ServiceTitan, Inc. (TTAN) Q2 2027 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to ServiceTitan's Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2027 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the call over to Jason Rechel, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and welcome, everyone, to ServiceTitan's Fiscal Second Quarter 2027 Earnings Conference Call. With me are ServiceTitan's Co-Founder and CEO, Ara Mahdessian; Co-Founder and President, Vahe Kuzoyan; and CFO, Dave Sherry. During today's call, we'll review our fiscal second quarter 2027 results. We will also discuss our guidance for the third fiscal quarter and full fiscal year 2027. Before we get started, we want to draw your attention to the safe harbor statement included in today's press release and emphasize that information discussed on this call, including our guidance, is based on information as of today only and contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact could be deemed to be forward-looking. Forward-looking statements reflect our views as of today only, and except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update or revise these forward-looking statements. Please take a look at our filings with the SEC for a discussion of the factors that could cause our results to differ. We also want to point out that we present non-GAAP measures in addition to and not as a substitute for financial measures prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. Definitions of these non-GAAP financial measures, along with reconciliations to our GAAP financial measures are included in our earnings release, which we furnished with the SEC and is available on our website at investors.servicetitan.com. Unless otherwise stated, all references on this call to platform gross margin, total gross margin, operating income, operating margin, free cash flow and related growth rates are on a non-GAAP basis. Finally, we've posted an updated investor presentation that can be found on the Investor Relations website at investors.servicetitan.com, along with a replay of this call. And with that, let me turn the call over to Ara. Ara?

Thank you, Jason, and thank you for joining us. I'm excited to share that our strong momentum delivering the Agentic operating system for the trades resulted in 21% year-over-year revenue growth and record free cash flow this quarter. Over the course of the year, it has become increasingly obvious that delivering this Agentic operating system to our customers and leveraging AI to further enhance our own organizational velocity are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to execute against. As a result, we've broadened the scope of our investments in both Max and the software factory in absolute dollars and also relative to our expectations at the beginning of the year. We now believe that focusing on our existing trades and accelerating our shift towards Max will allow us to unlock the full potential of our business in the years ahead. Vahe will share more about our Max execution. Dave will discuss the financial implications of this mix shift, and I'm excited to lead with the outcomes that our customers are realizing with Max today. Our vision since founding ServiceTitan has been to transform the lives of hard-working contractors by helping them grow revenue and increase margins. From day 1, we imagined the world where technicians focused on serving customers in the field, leaders focused on business outcomes and ServiceTitan increasingly handle the operational complexity in between. The outcomes our customers are now seeing with Max and our organizational readiness to lean into this success gives me even more clarity into our forward trajectory. As many of you know, we introduced Max as a pilot program at Pantheon last September, where Stacy Anapol was sitting in the audience. Stacy, the Co-owner and President of Delponte Plumbing & Heating, saw immediate potential in Max. She saw an operating system with a singular company brain connected to every piece of context in her business and armed with the ability to take action on key workflows in our operation, one that could automate and optimize our business generated demand, booked appointments, sold work, managed payroll and inventory and more, allowing her team to handle far more volume with the same headcount. Delponte has been in business for nearly 50 years and first implemented ServiceTitan in 2023 when Stacy took over as President. The initial goal was straightforward to build a better company for their customers, their employees and the future of the business. I'm glad to share that Delponte's results have been extraordinary so far. Stacy's revenue grew more than 35% year-over-year during Q1 2026 and more than 45% year-over-year in the second quarter of 2026, accelerating as the quarter went on. With Max, Delponte generated more calls, booked more appointments and closed more sales with higher average tickets. But what impressed me most wasn't the revenue growth. It was what the operating model allowed them to do next. Delponte launched a new vertical entirely around recurring service. In just 3 months, they've already served 400 customers, all without adding a single back-office employee. Delponte's technician to admin ratio improved from 2:1 in 2025 to 3:1 in 2026, materially improving profitability. Whereas technicians often work long hours during peak season to serve every customer and the office is typically overextended, technicians averaged only 45 hours per week and office morale has never been stronger. As I said last quarter, the power that Max unlocks means work that used to require a group of people manually coordinating an operation is now orchestrated by the system itself with humans and AI agents working together, each doing what they do best. Delponte is proving something we believe from the beginning. When routine coordination is handled automatically, leaders spend less time coordinating work and more time coaching people, serving customers and growing the business. We see this as just the beginning and are excited to announce the next big wave of innovation at Pantheon in October. We are focused on leveraging the Max platform and our massive proprietary data set, expanding ecosystem, brand leadership and distribution across more than 10,000 high-performing contractors to bring the magic of end-to-end automation to life. Before I conclude, I want to take a moment to thank Ross Biestman for building ServiceTitan into the business we are today. We announced earlier that after leading us from less than $30 million in ARR to over $1 billion of annualized run rate revenue, Ross has decided to step away from an operating role, but not before closing through Pantheon in Q3 as our CRO and then serving as an adviser through the end of the fiscal year to ensure a smooth transition. Ross, I am grateful for your leadership and your friendship over the past 9 years. Being the leader that you are, you've also built a bench of exceptional leaders and a world-class go-to-market machine. Rikus Pretorius has served as our SVP of Worldwide Sales and Ross's right-hand for over 7 years. We have great confidence that we have the right sales leadership team to lead us forward as Rikus steps into the CRO role beginning in Q4. Now let's hear more from my co-Founder, Vahe.

