ACV Auctions Inc. (ACVA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Greetings. Welcome to the ACV Q2 2026 earnings conference call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Tim Fox, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you, Tim. You may begin.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining ACV's conference call to discuss our second quarter 2026 financial results. With me on the call today are George Chamoun, Chief Executive Officer, and Bill Zerella, Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, please note that today's comments include forward-looking statements, including statements regarding future financial guidance. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties and involve factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements. A discussion of the risks and uncertainties related to our business can be found in our SEC filings and in today's press release, both of which can be found on our Investor Relations website. During this call, we will discuss both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures is provided in today's earnings materials, which can also be found on our Investor Relations website. With that, let me turn the call over to George.

Thanks, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We are very pleased with our second quarter performance and execution while facing a challenging market environment. We delivered record revenue with adjusted EBITDA exceeding the high end of guidance. In addition to solid financial results, we made significant progress on our 3 key objectives. First, we continue to gain market share and expand our dealer partner network to a new record. The combination of increasing our field capacity and penetration of our no-reserve offering contributed to our growth. Second, we had another strong quarter of performance in ACV Transport and ACV Capital, along with growing adoption of our value-added dealer solutions. And third, we are gaining traction with our emerging growth initiatives, including very strong demand for ViPR and momentum in the commercial wholesale segment. While macro headwinds caused conversion rates to compress below expectations in June and July, we believe conditions will begin to stabilize and remain committed to delivering double-digit revenue growth and increased adjusted EBITDA while investing in our exciting growth objectives. We're confident that executing on this profitable growth strategy will create significant long-term shareholder value. With that, let's turn to a recap of our results on slide 4. We delivered another record revenue quarter with growth of 10% despite continuing headwinds in the dealer wholesale market with volumes contracting approximately 6% year over year. And we continue to gain market share, selling 211,000 vehicles in the quarter. Next, on slide 5, we focus on the pillars of our strategy to maximize long-term shareholder value by delivering innovation that is driving growth and scale. I'll begin with growth. On slide 7, I will highlight our growth initiatives in dealer wholesale. As we discussed last quarter, we are investing in additional field capacity to broaden our regional growth performance, which resulted in a record number of dealer visits, inspections, and dealers transacting on our marketplace. We expect that these investments, along with improving conversion rates, will yield accelerated unit growth in the coming quarters. We also continue to leverage machine learning, combining inspection data and market data to provide real-time pricing. Our platform powers ACV guarantees to sellers and delivers no-reserve auctions to buyers. Our no-reserve offering remains the fastest-growing channel on our marketplace that benefits sellers, buyers, and ACV. We're removing seller market risk, accelerating bidder engagement, and increasing buyer satisfaction, while delivering a 100% conversion rate. We're confident our guaranteed offering will continue to be a key driver of market share gains. Turning to slide 8, let's review our marketplace service offerings. The transport team had strong execution in Q2 with 19% revenue growth and 125,000 transports delivered. By leveraging AI to optimize transport pricing, we continue to drive strong growth and operating efficiency. And despite the increase in diesel fuel during the quarter, the team executed incredibly well, delivering a transport revenue margin and attach rate that remained in line with our mid-term target. Lastly, our off-platform transport service continues to gain traction from our dealer partners, creating additional growth opportunities. ACV Capital also delivers strong performance, with attach rates reaching a new record in the high teens. Our expanded go-to-market strategy, new product offerings, and process enhancements to manage portfolio risk resulted in another strong quarter for the ACV Capital team. On slide 9, we highlight how we're further differentiating ACV and creating additional growth opportunities with our suite of AI-driven products. ClearCar and ACV MAX are adding tremendous value to our dealer partners and also contributing to our wholesale market share gains. By enabling our dealer partners to optimize inventory and automate vehicle selling and buying, we strengthen their ability to source more vehicles from consumers. As a result, our top 100 ClearCar customers doubled the volume of quarterly wholesale transactions on ACV after launching ClearCar. While ClearCar has proven to be a highly effective sourcing tool for our dealer partners, while increasing wholesale volumes on ACV, we're confident that ViPR delivers even more value through a powerful suite of ACV-enabled solutions. We have received very positive feedback during our successful early access beta program and are pleased that today marks the official launch of commercial availability for ViPR. We are already engaged with half of the top 50 dealer groups in the country, and our pipeline continues to grow. Through ViPR, our industry-leading inspection data and vehicle pricing capabilities enables dealers to unlock consumer vehicle acquisition at scale in the service lane and seamlessly identifies service upsell opportunities. We are also on track to integrate with the leading dealer software vendors to create a truly seamless experience in dealership service lanes. We remain on track to grow ViPR's footprint in coming quarters, offering a ViPR bundle with wholesale to create a powerful new lever to drive unit growth and expand our network. In addition, we have also started to leverage ViPR for vehicle inspections at our remarketing centers. While it's still early, we are confident that this solution will be an additional lever to drive improved unit economics. Lastly, as we highlighted in recent quarters, the internal adoption of AI tools across ACV has enabled us to gain meaningful velocity and efficiency. As such, we have even more confidence in delivering our differentiated product roadmap to support our growth objectives. Next on slide 10, I'll wrap up the growth section with our commercial wholesale strategy, a large adjacent market with both upstream and downstream opportunities. Our team has made significant progress on our software platform, and we believe this new digital model and end-to-end experience will transform commercial vehicle remarketing. Our differentiated offering is attracting large commercial consignors. We recently began remarketing vehicles from a top 5 fleet consignor and are in the final stages of securing a second large-scale consignor. We're also integrating with a large captive finance off-lease company and adding another top 4 rental car consignor to our marketplace. The commercial segment provides another exciting growth lever for us, and we are confident that we can accelerate wholesale volumes in the coming quarters. With that, I'll hand over to Bill to take you through our financial results and how we're driving growth at scale.

