Definitive Healthcare Corp. (DH) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, everyone, and welcome to Definitive Healthcare's Q2 FY '26 earnings call. [Operator Instructions] Now, I'll turn the call over to your host, Jonathan Paris. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us to review Definitive Healthcare's financial results. Joining me on today's call are Kevin Coop, our Chief Executive Officer, and Casey Heller, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that today's discussion may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements include, among others, statements about our market opportunity, future performance, growth in financial guidance, the benefits of our data and health and commercial intelligence solutions, our competitive position, customer behavior, adoption, growth, renewals, and retention, planned investments and operating strategy, value creation for customers and shareholders, and the expected impact of macroeconomic conditions on our business, customers, and the healthcare industry. Forward-looking statements are based on our current expectations and assumptions as of today and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For more information, please refer to the cautionary statement in today's earnings release, as well as the risk factors and other information included in our filings with the SEC, including our most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and Definitive Healthcare undertakes no obligation to update them except as required by law. During the call, we may also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, along with related definitions and limitations, are included in today's earnings release and investor presentation, each of which is available on the Investor Relations section of our website. For any forward-looking non-GAAP measures, the earnings release also explains why quantitative reconciliation is not available without unreasonable efforts and identifies the relevant unavailable items. With that, I'll turn the call over to Kevin. Kevin.

Thank you, Jonathan, and thanks to all of you for joining us this afternoon to review Definitive Healthcare's second quarter 2026 financial results. On today's call, I'll provide highlights from our second quarter performance and give an update on our progress against our key strategic priorities for this year. Let me begin by reviewing our financial results for the second quarter, which were in line or exceeded the guidance ranges on both the top and bottom line. Total revenue was $55.2 million, down 9% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA was $14.6 million, representing a margin of 26%, which was modestly above the high end of our guidance. We continue to do an effective job of managing expenses while investing in our core growth initiatives. We continue to generate solid cash flow, delivering approximately $50 million of unlevered free cash flow for the trailing 12 months. In general, we are successfully tracking against the targets we set forth at the beginning of the year. Our diversified and provider businesses continue to be further along in returning to growth. Importantly, these end markets represent over 60% of our revenue, and the improvement in these segments represents a critical foundation to build upon in the coming quarters. The response in our life sciences segment has been slower. We are encouraged by signs that the changes we are making to the business are positively impacting the segment, but it is taking longer to have the full impact we are targeting. We remain confident we will see a more meaningful benefit from these changes over time. Our confidence that growth can be improved comes from several important proof points. First and foremost, it is the improvement in our net dollar retention rate. It was once again up several points year-over-year on a trailing 12-month basis in Q2. This is the second consecutive quarter of year-over-year improvement and puts us in strong position to sustain it for the full year. And we're starting to see improvement in life sciences as our biopharma segment had the strongest new business quarter in 3 years outside of Q4. Included amongst those wins were 4 important win-back customers that had left DH prior to the start of 2025. The win-backs are reinforcement to our belief that ultimately data quality and superior service will drive longer-term value for our customers over price alone. We have been pleased to see that this is not only in our life sciences segment. We are continuing to see win-backs across our other end markets as well. A good example this quarter was a 6-figure, 3-year win-back in our diversified business. The customer left us at the end of last year for a lower cost competitor, having concluded that they no longer needed access to our full data set. Over the following months, our team stayed engaged, and when a business leader came back to explore a subscription for a single team, that conversation grew into a 6-figure enterprise agreement. This win reinforces a recurring theme. Even customers who believed that an alternative would be just good enough come to recognize that the cost of an inferior data set outweighs the savings. Again, this is an important validation of the business value our data and products deliver for our customers and reinforce that our focus on data quality and service rather than price was the right path. Our conviction that we are focused on the right things remains strong and that those areas of focus are responding. Importantly, these are areas all within our control. I would now like to provide an update on our operational progress against our 4 key strategic pillars. As a reminder, these pillars are data differentiation, integrations, customer