Thanks, Ara. Max has become the foundation for our future. And while I don't want to steal too much of our thunder for Pantheon next month, I'd like to dive right into the progress we made during the second quarter. Our North Star has always been to deliver transformational customer outcomes. Max customers continue to overperform their peers across key funnel metrics and are creating tangible business value. Max customers are generating more leads, converting those leads at a higher booking rate and completing work at a higher average ticket. They are doing this with improved operational ratios like what you heard from Delponte to deliver a faster and more efficient rate of growth relative to peers. We now have over 30 Agentic capabilities native within Max to power enhanced automation, including Q2 introductions like demand orchestration, advanced session SMS recovery, AI coaching and scorecards and live escalations. Due to the strength of these customer outcomes, we are growing Max more quickly than we had previously expected. We doubled the number of locations enrolled in Max during our fiscal Q1 to just over 100, and we expect it to again double that number during Q2. As a result of strong execution with existing customers and progress selling to select new customers for the first time, we exceeded our goal during Q2, and we now expect to end this fiscal year with over 700 enrolled Max locations. In addition to Max, we began to put our full go-to-market efforts behind another pillar of our AI monetization strategy, virtual agents in May. The differentiation of our natively integrated platform is proving out, particularly with our SMS agent capabilities now native alongside voice. During Q2, we launched voice and SMS features like speed to lead, technician notifications and both inbound and outbound capabilities, each converged within our AI-powered demand generation and capability optimization platform. While virtual agents remain early overall, during Q2, our revenue and call volume each more than doubled sequentially. And when it comes to our organizational velocity, our vision to build a software factory is increasingly taking shape. At its core, we envision that the software factory will be the growth engine behind our platform. It will touch everything we build and everything our customers experience, improving the platform, the pace of feature introductions and how we sell and market ServiceTitan. We're creating a self-reinforcing loop where software perpetually learns and improves based on actual customer behavior to build faster and more efficiently than we ever could have previously. As Ara mentioned, it is in concert with the results we see today that we are increasing the share of our investments on AI and software factory. We believe that increasing our focus on Max and AI will maximize the long-term value of ServiceTitan because we now have even greater resources to be invested in and running together towards the most important opportunity we have ahead of us. For example, we have advanced our investments in Max to include more agentic capabilities for field and office. Technicians are the backbone of the trade businesses, and we are continuing to make even larger investments in the capabilities we give to them from AI proposals to voice-based solutions. Our multiyear growth markets like commercial and roofing remain important initiatives for us as we work towards becoming the market standard over time. To enable increased investments in and attention on Max, during Q2, we elected to tighten our focus on existing commercial trades like mechanical, electrical, plumbing and landscaping and residential roofing rather than the planned expansion of our offering to new trades within commercial or broader residential exteriors categories. We expect this focus on existing trades to allow us to execute on existing investments while also accelerating our shift towards Max and internal AI, addressing what we believe to be our most important opportunity today. Dave will discuss the mix shift implications of this trade-off shortly. I am excited to speak to Pantheon about the compelling new outcomes that our customers will be able to achieve with AI. On to you, Dave.

