Zeta's AI Edge: 18th Beat-and-Raise Quarter Charts Path to Profitability

NEW YORK, NY – February 24, 2026 – Zeta Global (NYSE: ZETA) today announced a landmark achievement in its corporate history, delivering its 18th consecutive quarter of exceeding financial expectations and raising future guidance. The AI Marketing Cloud provider reported record results for the fourth quarter and full year 2025, signaling strong momentum that it expects will carry it to its first full year of GAAP profitability in 2026.

The announcement solidifies Zeta's narrative as a significant disruptor in the competitive marketing technology landscape. Full-year 2025 revenue surged to $1.3 billion, a 30% increase over the previous year. This consistent outperformance has become a hallmark for the company, providing investors with a rare degree of predictability in a volatile market.

“We delivered our 18th consecutive beat-and-raise quarter,” said David A. Steinberg, Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Zeta. “This consistent performance is not the result of a single product cycle or an easy comparison. It reflects the compounding power of our system.”

A Streak of Unprecedented Consistency

For nearly five years, Zeta Global has cultivated a reputation for under-promising and over-delivering. The fourth quarter of 2025 was no exception, with revenues reaching $394.6 million, a 25% year-over-year increase. This performance has emboldened the company to issue robust guidance for the coming year.

Zeta is now projecting full-year 2026 revenue to land between $1.749 billion and $1.762 billion, representing a year-over-year growth rate of 34% to 35%. This marks a substantial increase of $25 million at the midpoint from its previous forecast. The outlook for adjusted EBITDA is similarly bullish, with the company raising its full-year 2026 target to a range of $389.9 million to $392.1 million, reflecting a growth rate of over 40%.

Underpinning this financial predictability is a powerful customer retention and expansion engine. The company has reported a net retention rate of 120%, indicating that existing customers are not only staying but significantly increasing their spending on the platform year after year. This loyalty is a testament to the platform's perceived return on investment, which Zeta claims delivers $6 to $7 in revenue for every dollar a client spends.

“Our results continue to prove that Zeta can deliver durable, predictable and profitable growth at scale,” said Chris Greiner, Zeta’s CFO. “Our increased 2026 guidance reflects the momentum we are seeing in the business as well as the visibility and predictability of our growth.”

The AI Engine Driving Growth

At the core of Zeta's success is its sophisticated AI and a vast reservoir of proprietary data. The company's Zeta Marketing Platform (ZMP) is designed to unify customer identity, intelligence, and omnichannel activation into a single, cohesive system. Steinberg attributes the company's momentum to this integrated approach, which he believes competitors struggle to replicate.

The recent general availability of Athena by Zeta, a generative AI-powered marketing agent, marks the next evolution of this strategy. Billed as a “superintelligent marketing agent,” Athena is designed to act as an intelligent operating system for growth. It leverages a conversational interface, allowing marketers to use natural language to generate complex audience segments, launch campaigns, and derive analytical insights in minutes rather than days.

By integrating with Zeta's extensive Data Cloud and identity graph—which connects trillions of consumer signals into unified profiles—Athena can predict customer behavior and recommend next-best actions. This moves beyond simple analytics to agentic AI, where the system can proactively optimize campaigns to meet specific business goals. This focus on simplifying sophisticated marketing and automating manual tasks is central to Zeta's claim as an “AI disruptor in enterprise marketing software,” aiming to lower the barriers to enterprise-wide adoption.

While the AI marketing space is crowded with giants like Adobe and Salesforce, Zeta's strategy hinges on the power of its unified platform and proprietary data assets, which it argues provide a deeper level of intelligence and a more seamless user experience.

From Growth to Black Ink: The Profitability Milestone

A pivotal moment in the earnings announcement was the projection of positive GAAP Net Income for the full year 2026. After reporting a GAAP net loss of $31.5 million for 2025, this forecast signals a significant turning point and a key step in the company's maturation. The company already posted a positive GAAP Net Income of $6.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, demonstrating that profitability is within reach.

Achieving GAAP profitability is a critical milestone that distinguishes a company from high-growth tech firms that rely heavily on non-GAAP metrics like adjusted EBITDA to demonstrate financial health. It indicates that the business is generating enough revenue to cover all its expenses, including non-cash costs like stock-based compensation and amortization, which have historically kept its bottom line in the red.

The path to profitability is being paved by increasing operational leverage. As revenues scale, the company's cost structure is becoming more efficient. Adjusted EBITDA margins are expected to expand significantly throughout 2026, and a maturing financial profile means that dilutive expenses like stock-based compensation are representing a smaller percentage of revenue. This financial discipline, combined with sustained top-line growth, is what makes the prospect of full-year profitability a credible reality.

Building for 2028 and Beyond

Looking further ahead, Zeta also raised its ambitious long-term “Zeta 2028” targets. The company now expects to generate at least $2.3 billion in revenue by 2028, an increase from its previous target of $2.1 billion. The adjusted EBITDA target for 2028 was also lifted to at least $573 million.

A key contributor to this expanded vision is the recent acquisition of Marigold’s Enterprise Business. The deal brings over 100 global enterprise brands, including dozens of Fortune 500 companies, into the Zeta ecosystem. This not only expands Zeta's customer base but also enhances its product suite with established loyalty and engagement solutions from brands like Cheetah Digital and Sailthru.

The acquisition is strategically significant, as it strengthens Zeta's global footprint, particularly in Europe, and provides a strong foundation of subscription-based revenue. Integrating these new clients and technologies into the ZMP is expected to create substantial cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, accelerating Zeta's journey toward its 2028 goals. However, as the company scales, it will also have to navigate an increasingly complex regulatory environment surrounding AI and data privacy, a challenge for the entire marketing industry.