success, and innovation. Let me begin with data differentiation. Data is at the heart of our value proposition, and we continue to invest in sourcing new proprietary data types and to extend our lead in our core reference and affiliation data sets. We are also increasingly leveraging AI to increase the velocity of our data collection and quality assurance. We are introducing a new estimation methodology, ACE 3.0, that applies modern data science and machine learning to help address the industry-wide challenge of incomplete claims coverage, and we expanded our practice location data to more than 4.4 million verified provider locations, improving the precision and recency of our data collection our customers can rely on for territory planning, outreach, and segmentation. This differentiation is showing up in our wins. In the quarter, we added a major financial services institution in our diversified business whose tax-exempt markets team needed a reliable way to monitor health system consolidation, affiliations, and organizational hierarchies. They selected Definitive for our differentiated reference and affiliation data, delivered through an automated monthly feed directly into their existing workflows, choosing us over a competitor they evaluated earlier in the process. We also won a competitive claims deal in the behavioral health market where our coverage and the combination of claims with our reference and affiliation data separated us from other vendors. Our second pillar is seamless integrations. Basically, making it as fast and simple as possible for customers to access our data alongside their other systems they rely on is a critical aspect of delivering value and building durable relationships. Our data continues to show that customers who integrate Definitive directly into their systems of record and insight use us more often, which makes us a stickier, more strategic part of their operations and strengthens our renewal rates over time. And we've continued to accelerate the time to integrate. Compared to the second quarter of last year, we completed over 50% more integrations year-over-year, while also reducing the time to integrate by more than 50%. A good illustration this quarter was an early renewal and expansion with a large diversified account. Adding our Salesforce-embedded connector for their enterprise healthcare team turned a manual, list-driven process into a workflow-native experience and expanded their annual commitment to us. Also, in collaboration with a top-tier biopharma partner, we successfully launched a native integration that embeds our key opinion leader intelligence data directly into the Veeva Vault CRM, which is used widely by life sciences, clinical, and medical affairs teams, a capability we can now extend to additional pharma clients as they adopt that platform. Turning to our third pillar, customer success, we continue to see the benefit of aligning all functional teams that support the customer journey into a unified commercial organization. That alignment lets us engage earlier and more proactively to identify issues before they become problems and uncover opportunities to do more for our customers. A prime example of this quarter was a renewal that had not been budgeted for by the customer and was therefore at real risk of churning due to a budget oversight. Our integrated commercial team was able to identify this issue early, and through persistent cross-functional engagement, our team reestablished the value and partnered with the customer to overcome their budget challenge. This integrated motion successfully retained the business, satisfied the customer's critical need, and converted a 6-figure save with a path to further expansion in the future as a strategic partner. Finally, we continue to make progress against our fourth pillar, innovation, and our focus on digital engagement. With our foundation built on data, quality, and service, we are shifting more of our effort to this fourth pillar over the second half of 2026. For product, customers are increasingly using conversational natural language search to simplify complex research workflows. Since launching our natural language search experience earlier this year, we've seen customers replace multiple manual search and filtering steps with a single connected query. For example, a medtech company rapidly identifying decision-makers across functions and geographies, and a healthcare logistics company building a connected view of target facilities by combining financials, ownership, and network relationships. In our expert intelligence platform, multi-turn conversational search now accounts for roughly 40% of interactions with our AI search feature. In digital activation, we successfully demonstrated real value-add in our proof-of-concept stage and have now rapidly moved into full production with our momentum building on 2 fronts. We've added 10 new agency partners that are now activating in 2026 that were not active with us in 2025. This core group of agencies has grown activation spend meaningfully year-over-year. At the same time, we have added 7 new direct activation customers this year-to-date, and current customers are embracing our digital solutions more aggressively. For example, one longstanding population intelligence customer moved from an initial test into a total activation commitment of more than $300,000. The takeaway is that our activation growth is now being driven by both new direct customers as well as by rising adoption and spend across our agency ecosystem, which gives us a broader and more scalable path forward. We are also encouraged by the performance customers are seeing. One partner running campaigns at our audiences reported registration rates well above the