Thanks, Vahe. Today, I will run through our Q2 financial results and provide an update to our guidance for full fiscal year 2027. For more detailed financial results, please refer to our press release issued earlier today. Q2 gross transaction volume, or GTV, was $26.8 billion, up 17% year-over-year. Normalized for business days and weather, which were roughly offsetting, GTV growth of 17% was about 200 basis points below recent quarters, primarily due to lower job growth by existing customers. Our customers' lead volume grew at a more moderate seasonal pace during May and June compared to prior years before stabilizing July, which was consistent with HARDI data. This was evident across the broad set of trades in the markets that we serve, and it was particularly true for our HVAC-focused customers. Looking forward, we have adjusted our second half forecast to reflect the more moderate GTV growth we saw during Q2, of course, accounting for 1 fewer business day in Q3. Given the momentum and growing importance of Max, before getting into Q2 financials, I'd like to outline how we expect Max to impact our P&L over time. Specifically, I want to provide some color in 4 key areas. First, in terms of addressable customers, today, Max is primarily available for residential customers in the trades we call in-home, principally plumbing, HVAC, electrical and garage. As we said at this time last year, this grouping of customers represents our largest group of customers based on GTV, though not a majority. Second, in terms of subscription uplift we see from our customers that enroll in Max. As we've noted before, at full contract ramp, subscription revenue roughly doubles relative to prior spend, driving an average platform earn rate just north of 2%. Now we realize that not all of our residential in-home customers are ready to fully transform their businesses yet. We expect to launch packages that will be on-ramps to Max over time, which we expect to have meaningful uplift in subscription revenue run rate, though not quite at the same level as full Max deployment. We will provide more specifics as these packages launch. Third, we recognize revenue slightly differently for our core platform compared to our upsell products like Max and Pro. For the core subscription, we recognize revenue ratably over the term of the contract. For upsell, we recognize revenue as billed. Because Max requires such substantial change management, we typically do not bill for the first quarter of a contract and then ramp to full contract value through the first year or so. The momentum in Max as well as our decision to focus our investments here and in existing trades has led to a higher proportion of new deals coming from Max. We expect this change in composition and the timing difference of revenue recognition between core and upsell to be between a $2 million and $3 million subscription revenue headwind over the remainder of the fiscal year. Finally, given both the required process change and the expected customer lifetime value increase for Max, we have elected not to charge existing customers an onboarding fee for the transition to Max. We expect the mix shift to Max to lower professional services revenue by roughly an additional $2 million over the remainder of this fiscal year, which, of course, also flows through to professional services gross margin. Now shifting to Q2 financials. Q2 total revenue of $292.8 million grew 21% year-over-year. Subscription revenue of $212.4 million grew 22% year-over-year. Usage revenue grew 24% year-over-year to $72.1 million. Fintech revenue grew well, though slightly below recent periods due to more moderate GTV growth. Beyond Fintech, ecosystem and virtual agent revenue continue to perform well with virtual agent revenue more than doubling quarter-over-quarter. We continue to believe AI monetization will lead usage revenue to grow more quickly than GTV in FY '27. Total platform revenue for Q2, the sum of subscription and usage revenue grew 22% year-over-year to $284.5 million. Q2 professional services and other revenue was $8.3 million. Net dollar retention was greater than 110% for the quarter. Q2 platform gross margin was 81.1%, up 40 basis points year-over-year. Total gross margin for Q2 was 74.6%, up 20 basis points year-over-year. We continue to optimize for unit economics within our business. Q2 operating income of $44.4 million resulted in operating margin of 15.2%, an improvement of 310 basis points year-over-year. The fact that we can deliver such strong margins in a quarter with modest GTV growth gives us increased conviction in the higher operating leverage of the business moving forward. As such, we now expect that 25% incremental margins will represent a floor each year rather than a target moving forward. And in this fiscal year, FY '27, we now expect incremental margins of 33% Q2 free cash flow was $50.5 million, up 47% year-over-year. Year-to-date free cash flow of $40.9 million is up from $12 million over the same period a year ago. We remain focused on free cash flow conversion and expect that free cash flow conversion will remain consistently high again during this fiscal year as we saw last year. Now shifting to formal guidance. For the third quarter, we expect total revenue in the range of $285 million to $287 million. We expect to generate operating income in the range of $29 million to $30 million. For the full fiscal year 2027, we expect total revenue in the range of $1.139 billion to $1.144 billion. We expect to generate operating income in the range of $152 million to $154 million. We believe that our focused investments in existing growth markets and Max position ServiceTitan for even higher quality, more efficient long-term growth. We're very excited to talk about the future of the trades during Pantheon this quarter. We're hosting thousands of customers and partners. And while we're not hosting a formal investor event this year, we do hope to see many of you there. With that, I'll turn the call back to the operator for Q&A. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of DJ Hynes of Canaccord.

