Grindr Inc. (GRND) Q1 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

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. [Operator Instructions] 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 wants 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, now moving away from what is core to Grindr and to gay life, but building outward from it 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 remains 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 2 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 the 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 2 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 3 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 will -- 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, I guess, 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 2 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 really 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 kind of 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 on such kind of -- 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, I guess, 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, that was baked in our forecast. That was in the numbers we gave you when we introduced this year. 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 -- I would say, 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 2 kind of big drivers that push things ahead for us in the first quarter and led us to be confident enough to raise what our outlook was 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 really just 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. And George, maybe can talk a little bit more about some of the specifics around the product side.

Yes. So if you look at Grind's history over the last 5 years, usually a step change in revenue, kind of new revenue has come from something significant that we've launched on the product side because we are a product-driven kind of 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 middle of the year that led to a big growth in revenue 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 kind of 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 2 to 4 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, 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 2 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 guys 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 powerful 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 really 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. And the team was really behind it and they got blocked by the Board. So it's awesome 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, frankly, it started, right? 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 had competition. And so, we always pay attention to competition and it obviously 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. And by every metric that we have internally, that has continued to be the case. And frankly, in some respects, it is accelerating. Like in the time period that I've been at Grindr, the amount of time that people spend on the app has only increased. And so, we feel really good about our position in the market and what we need to do on a go-forward basis. Sniffies is a different product, and it serves a very specific use case. So Sniffies entered the market when Craigslist eliminated personals out of concern for sex trafficking and that opened up this space for cruising for people who were using Craigslist before and was a very heavily used product. And that's the kind of space that Sniffies has captured. We obviously have a much broader set of use cases that really kind of offer users many different things. And so we feel we're in a really good place in that regard. And again, there's place for more than one product. We know people use more than one product and that's probably okay. So we are focused on executing our strategy, and we're speeding up, not slowing down. That's how I think about it. On your second question on the platform, when I joined Grindr and frankly, for the year before I joined Grindr when I was learning more about Grindr, the assumption I would hear from everybody was the best way for Grindr to make more revenue is to get more people to become payers. And there is logic to that, right? The Grindr was at sub-6% payer penetration and our peers in the straight category are at 15%, maybe even 20%. And so it would make sense that you could convert a lot more people to become payers. But our -- and we've done a bunch of that, right? We've gone from sub-6% to 8.5%-plus and that's with MAU growing pretty significantly. So if we had stayed static, we'd be over 10% payer penetration today. But ultimately, the free experience on Grindr is really, really critical. And that's the reason why everyone comes into the product on a regular basis as they become adults. And so, from our view, the better way to monetize on a go-forward basis is to create value-added experiences for people on a premium level. And hence, why we're building Edge and a bunch of other premium experiences inside the product. So from that perspective, creating a more upscale experience for our brand is something that will help a more elevated and a more premium experience in the product. And that will be the primary way in which we drive revenue growth in '27, '28 and beyond. By the way, none of this is new, like this is what we had set out to do when we talked about it in Investor Day. We're just executing on it at roughly the time line that we had expected we'd be doing.

And George, I'll just hop in. I mean on the longer-term margin question, that's really not the primary focus for us. There's certainly a world in which we could continue to turn levers within the business to improve the EBITDA margin, whether it's more payer conversion, whether it's getting more productivity out of people, whether it's figuring out direct payments, so we don't pay so much in fees to the App Store. There's things that can be done, but that's not been 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 kind of have variable results with how they are impacted by age restrictions or age checks. So I guess what are some of the key learnings that you've seen in the geographies where they've been required so far? And how can they inform future potential implementations to kind of 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. I guess, was there anything in particular that got this company to come on and make a big campaign? Or was it just kind of fortuitous 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 really 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 and Texas and Utah that's achieved that as well. And I think that's really, really important. I'm a dad and I don't want my 6.5-year-olds being on Grindr, and I don't want them touching Grindr until they're 18, and that's something we believe in really, really strongly. The approach that some of the countries have taken internationally at mandating age verification at the app level comes with a lot of challenges to the user. It means that a user has to validate their age in multiple apps, which obviously increases the risk that their information will come out. And we have a set of users -- because something is leaked, et cetera. And we have a set of users who are extremely privacy conscious. Oftentimes, there are people who are still in the closet, who are very, very discrete. And these adult users, and I want to be very clear, we're talking about adults, just 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 people who are under-age. And so we think that the alternatives to that, which is the App Store or mobile device-based verification is a much better approach, and that's what we're going to keep advocating for. But obviously, we'll comply with laws as they happen. It has impacted MAU growth. To be very clear, MAU is still growing very nicely actually, but MAU would have grown by an amount larger than what it's going to grow this year if these rules were not in place in some of the countries. And I would expect more countries will adopt rules that are similar to this. Though again, we're going to continue advocating for App Store or device level verification. On advertising, so maybe to step back a little bit on the ads business overall before I answer the specific question. We've had incredible success with that business. We went from a roughly $30 million business in 2022 that was decelerating and frankly, didn't really have a path to grow to a business that, based on guidance that we've shown you, is going to be over $90 million this year. So that's tripling the business in a 4-year period, which I think the team deserves nothing but huge congratulations for that. And we've said at Investor Day, we want -- advertising is going to be kind of roughly the same percentage of revenue as it was in 2022, which is roughly 15%. That meant that the ad business had to grow faster than the core business. And again, it's achieved that. So I'm very, very proud of what the team has done. At the same time, where I've probably been most disappointed in my time at Grindr is that getting the direct ad business where brands come and work directly with us has not been as successful as, frankly, I would have liked it to be. We hear from brands a ton that they want to reach our type of audience that is tastemaking, that has high disposable income, et cetera, but they're not willing to put dollars to work on Grindr. And that's still work that we have to do from the brand perspective, on our brand. That's the work that we have do from a technology perspective and creating the technology that advertisers want us to have in the application to help them advertise as well as from a data perspective, like what are they actually getting in return. Grindr is a great place to advertise from the point of view of building your brand. It is not a direct response type of a channel because people are in a different mindset when they're on Grindr. They're not actually looking to kind of transact on something else when they're in the app. And so that obviously creates a special way of pitching the brand perspective of it. People are very used to buying direct response ads, but less so for what we offer. I'm still very bullish that over the long term, we will win in that direct advertising business, but I think it's going to take us a really long time. That doesn't mean that the ad business cannot grow. We expect the ad business to keep growing in the years to come and to stay at that 15% of total revenue baseline that we had in 2022 and that we've aimed to maintain. So there's still a ton of growth for the ad business. I think we'll continue to see a ton of positive results from Rewarded Video, which actually makes the user experience in the app better as well. So that's one of the things that we are seeing a lot of traction with. With this particular advertiser, we had been working on them for almost 2 years, and they had been advertising with us during that period of time as well. It's the same advertiser that had a big push in Q4 of 2024, you might remember, when we had a big uptick in revenue as a result of that. So we have a relationship with them. We're really happy that 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 2027 -- sorry, in 2028 and beyond.