Thanks, George, and thank you for joining us today. ACV's second quarter results reinforce our commitment to deliver profitable growth while investing to drive dealer wholesale market share gains and to support key growth initiatives. On slide 12, let's begin with a brief recap of our second quarter results. Revenue of $214 million was within our guidance range, and grew 10% year over year compared to strong results in Q2 '25. Adjusted EBITDA of $21 million exceeded the high end of guidance, reflecting strong unit economics and expense discipline. Finally, non-GAAP net income of $10 million was at the high end of our guidance range. Next, on slide 13, let's review additional revenue details. Auction and assurance revenue was 55% of total revenue and grew 6% year over year against a tough comparison of 20% growth in Q2 '25. This performance reflects approximately flat unit growth in the context of a 6% decline in the dealer wholesale market. Auction and assurance ARPU of $554 grew 6% year over year. Marketplace services revenue was 41% of total revenue and grew 17% year over year, reflecting continued strong performance for ACV Transport and ACV Capital. Lastly, our SaaS and Data Services products comprise 4% of total revenue with growth of 3% year over year driven by further adoption of ACV MAX. Next, I'll review Q2 costs on slide 14. Non-GAAP cost of revenue as a percentage of revenue increased approximately 300 basis points year over year. The increase was primarily driven by a higher mix of no-reserve sales on our marketplace. As a reminder, no-reserve sales typically have modestly higher costs than standard auction sales. However, they drive strong blended conversion rates, improved marketplace liquidity, and importantly, are accretive to adjusted EBITDA. In fact, we delivered record adjusted EBITDA per unit, increasing 11% year over year in Q2. Furthermore, our 2 most profitable regions continue to expand EBITDA per unit with our most profitable region delivering over $300 per unit. Non-GAAP operating expense, excluding cost of revenue as a percentage of revenue, decreased approximately 300 basis points year over year, reflecting operating leverage in our model while continuing to invest in key growth initiatives. Moving to slide 15, I'll frame our investment strategy as we drive profitable growth. In 2026, we expect OpEx growth of approximately 6%, which is a decline from 12% in 2025. As a reminder, our 2026 OpEx includes additional go-to-market spending to support regional growth objectives. Even with these growth investments, adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to increase by approximately 100 basis points year over year. Next, I will highlight our strong capital structure on slide 16. We ended Q2 with $242 million in cash and cash equivalents, and $205 million in debt. Note that our cash balance includes $175 million of marketplace float and reflects the $50 million accelerated share repurchase program we announced last quarter. In terms of operating cash flow, the year-on-year decline for the first half of 2026 was primarily driven by the change in marketplace float. The amount of float on our balance sheet will continue to fluctuate meaningfully based on business trends in the final 2 weeks of each quarter, which has a corresponding impact on operating cash flow. Looking forward, we are expecting to generate positive operating cash flow in the back half of the year, reflecting continued adjusted EBITDA growth and margin expansion. Turning to guidance on slide 17, we are reaffirming our 2026 revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance, despite uncertain macroeconomic conditions and our expectation that the dealer wholesale market will begin to stabilize in the back half of this year. Now for the details. Third quarter revenue is expected to be $219 million to $225 million, growth of 10% to 13%. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be $21 million to $24 million, reflecting a 10% to 11% margin. We continue to expect 2026 revenue of $845 million to $855 million, growth of 11% to 13%. Note that full year revenue guidance assumes that our go-to-market investments are expected to drive modestly higher growth in the second half of the year. We continue to expect 2026 adjusted EBITDA to be $73 million to $77 million, growth of approximately 27% year over year. We are expecting 2026 cost of revenue as a percentage of revenue to be modestly higher than in 2025, more than offset by OpEx efficiencies. Lastly, we are expecting non-GAAP OpEx excluding cost of revenue to grow approximately 6% year over year as we continue to drive further cost optimizations. And with that, let me turn it back to George.

