside PubMatic is being curated upstream of the bid request rather than at the bid.

Containerised decisioning changes where buying logic runs. Decision Fabric moves partner models inside the exchange, alongside comparable moves elsewhere in the market. If bidding logic migrates from DSP infrastructure to SSP infrastructure, the fee structure and the data access rights attached to that logic move with it. That is a supply chain question before it is an AI question, and it belongs in supply path reviews rather than innovation roadmaps.

Cumulative adoption metrics are not run rates. Buyers evaluating agentic claims across vendors will encounter campaign counts and deal counts presented without a denominator or a time base. PubMatic's 80 campaigns and 4,000 deals are since-launch totals across a seven-month period. Comparable figures from other platforms may be quarterly. The two cannot be read against each other.

The 98% net dollar-based retention rate sits underneath the growth headline. Existing publishers on the platform generated slightly less revenue than a year earlier. The revenue increase came from new publishers, new buyers and channel mix. For publishers assessing platform commitments, that is a different signal than the 11% headline suggests, and it is disclosed once a year.

Regional performance is uneven. The company-wide 11% growth figure conceals EMEA growth of 4.0% and a 3.2% decline in United States revenue across the first half. APAC supplied the majority of incremental revenue in the quarter, a distribution absent from every document in the earnings package except the quarterly report.

Political spend timing is now explicit. Management expects the political contribution weighted to the fourth quarter and below 2024 presidential-cycle levels. Buyers planning inventory availability and pricing around that period have a stated expectation to work against.

Timeline

Summary

Who: PubMatic, Inc. (Nasdaq: PUBM), the Redwood City-headquartered supply-side advertising platform founded in 2006. Co-founder and Chief Executive Rajeev Goel and Chief Financial Officer Steve Pantelick presented the results. Stacie Clements moderated the call. Analysts asking questions were Shweta Khajuria of Wolfe Research, Rob Coolbrith, Naved Khan of B. Riley, Eric Martinuzzi of Lake Street, James Heaney of Jefferies, Barton Crockett of Rosenblatt, and Simran Biswal of RBC. Patrick Van Gorder, Chief Partnership Officer at Level Agency, was quoted in the company's materials. Megan Ramm joins as Global Chief Revenue Officer.

What: Second-quarter 2026 revenue of $78.6 million, up 11% year over year, against guidance of $68 million to $70 million. Gross profit rose 19% to $52.7 million at a 67% margin. Adjusted EBITDA of $19.6 million rose 38% at a 25% margin, the 41st consecutive positive quarter. Free cash flow of $13.7 million rose 47%. GAAP net loss was $1.2 million, or $(0.03) per diluted share, despite pre-tax income of $1.9 million, because of a $3.1 million tax provision at a 164% effective rate. Non-GAAP net income was $5.9 million, or $0.12 per diluted share. CTV, mobile app and emerging revenues together reached approximately 60% of revenue. Emerging revenues roughly doubled to about 15% of revenue. The company reported more than 80 cumulative autonomous campaigns and more than 4,000 AI-powered deals since the January AgenticOS launch. Separately, Pantelick announced his planned retirement.

When: The quarter covers the three months ended June 30, 2026. Both press releases were issued on August 6, 2026, at 4:05 p.m. and 4:08 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, with the earnings call held at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Time the same day. The Form 8-K and Form 10-Q were filed August 6, 2026. Pantelick continues as CFO into the first quarter of 2027 and as senior adviser through July 1, 2027. Megan Ramm starts August 10, 2026.

Where: PubMatic operates globally with no corporate headquarters designation, listing Redwood City, California in its filings. Revenue by publisher billing address was $41.6 million United States, $25.0 million EMEA, $10.3 million APAC and $1.7 million rest of world. The Google antitrust action sits in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Why: The quarter breaks a three-quarter sequence of year-over-year revenue declines and is the first period in which PubMatic's reported financial performance moves in the same direction as the agentic AI positioning it has pursued since January 2026. For media buyers and publishers, the operational disclosures matter more than the beat: the platform is deliberately processing fewer gross impressions while monetising more of them, moving partner decisioning models inside its own infrastructure through Decision Fabric, and reporting a net dollar-based retention rate of 98%, meaning existing publishers generated marginally less revenue than a year earlier. Third-quarter guidance of $75 million to $77 million implies continued double-digit annual growth alongside a sequential decline, and none of the guidance assumes any resolution of the Google antitrust proceedings.