benchmarks they typically expect for hard-to-reach conditions, and this supports our belief that combining high-quality data with ease of digital activation execution will be a winning combination. The most significant milestone this quarter is the launch of Turbo, our new AI-powered healthcare intelligence platform that accelerates how healthcare teams access, process, and turn data into action. Turbo unifies our proprietary healthcare intelligence built on billions of signals spanning providers, organizations, claims, affiliations, key opinion leaders, and consumer data to power autonomous decision-making rather than simple data retrieval, so customers can ask complex questions in natural language and make faster, better-informed commercial, strategic, and product decisions. With DH trusted data as the foundational layer, Turbo will deliver reusable capabilities or skills to power workflows and experiences tailored to the appropriate persona or strategic role, be that commercial, sales, product, marketing, or strategy, with agentic AI providing a future state of always-on continuous monitoring, alerts, and notifications. Our launch begins with an initial stage pilot with a select group of strategic customers this month. We have curated this pilot to ensure it represents a broad customer base that spans both healthcare systems, life sciences organizations, and customers in our diversified segment, which capture all others who sell into the healthcare ecosystem. We are targeting general availability before the end of the year, and our commercial teams are preparing broad market conversations this quarter to align demand with launch. Feedback from our pilot customers will help shape the final experience. While AI is foundational to our next-generation commercial and product strategy, it is important to note that we view AI as a company-wide transformation, not simply a set of product features. We are embedding it across our data value chain to improve how we source, curate, and enrich our data, AI-native capabilities directly into our products. And we have already equipped our teams with AI tools that improve productivity and decision-making across the entire company. Our advantage is the combination of proprietary, differentiated healthcare data, our deep contextual domain expertise, and our scaled and trusted customer relationships across thousands of embedded customers, the foundation on which these AI investments compound. To summarize, we remain focused on delivering upon our commitments for the full year by executing on the things within our control while maintaining disciplined expense management. We will continue to focus our resources in the highest value areas that we believe will best position the company to improve retention and return to consistent, predictable revenue growth over time. With that, let me turn the call over to Casey to review the financials in more detail.

Thank you, Kevin. In all my remarks, I will be discussing our results on a non-GAAP basis, unless otherwise noted. As Kevin mentioned, we delivered a solid quarter with our revenue performance within the guided range and profit metrics above the high end of our guide. I'll walk through the financial results in more detail, including our revenue trends, market performance, and outlook. In the second quarter, we delivered revenue of $55.2 million, down 9% year-over-year, adjusted EBITDA of $14.6 million, reflecting a 26% margin, and adjusted net income was $7.5 million, resulting in $0.05 of non-GAAP earnings per share in the period. We also delivered $11.6 million of unlevered free cash flow in the quarter and $50 million on a trailing 12-month basis. Now moving to our results in more detail. Revenue of $55.2 million was within our guided range and represents a 9% decline year-over-year. Subscription revenues of $52.8 million declined 9% year-over-year, and we again delivered improvement year-over-year in net dollar retention on a trailing 12-month basis. Professional services revenue underperformed our expectations for the quarter, as bookings were lighter for traditional analytics engagements, despite the strength in digital activation. The weaker analytics engagements will also impact Q3 expectations in professional services, as I'll touch on later. Adjusted gross profit in the quarter was $44.2 million, which is down 12% year-over-year. As a percentage of revenue, the adjusted gross profit margin of 80% contracted 230 basis points as reported. However, in Q2 2025, we had a one-time credit from a data contract renegotiation. We spoke of that last year, and adjusting for the one-time credit that did not repeat, we expanded adjusted gross margin by 100 basis points year-over-year. And as I mentioned earlier, adjusted EBITDA was $14.6 million and reflected a 26% margin. Despite the continued top-line pressures, we've continued to prudently manage the business and focus investments on the initiatives that will return Definitive to revenue growth over time. Those same one-time credits that benefited COGS in Q2 of last year drove approximately three-quarters of the adjusted EBITDA margin contraction year-over-year. Turning to cash flow, our business continues to generate strong free cash flow due to our high-margin model, upfront billing, and low recurring CapEx requirements. On a trailing 12-month basis, operating cash flows were over $41 million, and we generated $50 million of unlevered free cash flow. Our conversion rate of trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA to unlevered free cash flow was 75%, which is down about 5 points year-over-year, primarily reflecting unique items that benefited the prior year. This cash generation provides flexibility to continue investing in growth. Consistent with last