Dave, so you said lead volumes stabilized in July after softer growth in May and June. What have you seen since quarter end? And Q2 represented maybe a temporary moderation versus kind of a new GTV run rate?

DJ, why don't I do a quick deep dive on the GTV overall and give you some clarity there. I think first, let me go to business days. Because July 4 fell on a Saturday this year, there was an observed holiday on Friday, July 3. In the past, observed holidays have performed like normal business days, which is what we expect to come in the quarter. Instead, July 3 was closer to a weekend day, creating less benefit than the 150 bps we had planned. Second, in terms of weather, it was a summer -- it was a warm summer, though roughly consistent with last year. And upon reviewing the results for the quarter, we do believe that the early start of the cooling season in April did pull a portion of Q2 GTV into Q1, creating a small headwind. Now these 2 factors more or less offset one another, which is why normalized and reported were the same 17%. Now -- coming to your question, beyond weather and business days, as I noted, consistent with HARDI data, we did see variance within the quarter as May and June were weaker, July was stronger. From what we could see, the core challenge our customers face was the lead volume, and we did see that stabilize in the month of July. And unlike in similar periods in the past, our customers did not pass up -- we're not able to offset this lower lead volume with higher average ticket. Now I don't have clarity on what's driving consumer behavior, particularly on lead volume. So what we did is we rolled forward the aggregate of Q2 into our forecast for the rest of the year rather than assume what we saw in July was a bounce back going forward. And in terms of the first month of the year, DJ, we don't -- I don't love getting the practice of talking about in-quarter forecast because there's so much variance within the quarter, but I think that helps to answer your question.

Yes. No, that's helpful color, and I appreciate your comments on Q3. Ara, maybe a more strategic question. So you noted delaying expansion into new commercial trades and broader exteriors to kind of fund Max. How much future growth do you feel like you're deferring? And what are the milestones or signals that would cause you to begin broadening those investments again?

Yes. Great question, DJ. I'll first say this, we are relentlessly focused on the 2 profound opportunities unlocked by AI that we believe will win the next era of software and meaningfully expand ServiceTitan's long-term opportunity. And so we are concentrating our incremental resources on them. First, of course, that's Max, our Agentic operating system. The customer outcomes are compelling. Max customers grow revenue faster and more profitably, demand is strong. CLTV is expected to be higher, and it's not just existing customers upgrading. We recently started leading with Max for new logos in residential in-home trades. And these results give us confidence that our Agentic capabilities are the best path to continued success across all of our segments over time. And then second is the software factory. We believe one of the most important competitive advantages in software will be how quickly and efficiently we can turn an idea into high-quality product in customers' hands. And in some areas, we have large features previously estimated to take quarters being delivered in months with escape defects meaningfully down and bugs identified and resolved automatically. But there is more work to be done to cover the entire ServiceTitan footprint. So we are putting capital and talent where the return is highest. And the magnitude of these 2 shifts is such that we believe nearly every incremental hour is best spent on them. And naturally, there are trade-offs like the revenue recognition timing and the professional services revenue that Dave outlined as well as this sequencing of trade expansion you noted. But we firmly believe this focus will compound value over quarters and years.

Our next question comes from the line of Michael Turrin of Wells Fargo Securities. now.

I just wanted to follow on to the prior point because I think this is an important point just in general on the call. So just across the team, would love to get more details on the decision to prioritize Max over some of the subsequent trade expansion that we've seen on the road map previously. Just walk us through the thought process, what you're seeing with Max, why now? And what gives you the confidence that's the right decision both today and over the longer term?