Thanks, Bill. Turning to slide 18, I will summarize. We are pleased with our Q2 execution, delivering record adjusted EBITDA of $21 million, while navigating through challenging market conditions. We continue to enhance our technology and operating models, ultimately making us more resilient. We are attracting new dealer and commercial partners to our marketplace and expanding our addressable market, which positions ACV for attractive growth as market conditions improve. We are delivering on an exciting product roadmap, powered by ACV AI to further differentiate ACV and drive operating efficiencies. With ViPR now available and our commercial offering ready, we are entering an exciting new phase of growth. We are focused on achieving strong adjusted EBITDA growth and delivering on our mid-term targets that we believe will drive significant shareholder value. We are committed to achieving these results while building a world-class team to deliver on our goals. Before we begin the Q&A session, I would like to thank Bill for his partnership and the contributions he's made during his tenure as CFO. He has been instrumental in our evolution, supporting the company through its IPO and scaling ACV into the industry leader we are today. We wish him the best in his next chapter. I'm also very pleased to welcome Tim into his new role of CFO. Tim is exceptionally well-suited, bringing proven financial acumen and a deep understanding of ACV's strategy, operations, and growth opportunities. He has played a pivotal role in shaping our financial strategy and communicating our vision to the investment community. We are confident he is the right leader to help advance our strategy to create value for shareholders. In turn, I'll turn it over to Tim so he can share closing thoughts.

Thank you, George. Look, I'm very honored to be named CFO and to continue working with you and the ACV leadership team to further propel our growth trajectory and build on a really strong foundation. There's really 4 key themes that I'd like to stress. One, our business model continues to deliver with adjusted EBITDA per unit setting a new record in the quarter. Secondly, our new field investments are beginning to pay dividends. If we look at the 5 emerging regions where we've leaned in mostly on go-to-market capacity, we delivered mid-teens unit growth in the second quarter. It's starting to really pay off. Thirdly, ViPR is at an exciting inflection point as we begin to secure commercial agreements and scale production to support strong growth in 2027. And lastly, our differentiated commercial strategy is gaining real traction with major commercial consignors, and we're confident it will be another meaningful growth driver going forward. And lastly, of course, I'm supported by an incredible team here at ACV and look forward to executing on our strategy. With that, I'll turn the call over to the operator to begin our Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Rajat Gupta with JPMorgan.

I wanted to wish Bill best of luck and also congratulate Tim on the appointment. I look forward to working with you more closely. So maybe just on the quarter, it looks like you beat EBITDA numbers slightly. You're reiterating the full-year EBITDA guidance, revenue guidance, but OpEx was lowered and I'm curious if you could help understand the moving pieces there and why gross margins are trending lower, if you can help clarify that, and I have like a quick follow up.

Sure, Rajat, I'll start and then I'll have Tim chime in a little bit more. So really, we're really showing commitment to hitting our EBITDA numbers regardless of all the macro challenges, regardless of whatever is going on. We mentioned that there was a different conversion rates. But even with some of these challenges, you're just seeing strong execution. And we've been really informing our investors that revenue margin has changed a little bit over time, but EBITDA is growing. And I think also Bill shared on the call that in our largest regions, we hit all-time highs in EBITDA per unit. So very strong business model, very strong management from an overall OpEx perspective, you are starting to see AI help us become more efficient. So lots of benefits over here, but Tim, any more you wanna chime in?

Yes, I think that covers it. We mentioned revenue margin is compressing a little bit more than we had originally thought. But that's being more than offset by OpEx efficiencies. And given the current market headwinds, we really just want to be prudent about our cost structure and continue to drive a focus on the adjusted EBITDA expansion.

Got it. Yes, I just wanted to follow up on that philosophy. I know, George, we had this conversation like a few quarters ago on an earnings call around this philosophy on EBITDA versus maybe going for growth. I mean you clearly have a competitor who is scaling pretty rapidly. It's a big TAM. Why wouldn't you prefer to accelerate some of the investments around go-to-market to maybe just target growth a little more aggressively? And just on a related point, you know, would the company still be open to partnering with a strategic partner in order to maybe just help accelerate those investments, if that is a philosophy you're leading with to protect EBITDA right now.