quarter, we continue to make organic product investments with an emphasis on expanding our AI capabilities. And we saw another quarter of increased capitalized software development spend, totaling over $2 million, up about $700,000 from the prior year. At the end of Q2, deferred revenue of $89 million was down 12% year-over-year, and total remaining performance obligations declined 18% year-over-year. Current remaining performance obligation of $150 million declined 12% year-over-year. The total remaining performance obligations and current remaining performance obligations year-over-year declines are similar to what we've reported in both Q4 and Q1 and continue to be impacted by the shift towards single-year deals versus multi-year commitments that we discussed the last 2 quarters. With a solid start to the year behind us and continued progress against our objectives, let me turn to our outlook. For the third quarter, we expect total revenue of $54 million to $55 million, a revenue decrease of 8% to 10% year-over-year compared to Q3 of 2025. Within the revenue guide, we expect subscription revenue to be flat sequentially from Q2 to Q3, and we expect to deliver double-digit professional services revenue growth but at a lower level than originally anticipated. This results in expected adjusted operating income of $10.5 million to $11.5 million, adjusted EBITDA of $13.5 million to $14.5 million, or a 25% to 27% adjusted EBITDA margin in Q3, adjusted net income of $5.5 million to $6.5 million, or approximately $0.04 to $0.05 per diluted share on 145 million weighted average shares outstanding. For the full year 2026, we expect revenue of $220 million to $222 million for an 8% to 9% decline year-over-year. This tightens our guidance range based on our first-half performance and visibility into the back half of the year. Our outlook on professional services for the year has weakened versus what we projected 90 days ago. Given the shorter duration of those agreements and the light Q2 bookings, we expect this to have an impact to our second-half top-line outlook, which is reflected in the tightened range on our guide. Despite the full-year revenue guide tightening around the lower end of our prior range, we are in a position to again raise the midpoint on our profit guidance for the year as a result of our continued work to proactively manage our cost base while making targeted investments in growth areas that have us excited about the future. For 2026, we now expect adjusted operating income of $45.5 million to $47.5 million, adjusted EBITDA of $57 million to $59 million for a full-year margin of 26% to 27%. This guide increases the midpoint by $1 million, as well as raising the adjusted EBITDA margin by approximately 100 basis points, reflecting the solid start to the first half of the year and our ongoing commitment to maintaining strong margins while investing in our key growth areas. Adjusted net income is expected to be between $27 million to $29 million, and earnings per share are expected to be $0.18 to $0.20 on approximately 145 million weighted average shares outstanding. In closing, I'd like to emphasize that despite the ongoing pressure on our top line, our priority remains clear, preserving non-GAAP profitability and healthy margins while making disciplined investments that position us for renewed growth. We remain confident in our strategic direction, and we're seeing meaningful traction on our core pillars. Progress, we believe will strengthen customer retention, put us back on a path to accelerate growth and create lasting value for our shareholders. And with that, I would like to open it up for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question today comes from Ryan McDonald of Needham & Company.

Hey, this is Matt Shea on for Ryan. Thanks for taking the question. Congrats on the launch of Turbo. Maybe with GA targeted for late 2026, is there any Turbo revenue contemplated in the current guidance? And then what are kind of your early thinking? It sounds like some of this is probably still in development, but what's sort of your early thinkings around the commercial model? Do you look at this more of like a bundled retention uplift, or do you kind of plan out rolling out a new premium SKU or more of a usage-based model? Thanks.

Thanks for the question, Matt. A couple of elements. One, as it relates to our guide, we're not anticipating any material impact to the 2026 top-line revenue. Definitely expected to be more impactful in 2027, but what we do expect it to have an impact on, given the rollout later in the year, as we're introducing it to customers, we do think that it has the opportunity to help with retention, and given December and January are our largest renewal periods, we're really hopeful that we'll get a chance to influence some of those early as we're spending time with customers on the new platform. The other piece around kind of the early thinking on the model of it, I will say that the pricing on it is still being evaluated ahead of its GA launch later this year. We are taking a pretty thoughtful approach to how we're assessing the potential for different structures by cohort. So what I mean by that is, there may be a difference between a customer who already has access to the majority of our data, they would be expecting to get a lot of value out of the platform quickly, versus a smaller customer with a limited data set will have the opportunity for greater data module upsells. So, over time, we do plan to be introducing a usage-based element with tiered pricing as well that will calibrate a bit. But for us right now, we really are just focused on launching the pilots and getting that early kind of customer feedback ahead of GA. This is really exciting for us.