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

First, to ask about discrete mode and kind of how you think users will engage with that feature looking forward? Do you expect this kind of 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 efforts will be directed towards within the business?

Great. Well, I'll take the first one, and then maybe John and I can split the second one. So on discrete mode, discrete is for Right Now specifically. So it's not a -- you can -- not to be discrete on the app overall. We already have a way for people to browse the grid without actually showing up on the grid if that's what they want and some people do want that. But this is for Right Now. What we heard from a lot of users who we surveyed or got feedback from was that they want to post in Right Now, but they don't want their posting in Right Now to be connected to their profile on Grindr because a lot of people have friendships on Grindr and for discretion reasons, they don't want to be telling everyone they know, "Hey, I'm posting in Right Now," which is perfectly reasonable. And so the discrete mode has enabled that capability where a person can post on Right Now, will receive messages from other people who are in Right Now or who are interested in Right Now. But you will not be able to see the connection to your regular profile and that way you kind of keep that discretion. So, that's something that people really wanted. I think it's going to be a good feature in making Right Now a better product for people who want that. But there's a ton that we're doing with Right Now that I'm not yet in a position to publicly talk about that I think will keep making that experience better and better for people. We have a very large percentage of branded users that use Right Now on a multi times a week basis. And so we're really happy with that, but we still think there's more that we can do to make it even better. When it comes to hiring, we definitely went into -- we've been behind on the number of people that we need for quite some time, right? I am known to run a very lean operation. Grindr has over $2.7 million in revenue per head at the end of last year. And so we felt that we need more people. And we had a fairly aggressive hiring plan for the year. We are probably -- we're doing very well on hiring, but I don't think we're going to end up hiring everyone that we had envisioned, and that's reflected in the EBITDA margin or in the EBITDA raise that we gave for the year in this release. One of the reasons why we won't probably hire everyone is because how we work is fundamentally changing. We've said in the past that our engineers are self-reporting that they are 1.5x more productive than they were 9 months ago. We now have teams of -- on the product team that are being -- small teams of 4 people are able to produce as much work in a week as teams of 10 or 20 people would have previously produced in the course of a month. And that's all because of AI. The roles of engineer, product manager, designer, data scientists are all kind of collapsing in that now they are all doing all parts of that work, meaning a designer can code and function as a product manager or a product manager can code and also do design. And so we're terraforming this business to be an AI-native business. It's is really changing how we work and the amount of productivity you're getting from the teams. And as a result, we -- given how lean we are, we don't have the same problems that a lot of other companies have. But we do -- and we still need more people in terms of hiring, but we do want to be judicious in how we hire and who we bring on board because we want them to be much more AI native to fit in this new mode of working that we are now evolving inside the company. I don't know, John, if you want to add anything to that.

I would just say the 39% to 42% EBITDA margin is healthy. As we talked about on an earlier question, even as the CFO, if you told me I could grow revenue or I could grow margin, I would choose revenue right now. I think that margin optimization isn't the most important thing. To George's point, the guidance and the plan that we had in place contemplated hiring and investing in the future and that it was going to impact margin as a result, which it did. But also to his point, we've been able to increase that because the plan has changed as we've evolved. And I do also echo the sentiment that we're investing in the business in other places, which would include like investing in marketing efforts and spending more money there. And you see us doing more, I think, culturally-relevant events like the White House Correspondents' Dinne or partnering with Madonna on our album launch. And those are things we're doing that are marketing investments outside of attracting users to the app. They're really about improving our cultural relevance and what we bring to the community and to the user base overall. And we've been working our way through that, testing those things. And then I think as we've achieved success, in some of these events and these touch points that become these cultural flashes, we have more confidence to invest some more money in marketing because it's working. And so those are the kind of things we're thinking about and balancing. And certainly, there's a case to be made to just optimize for margin all the time, but that really doesn't give us the trajectory to execute on the vision that George has laid out to really continue to round out the app in many different ways and to expand the number of modalities in which we can reach revenue and reach users.

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