Zeta Global (ZETA) J.P. Morgan 54th Annual Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference summary

Strategic vision and platform evolution

• Aims to become the operating system for enterprise marketing, leveraging AI-driven business intelligence and data integration across channels.

• Athena, a conversational AI agent, enables clients to achieve marketing outcomes through voice commands and real-time analytics, driving significant workflow adoption.

• Partnerships with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google expand capabilities, including serving ads within the OpenAI ecosystem.

• Focus on ingesting and matching large-scale first-party data, with over 92% match rates and 555 million opted-in global individuals.

• Plans to expand beyond marketing into broader business intelligence products, with future monetization strategies for AI-driven analytics.

Financial performance and growth drivers

• Achieved over 30% organic top-line growth and over 50% organic EBITDA growth for four consecutive years.

• Q1 saw 50% top-line growth, 42% EBITDA growth, and 42% free cash flow growth, with 29 points of organic growth split between existing and new customers.

• ARPU grew 21% in Q1, with net retention rate at 120% last year and guidance of 110%-115%.

• 19 consecutive quarters of beating and raising guidance, with $55 million raised on top-line guidance this year.

• Super-Scaled customer count grew 19%, and customers using multiple use cases or channels increased significantly, driving higher spend and retention.

Product innovation and operational efficiency

• Athena drove a 700% increase in agentic workflows and is credited with major client wins, including replacing Salesforce at a large retailer.

• Internal automation platform SPADE generates 75% of new code, accelerating product development and controlling costs.

• Headcount growth kept at 10% while maintaining 30%+ organic growth, with expectations to slow further.

• Mix shift toward agency and social channels, with agencies now approaching 25% of revenue and expected to migrate to higher-margin direct channels.

• Proprietary inference models and data cloud create defensible moats, with client data integration driving smarter algorithms and higher retention.