Great question, Michael. There is a lot of excitement. What started maybe a year ago as the idea was an aggregation of the Agentic capabilities inside Pro products, and there were roughly 8 of them at the time, has grown into something far bigger than that. There are now 30-plus Agentic capabilities, all orchestrated together on the Max Agentic operating system, generating demand automatically for customers through things like e-mail marketing, Google Ads and Facebook ads, automation, speed to lead, automation of converting phone calls into booked appointments, whether through virtual agents or now SMS agents as well as improvements in close rates and average tickets in the field through things like automating the selection of the best technician for any job based on lead scoring as well as the automatic creation of good, better, best options in the field, automatic follow-up of unsold estimates. All these things are very meaningfully increasing revenue for our customers and meaningfully increasing profitability. The results have been very compelling, and it is the evidence of these results that increase our confidence and conviction that Max represents far greater value to customers. And then we see that in the increase in CLTV from customers. And we see it as an imperative to ultimately, over time, get Max into the hands of every hard-working customer so they can continue to thrive.

And the only other thing I'd add, Michael, is that this is not a forever decision. We do expect to come back to trade expansion over time. We think the importance of Max now and the software factory, which increased velocity later allows us to attack more trades and more features with more gusto over time. It's just a prioritization decision at this moment.

And if I may, just as a follow-up, Dave, the growth profile has held fairly durable. We're looking at the mid-teens guide for the back half. And I just was hoping you could help frame what's contemplated there, what the right way to think about the normalized medium-term growth rates for ServiceTitan would be? And if there are any indicators, if you plan to give Max on a quarterly basis or other indicators for us to look at to gauge progress, that's all helpful.

Absolutely. As always, our guidance is driven by the best information we have right now. And what I'll say on our forward growth, there's a couple of things that are driving the difference from what we've seen before. First, we are rolling forward a more modest GTV forecast after the results we saw in Q2. Second, the new deal volume, as I highlighted in my prepared remarks, are shifting to Max. And that shift has approximately a $4 million to $5 million near-term headwind across both subscription revenue and professional services. It's these 2 factors that are creating a bit of a headwind in the back half of this year. We continue to believe the growth -- the growth and earnings potential of the business remains strong, and we're excited to put ourselves in a position to have strong FY '28.

Our next question comes from the line of Dylan Becker of William Blair.

Maybe one more crack at the apple here on kind of the strategic prioritization. Ara, maybe for you, is there a way we should think about, obviously, the value and ROI you're delivering through Max enabling you to kind of capture more of that lion's share earlier to date? And if that is the case, maybe how that kind of gives you guys incremental conviction in extending that value prop to adjacent trades over time, effectively making the value proposition more compelling similar to what you saw as the platform evolved on a pre-AI basis, if that makes sense?

Yes. So what we're seeing is that for customers that are in the sales cycle now where we introduced Max early on, that the appetite to not just wait until after they're live with the core and then incrementally grow is actually pretty promising. And so our ability to then go through that process with customers is what we're in the process of validating and we're excited about in terms of launching full GA for Max in home trades. The exact implications in terms of the speed with which we're able to capture the full opportunity really depends on how much of the Max Apple they bite on that first one versus these subsequent packages around demand, field, back office and the sequence with which they go as well as the rev rec implications relative to what we had previously is unclear right now in terms of exactly what that acceleration looks like, what proportion and complexion is going to take on, which flavor. But the early signals are promising, and we're really excited about it.

Perfect. And then maybe either sticking with you or for Dave as well, too, encouraging commentary on the virtual agents piece doubling, I believe, quarter-over-quarter. So just kind of any sense of how those customers continue to kind of deploy where they deploy virtual agents of the bat and how they're kind of scaling those use cases from those initial trials, maybe into more broad deployments across the portfolio?

Yes, great question. So maybe a quick recap first. We built support for dozens of additional real-life production use cases through Q1. We began our more expanded go-to-market efforts late Q1, and then we saw strong success in Q2 behind the early efforts of our fuller go-to-market machine. Nearly all of our customers face situations where they have a sudden influx of calls that overwhelm their office staff as well as calls that come in after hours. And of course, when each call might represent thousands of dollars, it's very critical to book each and every one of them. So many customers start with overflow and after hours. But now we also have customers given the performance of these agents and how well they book, how human they sound and how well they handle escalations that opt to let VA handle incrementally more and more volume, especially as CSRs attrit from the business, which is one of the highest attrition roles in the contracting business.

Our next question comes from the line of Billy Fitzsimmons of Piper Sandler.

