Earnings Labs

Nerdy, Inc. (NRDY)

Q4 2025 Earnings Call· Thu, Feb 26, 2026

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon. Thank you for attending Nerdy, Inc.'s Q4 2025 earnings call. My name is Tamia, and I will be your moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. I will now pass the conference over to your host, T.J. Lynn, Associate General Counsel of Nerdy, Inc. You may proceed.

T.J. Lynn

Management

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for Nerdy, Inc.'s fourth quarter 2025 earnings call. With me are Chuck Cohn, Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of Nerdy, Inc., and Jason H. Pello, Chief Financial Officer. Before I turn the call over to Chuck, I will remind everyone that this discussion will contain forward-looking statements including, but not limited to, expectations with respect to Nerdy, Inc.'s future financial and operating results, strategy, opportunities, plans, and outlook. These forward-looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expected results. Any forward-looking statements are made as of today's date, and Nerdy, Inc. does not undertake or accept any obligation to publicly release any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in expectations or any change in events, conditions, or circumstances on which any such statement is based. Please refer to the disclaimers in today's shareholder letter announcing Nerdy, Inc.'s fourth quarter results and the company's filings with the SEC for a discussion of the risks. Not all of the financial measures that we will discuss today are prepared in accordance with GAAP. Please refer to today's shareholder letter for reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures. With that, I will turn the call over to Chuck.

Chuck Cohn

Management

Thanks, TJ, and thank you to everyone for joining today's call. In the fourth quarter, I am pleased to share we delivered on the three goals we set entering 2025: return the business to growth, accelerate our transformation into an AI-native platform, and achieve positive non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA. Fourth quarter revenue was $49.1 million, above the top end of guidance and up 2% year over year. This is the first quarter since 2024 in which both our consumer and institutional businesses grew simultaneously. Non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA was positive $1.3 million, beating our guidance range of negative $2 million to breakeven and improving by $6.8 million from Q4 2024. We completed the rollout of our new learner and expert experiences in the fourth quarter with an AI-native code base and entered 2026 with a stronger, more flexible foundation, improved unit economics, and significantly higher product development velocity. Zooming out, we get a lot of questions about how AI is changing how we think about our business and our industry. The demand signals we are seeing and the conversations we are having with customers indicate that the market for high-quality, personalized, one-on-one tutoring remains large and enduring, and it represents a big opportunity for us to better serve and reach these learners. Roughly 50 million students progress through the K-12 education system and higher education system in the United States each year, and families seek premium private tutoring for meaningful long-term goals whether it is the first grader learning to read with a specialist, a high school junior aiming for an elite college, or a college student fighting to stay on the path to medical school and get past organic chemistry. These are deeply personal journeys where sustained human connection, accountability, expertise, rapport, trust, and a little pushing can go a long…

Jason H. Pello

Management

Thanks, Chuck, and good afternoon, everyone. Nerdy, Inc. finished the year with substantial operating momentum as we head into 2026. Fourth quarter revenue and adjusted EBITDA were all above consensus expectations. Nerdy, Inc. delivered its third consecutive quarter of sequential improvement in year-over-year growth rates, culminating in a return to positive revenue growth for the first time since 2024. Revenue of $49.1 million was well ahead of our guidance range of $45 million to $47 million, representing an increase of 2% year over year from $48 million during the same period in 2024. As Chuck mentioned, revenue increased when compared to the prior year due to both higher consumer and institutional revenue. Within consumer revenue, learning memberships revenue of $41.6 million represented a 6% increase year over year and 85% of total company revenues. This was partially offset by a specific state-funded consumer revenue program of $2 million in Q4 2024 that did not recur in 2025. The current year period was positively impacted by higher ARPAM in our consumer business as a result of the mix shift towards higher-frequency learning memberships coupled with price increases for new consumer customers enacted during 2025. These changes are delivering higher retention in newer cohorts due primarily to improvements in the user experience and investments in expert pay and incentives. As of December 31, ARPAM was $364, representing a 21% increase year over year, and there were 33,200 active members. As Chuck mentioned, during the fourth quarter, we completed the rollout of our new learner and expert user experiences that we believe will drive retention improvements and further accelerate growth. Our institutional business delivered revenue of $7.2 million and represented 14% of total company revenue during the fourth quarter. Varsity Tutors for Schools executed 56 contracts, yielding quarterly bookings of $4.1 million, a…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. If for any reason at all you would like to remove your question, please press star followed by two. Again, to ask a question, please press star one. The first question comes from Ryan McDonald with Needham. You may proceed.