Yes, I think, Rajat, thanks for asking. I think this might help clarify. We are hiring pretty materially on the field from a sales perspective. We have a number of roles open. We've been hiring throughout the year. And Tim shared in his remarks that in a handful of our regions, we really grew well year over year. So, we look at the overall expense envelope, we will have more salespeople across ACV out in the field selling. You know, we -- probably somewhere in the nature of -- let me just do the quick math. 15% to 20% at least more salespeople by the end of the year, maybe even a little bit higher than that. So there will be more people out there selling. There will be more inspectors out there in the market hitting the market. So year over year, you'll see increase in inspectors. You'll see an increase in salespeople, but in other parts of the organization, we needed a little bit less folks on some of the other roles here. So what you saw here on our overall expense, we are a lot more efficient leveraging AI. We are a lot more efficient in producing -- building software. We're seeing us just be overall leveraging the benefits of scale. So, but yes, to your point, we are definitely leaning in more on the sales between now and the end of the year. We do think we will have our unit number will look better in the back half of the year is sort of our beliefs, and we're out there going to execute on that. On your other point, I think talking about strategic partners and things like that on a public call, I don't think this is the right time for that. But we -- yes, no comment on that. But I would say on these other efforts, Rajat, we're out there. We're feeling very good about these incremental investments we're making in the field. If you go to our website right now, you'll see we're out there recruiting for a bunch of roles. And so far, so good.

Our next question comes from Bob Labick with CJS Securities.

Super sorry about that. I'm not in my office, so I'm clearly confused here. Anyway, congrats to Tim. And Bill, it's been a real pleasure working with you, so good luck going forward. I appreciate you guys taking the call for my questions. I wanted to kind of dig in on the last topic we were just talking about, the number of VCIs and territory managers kind of added. You talked about, you know, by year end you'll have 15% to 20% more of TMs and you'll be adding the inspectors as well. Where do you stand? Walk us through the ramp for these people. Like, how much of the benefit has been seen so far or when does that benefit of this hiring kind of show up in the numbers, not the P&L, not their costs, but in the sales numbers and in the units and things like that.

Yes, thanks, Bob. I'll try to go a little bit deeper into this since we've had multiple questions. So one is we're doubling down by not only having our traditional territory manager role, but we're also adding in very focused sales executives who are just opening up new rooftops. We found that as an additional area of need. As we grow out there in the field, many of our territory managers who are selling 500 to 1,000 cars a month, well, they end up, at the end of the day, spending a lot of their time farming and a little bit less hunting. So we did some work across the country opening up some sales roles and we're finding that to be a help. So the role of the territory manager, the role of these new sales executives collectively are getting us more touch points with dealers. And between the 2 of them, the expansion of the 2, we believe we're going to have a back half of the year that's going to give us the growth that we need. So was there a second question there?

Yes, I mean, just to follow up and put the final point, just to reiterate a comment I made towards the end of the prepared remarks. Bob, we talked earlier in the year about basically 5 or 6 emerging regions that we needed to get a little bit more field capacity out there, including VCIs. And so what I shared was that in 5 of these regions where we really leaned in quite a bit on go-to-market investment, we have mid-teens growth. Now, granted, some of them are on the smaller side of the region, but some of them are still growing at a really, really nice pace. We had one that grew in the 30s. So I'd say it's starting to show up in certainly some of these emerging regions. We are clearly expecting it to pick up in the third quarter and then the fourth quarter, as you can infer from our guidance. So that's really kind of a back half story and certainly into '27.

Okay, great. And then just as it relates to the ViPR rollout, can you kind of remind us your goal for where you'll end this year with units out there? And then really the bigger point is the acceleration in '27, and if you're set to bring that on, and if there's any goals for the number of units that'll be rolled out in '27.

Yes, certainly. So the feedback has been tremendous. We mentioned on the call that of the top 50 dealer groups, over 50% of them today are in some type of significant conversation with us or either already ordered ViPR or about to order ViPR. So we're feeling really good about the pipeline that's developing. What we said on prior calls is that we are building over 100 of them this year, and we're starting to deploy those units. Some dealer groups have ordered 7, some dealer groups have ordered 20, they're all different sort of stages of ordering ViPR. The business model is both a subscription model and also a commitment for wholesale, where they start to commit to selling some wholesale volume with ACV. So there's sort of 2 benefits of the business model. Next year, although it's obviously a little early now, but I would say our goals are over 500 units. Next year, I don't know, it could be significantly more than that. But it's still early. I would say it's going to be a big number for us. With the amount of enthusiasm we have right now, I don't know if it could be 1,000 units, who knows. But it's going to be over 500, it's going to be out there. We're going to listen to our customers. And if they want us to build a lot of these, which it looks like they do, we're just going to build, go out there be the leader of the category overnight.