So you reported in the press release that ServiceTitan exceeded doubling Max locations in fiscal 2Q and now there's 700 Max locations target by fiscal year-end. Max is obviously early and seeing good momentum. It seems like it will become a more material revenue contributor in future years. I think the 2 biggest questions we get on Max is, one, it takes a few quarters for customers to get live, which you guys talked about in the prepared remarks. But could that come down over time? And two, implementations seem like kind of a white glove service right now to get customers live, and that's for a good reason. Is there a kind of upper limit or ceiling on the amount of Max customers you could add per quarter? Or could that come down over time as well? Like how do we think about scaling Max adds?

Great question. So the way I think about it is it's fundamentally a 2-step process. Step one is about achieving product market fit, which for me means if you took it away from a customer, would they fight you for it? Independent of the cost to implement or the length of time it takes, can you just reach that point? Once you reach that point and only when you reach that point, you go to step 2 of scaling, of which the biggest unlock is the ability to implement efficiently, both in terms of time and effort while holding on to the quality. And so if you look at what it took to implement ServiceTitan as a whole, the core product, it went from taking several months for even the simplest use case to a fraction of that today for that same cohort. And we expect that over time, the amount of work it takes and the level of effort it takes to implement Max will follow a similar trajectory. Our confidence in more broadly releasing Max to our in-home trades fundamentally rests on this premise. And so while we still have wood to chop in terms of going through the same process, I don't see anything fundamentally different that will not follow a similar path, especially with the power that we get with AI. In terms of the second question, I believe the answer is largely the same. We believe that our ability to expand will be fundamentally gated by both achieving product market fit in the expanding segments and the ones that aren't served today and doing so with an efficient onboarding process that ultimately holds the quality and delivers the outcomes. And so it's just a matter of going through that process. And now we're focused for in-home trades on that scaling bit, and the product market fit will come with the other segments after that.

Our next question comes from the line of Chris Quintero of Morgan Stanley.

You all mentioned that some of your customers are not ready to fully transform their businesses yet. So curious kind of why you think that is? And then secondly, as you think about these new on-ramp packages, are there any details you can provide as it relates to the capabilities or some of the additional details around some of those packages?

Got it. So on the first one, we think that what we're witnessing is a natural progress of diffusion of technology that has played out how it always has, where there are certain groups that are early adopters and visionaries that look to take advantage of technology to give them a business advantage. And then there's everybody else looking from the sidelines. There is nobody who is not paying attention. And from where we're sitting, the process we're going through is either somebody is ready to jump on board and see the results and success or they're being closely watched by everybody else. That's why we're so maniacally focused on driving success to this initial cohort because we think that anybody else who's not ready to jump on today is a temporary phenomenon. The results are too big and too important to ignore. And so we think that the diffusion of AI, while it will happen faster than previous technology, is still going to take some time. And the readiness to jump on board is largely a function of seeing is believing. And we both see it and believe it and believe our customers will do as well soon.

Our next question comes from the line of Scott Berg of Needham.

I have a follow-up kind of to Billy's question a moment ago around implementations. With the kind of accelerated number of customers and focus that you're looking to deploy here throughout the balance of the year, do you have the right capacity around the implementation teams to actually deliver on the strategic change in a short order? Or do you have to go through a pretty intense exercise in the near term to get to the right staffing levels and deliver on the increased demand?

We're not planning on any meaningful increases in our staffing. We are banking and assuming that our ability to do the implementations at or above the quality that we've seen with significantly less effort and time on both our behalf and our customers' behalf is going to be the enabler of us being able to hit the numbers that we just talked about without having to scale our customer-facing teams in order to do so.

And with that said, Scott, it's worth noting the teams will be where they are. The revenue on professional services will come in lower, as we noted in my prepared remarks, which will flow through to professional services and other gross margin.

Our next question comes from the line of Tyler Radke of Citi.

I wonder if we could just spend a little bit of time again on the dynamics that you saw in the quarter. And just curious if you saw divergence between different trades in terms of the order volumes and GTV performance? And is that perhaps informing any of your views on allocating resources away from expanding into additional trades?