Ryan McDonald

Analyst

Hi, Chuck and Jason. Congrats on a nice quarter here, and thanks for taking my question. Chuck, maybe to start, great to hear about some of the completion of the rebuild and the rollout of the new platform, and obviously good to see some of the positive feedback from the survey in January. As you think about how these improvements translate into the fundamental profile, is there anything you can tell us in terms of how this might be impacting the number of sessions or engagement with the learner so far as they are engaging with the new platform and how that might be helping retention as we go throughout the year?

Chuck Cohn

Management

Sure. And thanks, Ryan. Good question. So the way that we sort of thought about this was you effectively had a legacy system that we built over time. I have been doing this a while, and at some point, it started to slow us down a bit. So independent of AI or anything else, we had tech that limited the flexibility of the system, and inevitably, there was a cost associated with that tech, so to speak, with the pace at which we could move, and some things were harder than others. What we were able to do last year was not only get over that tech debt hump, but also put ourselves in a position where the platform was a completely new code base for the consumer and for the learner- and expert-facing aspects of the platform, so that is the authenticated, logged-in experience combined with our live learning platform. We are then in a position where effectively anything going forward is something that we can do much, much faster. So we can give more flexibility, the code base is built in such a way where we can better leverage identified processes, and the whole build process gets better. So we would expect to see it pull through to much more engagement. The way I think about it is at the time of launch, it was like a parity-plus: a brand-new platform that did the same thing for customers and we removed friction. But what we have done over the course of the last couple of months, and what we will be doing throughout the course of the year, is really deepening the relationship. So there are certain things that we are now able to do much better and more immersively and more thoughtfully as it relates to the particular context so that when, say, a tutoring session ends, the exact right information that summarizes it, identifies next action items, sends information to the parents, and leads to the next additional study plan augmentation—all these things just happen automatically now through the ability to better leverage context tools and identified processes. That is kicking off. So the early signs feel really good, but the most important thing is that we are running like 10 times faster. So that is where I think we feel really good about how much faster we can build, and there is an opportunity to delight customers in ways we just frankly have not been able to before, so it is fun. We are feeling really encouraged. We had a great quarter, and we feel like we are entering the year with a lot of momentum.

Ryan McDonald

Analyst

That is great to hear. I appreciate all the additional color there. In terms of net new learning members and potential to add there as we go throughout the year, I am curious—there have been a lot of changes in the search environment, with Google releasing some algorithm changes with Andromeda. How are you navigating the new landscape and driving discoverability as the search landscape continues to evolve?

Chuck Cohn

Management

Yeah. We feel really good about the top-of-funnel trends, actually. There is obviously non-commercial traffic that perhaps is down broadly, but as it relates to commercial traffic—people looking for tutoring and potential services—we are seeing good trends. We feel like we can optimize the entire funnel better than we ever could before, and our ability to then actually make each different subject—and there are about 3,000 or so subjects that we track on the platform—more compelling, more relevant, and more personalized was an incredibly hard problem previously, and we are much better able to do that now. The product is becoming more compelling, which then lends itself to better conversion at the top of the funnel and then better retention once people actually join the platform. So the top-of-funnel trends from a customer acquisition perspective look healthy, and from our perspective, it looks like a big opportunity to better serve customers this year.

Ryan McDonald

Analyst

Awesome. Appreciate the color. Thanks again.

Chuck Cohn

Management

Thanks, Ryan. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your line.