Our next question comes from Andrew Boone with Citizens.

I wanted to talk about macro and just the conversion rate issues that you guys saw in the quarter. Can you unpack that and then just be very specific about kind of the stabilization that you guys talked about for the guidance for the back half? Is that an improvement from current levels or what exactly does stabilization mean? And then on the commercial opportunity, it would be great to just understand what you guys are seeing today. What is attracting kind of new, large consignors to the marketplace? And what has to take place for this to be a larger portion of the business on a go-forward basis?

Yes, first on the price disconnect between sellers and buyers. What was it, 500 basis or 600 basis points?

600 basis points impact on unit growth.

Yes, 600 basis points impact. So it was a -- why would this happen is, many of you have read that used car values continue to go down. And as these used car values go down, sellers are asking for more than the buyers are willing to pay. But this dislocation is not new to us. We've seen in the past, it's typically temporary, and I'll tell you why we believe it's temporary. Dealers aren't here to collect cars on their lots. These values are going down. They're paying floor plan fees, and they got to sell these cars. So we do think there will be a shift back to wholesale and being serious about wholesaling these vehicles. So we feel good that we're out there. We're reaching all-time highs, the number of dealers we're out inspecting cars with, number of sellers, number of touch points. So we really had the listings number coming into the last quarter, we would just have a little bit higher conversion rate. We would all have been jumping up and down. And this usually corrects itself. Anymore, Tim, you wanna add in?

Yes, just to emphasize the point about listings, we actually nailed the forecast with listings, which in this kind of market is a real testament to the team, the growing team out there, the kind of value that we're bringing. We did mention we have record number of sellers and buyers. So that top of funnel momentum has been great and it's very important. You get about a 300 to 350 basis point contraction in the conversion rate for the quarter. Unfortunately, it has a pretty dramatic effect on units. But again, as George said, we've seen this playbook before. It's going to be temporary. It's self-correcting over a month or 2 typically. And so we do expect the market will be better, certainly from a conversion rate perspective. And from a year-over-year growth perspective, the comps actually get a little bit easier in the back half. So whether they're flat to maybe just slightly down, but definitely better than we saw in June was down 6%. July just came out, that was down 8%.

Double down on that. That's dealer wholesale.

Dealer wholesale, right.

Yes, So this is third -- Tim is speaking to third-party data from NAAA, which said dealer wholesale was down 8%.

In July. Yes. So I think the direct reflection of that price dislocation out there. But we do certainly expect the market to be at least supportive in the back half and not be a continued headwind like this.

Anything on commercial?

Oh, that's right, your other question. Commercial has been very exciting. I should have led with that question. We've had a great few months in commercial. We've got some of the largest fleet companies starting to sell cars. At least 2 of the big guys are starting to sell cars on our platform, which is very exciting, important vehicles because the buyers love these cars, great diversification of our marketplace. So we've had further momentum in the repo category, further momentum in -- across the board, both upstream and downstream. So what am I threading here, Tim?

I'd say that we are expecting, to your question about growth, we are expecting commercial volumes to begin to contribute a bit more meaningfully in the back half, particularly in the fourth quarter.

But the software release that Bill here was talking about for too many quarters is now live and out there operationalizing and we're selling cars. So this really unique integration we've done with AutoIMS, where we can inspect a car upstream at a fleet location, you've heard me talk about assessing what type of reconditioning needs to be done or not with that vehicle. It's a very unique integration we've done. We can now go upstream to a fleet location, inspect the car, not even have to send it downstream. That software now works. We're out there leveraging it for the market first time over the last -- really this past period. So we're feeling really good about it. And then also another important milestone is we're opening up our second greenfield, Chicago, over the next 30 days. So we're very excited. As you know, we've opened up one in Houston, and now this one we're opening up in Chicago. Great market opportunity. Looking forward to expanding both our upstream and downstream opportunities.

Our next question comes from Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs.

I'll echo the thanks to everything for Bill and congrats, Tim, on the new role. Look forward to keep working with you and with the new responsibilities. I'll have to ask a capital allocation question. Bill's gotten too used to me asking it over the years. You've been returning capital, but you're also trying to grow the business and especially the mix of value-added services. How are you guys thinking about the various return profiles of returning capital against where the stock is today as opposed to the potential return profile that presents itself over maybe a longer duration period of time if you continue to invest in the business and keep driving some of the key platform initiatives, especially value-added services forward and just how you think about striking that right balance in the years ahead.

Tim or George, you want me to take this one?