Thanks, Tyler. I'll say in terms of the decomposition of the GTV and how it performed relative to one another, this lead volume piece was particularly notable in HVAC. But broadly, commercial continues to be a meaningful driver of GTV growth. In this quarter and all quarters since we've been public. A slightly lower rate in Q2 than in Q1, but it continues to be a meaningful driver of our growth. Residential, our customers continue to grow nicely. But as I noted in my prepared remarks, we did see an impact on lead volumes and job growth, particularly around HVAC in the quarter.

Our next question comes from the line of Nick Altmann of BTIG.

I wanted to circle back to some of the new on-ramps for Max. It basically sounds like there's maybe more of an a la carte kind of way to purchase Max versus buying the entire suite. And my question is, how does that ultimately change the growth curve for Max? Because on the positive side, it does sound like it could lead to a greater volume of customers. I imagine they can implement and ramp faster and see that ASP uplift with the obvious trade-off being the ASP side of the equation. So just any commentary on how those new on-ramps ultimately kind of change the growth trajectory of Max in your perspective, if at all?

Great question. So for the cohort of customers that are very excited and ready for the full transformation through all of Max, we have greater demand than we have the ability to implement right now. And hence, the focus on making the implementation much more efficient so we can scale more quickly. But we also recognize because of the traditional diffusion of technology that there will also be cohorts that would like a more bite-sized approach, where they have urgency around transforming demand generation. And hence, we want to have a demand orchestration version of Max that allows them to see incredible results quickly before later transforming field operations. And then there will be a cohort that has more urgency around transforming field operations and seeing the results before then also doing the same on demand orchestration. Ultimately, these bites are still quite very big bites. We are talking about a very material transformation of all of demand generation and orchestration as well as a very meaningful and significant transformation of field operations and how they sell in the field.

Our next question comes from the line of Parker Lane of Stifel.

Nice to see the virtual agent growth remains very solid here. When you get under the hood and look at that growth, how much of that has come as a result of customers moving into virtual agents for the first time, embracing that process through ServiceTitan versus actually going and displacing some of the competing features out there in the market?

Great question. It's pretty balanced between customers that are adopting VA for the first time as well as customers that are replacing an existing solution.

Our next question comes from the line of Jason Celino of KeyBanc Capital Markets.

I don't think it's been asked yet, but the Q4 revenue guide, it kind of implies that we see a little bit of acceleration versus Q3. Maybe, Dave, can you maybe speak to this a little bit? Is it just a comps issue? Or is it something more dynamic?

Two things there. First, one, there's one fewer day in Q3 than there was in the prior year. So there's a comp driver. And the second is we do expect to see some beginning of Max flowing through into our numbers in Q4, but the primary driver is the comp issue on the biz days.

Our next question comes from the line of Terry Tillman of Truist.

Most of my questions have been answered, but I've still got one. It's a 3-parter. I guess in terms of VA, how important or an increased unlock for new business or adoption is SMS Agentic? When customers buy voice and SMS, is that a higher price point? And then, Dave, do you think that the growth in VA could continue doubling for some period of time off the smaller base?

You want to hit the VA piece, Vahe?

Yes. Voice and SMS are priced separately. So they result in higher revenue to us.

Yes. And they both flow through as consumption because they're charged either on a per call, per outcome or per text message basis. They flow into the usage revenue. I think that we feel pretty excited about the progress in VA, both in terms of the results we've seen, the attach to new customers or existing customers and importantly, the feedback we're getting on the product side. And so while I don't have a specific forecast to share today, I will say that the momentum feels solid from what we're seeing today.

Our next question comes from the line of Joe Vruwink of Baird.

Just going back to the focus on existing trades. When I think about some of the rooftops in a commercial practice, they tend to span into like an adjacency, maybe construction, where adding the new capabilities would help create kind of the comprehensive offering that helps you land at the beginning. Has the thinking about this changed at all? Or is the go-to-market just going to be much more targeted in commercial where maybe this dynamic doesn't matter as much?

Yes. I think it's important that we clarify exactly what we mean by this narrowing of the aperture and what it is and what it isn't. It is not taking resource away from roofing or commercial and construction. And for us, as we've been discussing, construction is an absolutely integral part of winning in commercial. So that dynamic is not changing. We don't expect that investments in either of those to be reduced by any measure. The discussion here is entirely about the incremental investments that would have otherwise gone to new trades that we are not in. So everything about what we've said about commercial and construction in the past still holds.

Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Sherman of TD Cowen.

Okay. Dave, I wanted to come back to the lead volumes impacts in Q2. Do you think there's some AI impact there as customers have moved searches to other platforms? Why was it more acute to HVAC? And can Max actually help to offset those impacts if that's -- if this is what's going on with the lead agents that are in Max?

So we don't have super clarity on what's driving the lead volume. What we will say is that it's pretty broad-based when you look at the trades and our peers reporting the period. And so I don't think it's specific to us and our customers. So I will say it may be something there, but I don't think right now it's something specific to our customer base. In terms of Max, I'll let the founder speak to that in a second, but we do think there's an opportunity for our customers to be at the forefront of how consumers interact with AI.

Indeed, I'll say one of the most important premises of Max is that it helps improve demand generation. And so our ambition, of course, is to get Max in the hands of every customer. And so every customer can thrive on demand generation, on demand conversion into booked deployments and then ultimately also in close rates and average ticket. And then second, Max being the Agentic operating system, of course, has these 30 Agentic capabilities built in that are completely turnkey. And of course, customers will be able to tailor them, but also is the ability not only for customers to build additional workflows and Agentic capabilities natively in Max. But lastly, for it to interact with ultimately consumer agents. And fundamentally, our job is to outperform the market with our customers. That is the core value proposition we deliver to them.

Our next question comes from the line of Dan Jester of BMO.

I wanted to go back to the comment about leading with Max. And so as you think about the go-to-market organization, besides some of the packaging items which you talked about, are you changing anything else with regards to that leadership with Max going forward? And as these packages get ramped and put out to the broader community, would you expect that you would only lead with Max with targeted customers? Or is that still maybe something further out into the future?

I think we are seeing quite strong demand in these target segments from new logos for Max from the very beginning. Of course, for some population of that segment who might not be ready for it and who want more traditional software, of course, we will make the existing traditional platform available to them to get them started. But we're seeing pretty strong demand for new logos for Max.

And we're talking about this earlier. And if Ara and I were just graduating from school and starting ServiceTitan today, we will be building Max and the Agentic operating system. This is not just some other ancillary product. We see this as the future of ServiceTitan. And so this is what we would be building today if we were starting from scratch. And that's why we think that leading within the sales process is the right way to go.

And finally, to close out, I think for the customer and for us, there's massive efficiencies in leading with Max because the implementation and the business transformation that goes through onboarding already exists and to go straight to Max is more efficient for them and for us, which is why we're leading with it, why customers are excited about it.

Our next question comes from the line of Yun Kim of Loop Capital Markets.

Okay. Great. So there's a lot of information to digest here, obviously. But in light of a lot of the data that's presented and some of the shift in the focus here, but you guys did put out some upside. And if you can just talk about where -- highlight some of the drivers of the upside here beyond, obviously, the Max adoption, which isn't translating into revenue today? Any outperformance that you can highlight?

Absolutely, Yun, thank you. This is a pretty important question. I want to take the opportunity to be a bit specific about it. So let me say a couple of things. First, as we think about our guidance, the first and foremost principle in this quarter and always is conviction in our ability to deliver on the numbers we put in front of you. Second, beyond ensuring we deliver what we say, if you step back and look at our track record, an average quarterly beat versus the midpoint of our guidance has been in sort of the $9 million to $10 million range with the primary source of variance coming from GTV and a bit from professional services. In this quarter -- in quarters where our beats have been larger, we've been pretty transparent that the usage revenue has been the primary driver, generally driven by GTV outperformance and that we expect there to be quarters where the inverse happens, which is exactly what happened in Q2. Finally, had Q2 GTV been in our normal expected range and had the business day benefit materialized as we expected, you'd have seen roughly another $1.5 million to $2 million or so in Fintech revenue, which would have put the performance exactly in line with our normal performance versus our guidance. We continue to prioritize the consistency of this track record, and we have rolled forward the GTV trends we saw in Q2 into the back half of the year. To ensure that we're able to deliver on a consistent cadence with you all.

Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference back to Ara Mahdessian for closing remarks. Sir?

Thank you, Luke, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I just want to close by thanking all the Titans around the world who show up every day to make our customers successful. Pantheon is our most exciting time of the year. We're excited to host thousands of customers, partners and hopefully, many of you for the future of the Agentic operating system for the trades.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.