Earnings Labs

Via Transportation, Inc. (VIA)

Q4 2025 Earnings Call· Fri, Feb 27, 2026

$15.38

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Transcript

Gabrielle McCaig

Management

Good morning, and welcome, everyone, to Via's Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. I'm Gabby McCaig, Via's Chief Corporate Communications Officer and Head of Investor Relations. With me today are Daniel Ramot, Via's Co-Founder and CEO; and Clara Fain, Via's Chief Financial Officer. During today's call, Daniel will review our fourth quarter 2025 business update before handing it off to Clara to discuss financial results and our guidance for the full year 2026. Daniel will end with some additional comments before opening it up to Q&A. In addition to prepared remarks on this call, additional information can be found in our investor presentation, press release and SEC filings on our Investor Relations website at investors.ridewithvia.com. Before we get started today, we wanted to draw your attention to the safe harbor statement included in our press release and investor presentation. Items we discuss today will include forward-looking statements about topics, including, but not limited to, our future financial performance, projections and management's plans and objectives for future operations. Actual results may differ materially from those presented in the forward-looking statements and are subject to risks and uncertainties described more fully in our SEC filings, including our annual report on Form 10-K. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on our assumptions as of today, February 27, 2026. Unless required by law, we undertake no obligation to update or revise these statements as a result of new information or future events. We would also like to point out that our discussion today will include certain non-GAAP financial measures in addition to, not as a substitute for, financial measures calculated in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. Definitions of these non-GAAP financial measures, along with reconciliations of non-GAAP to GAAP financial measures are provided in our press release and our investor presentation. And without further ado, I'll now hand it over to Daniel.

Daniel Ramot

Management

Thanks, Gabby, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We're delighted to report that Via delivered another exceptional quarter, exceeding expectations on both top and bottom line performance. In Q4, our revenue grew 30% year-over-year to $119 million. This was the eighth consecutive quarter with year-over-year platform revenue growth at or above 30%, highlighting Via's ability to consistently deliver rapid, durable growth. Q4 was the strongest quarter in company history for net new platform revenue. This outstanding result was driven by our relentless focus on product innovation and our ability to deliver to our customers not only the most cutting-edge technology in the market, but also the solution that best matches their needs. The number of customers on our platform grew sharply in Q4 to 821. We saw strong organic customer growth of 9% year-over-year, and we added 94 new customers through our acquisition of Downtowner, an important expansion of our platform and exciting opportunity for future growth. We also remain highly focused on maintaining our progress towards profitability. In Q4, we had the narrowest loss in Via's history at negative 6% of adjusted EBITDA margin. 2025 was an outstanding year for Via. Not only did we take the company public and acquire Downtowner, we also achieved rapid and consistent growth throughout the year and continue to invest in our product and team to support durable growth in the years to come. In 2025, we grew platform revenue 31% year-over-year to $434 million. Adjusted EBITDA improved year-over-year by 8 points to negative 8%. In Q4, we continue to win new customers at a rapid rate. We are seeing strong growth in the number of large customers who adopt our platform across the U.S. and globally, in part driven by an acceleration in the number of cities and transit agencies…

Clara Fain

Management

Thank you, Daniel. We are very pleased to wrap up our first year as a public company with another remarkable quarter. Q4 net new revenue was the strongest in the company's history, and we exceeded our revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance, showcasing our commitment to consistent execution and durable growth as we continue to capture the massive opportunity ahead of us. Now let's dive into the results. In Q4 2025, our annual run rate revenue, which is defined as our quarterly revenue multiplied by 4, was $476 million, representing a year-over-year increase of 30%. This marks our eighth consecutive quarter of 30% plus year-over-year revenue growth for our platform. Our growth continues to be fueled by exceptional strength in the United States with platform revenue up 39% year-over-year in the U.S. In Q4 2025, the number of customers leveraging our platform was 821, representing a year-over-year increase of 23%. Our year-over-year organic growth was 9%, in line with our historical range of 8% to 12%. In addition, we acquired Downtowner, our first acquisition as a public company in late December. This added 94 customers to the platform. In Q4 2025, excluding Downtowner, revenue per customer was the highest in Via's history as more customers than ever expanded their usage and adopted multiple products on our platform. We ended the quarter with 94 customers with annual run rate revenue over $1 million, a 31% year-over-year growth. In 2025, we generated 97% of revenue through recurring fees for access to the platform. Our contracts are typically multiyear, 2 to 3 years on average with additional option years. Our contracting unit is typically the vehicle, whether the contract is software or software and services, we offer bundled price per vehicle per month or per vehicle per hour. This allows our customers to easily…

Daniel Ramot

Management

Thank you, Clara. I just wanted to reiterate again how pleased we are with this quarter and the full 2025 year performance. 2025 was a banner year for Via, capped by milestones like our IPO, continued 30% plus growth and an incredible velocity of impactful product development. However, we are still in the early days of transforming the massive and hugely important public transit market, not to mention the opportunity to enable local government efficiency more broadly. And I'm confident in our ability to continue to deliver strong performance in the coming years. With that, I wanted to thank you all again and turn it back to the operator so we can take some questions.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from John DiFucci with Guggenheim Securities.

John DiFucci

Analyst

Since it's one question, I was -- I'll let someone else ask the AI question. So I'm going to go on to something here, something else. Listen, we've done a ton of work on Via. And by the way, this looks really good. So nice job on this quarter and the guide. And we've done a ton of work here on the space lately and realize there's a lot out there that you can do because your customers are public, and so they -- all that stuff is public, you just have to find it. It just takes a lot of work. We also realize in doing this, there's a lot of FUD out there that when taken out of context can be somewhat misleading. So we -- like we see Via as a software-led solutions company. Although there's some stuff out there, I think, with some investors wondering how much services comes into that. We think it's really important as Daniel did a good job explaining that today in your prepared remarks. But I think there's one large customer out there with contracts that are services. That customer, I think, also buys software from you. But I'm just curious, is this somewhat of an anomaly that is services-only contracts that aren't coupled with software? Or is it more common to see in your business?

Daniel Ramot

Management

John, thanks for the feedback and the question. You're absolutely right. That specific contract that I believe you're referring to is an anomaly, and it's an outcome of a very specific set of circumstances. Generally, we don't see anything like that in the market across the U.S. or Europe or any of our other markets. We're very focused on selling, as you said, software-enabled solutions. And as I tried to explain in my prepared remarks, as you commented, we think it's absolutely critical to the business model and other companies that have attempted to do it a different way, come in with your standard SaaS model or just insist on selling software. I don't think have been able to scale in any meaningful way. And so this is just -- in our view, this is the way to conquer this market. It's a huge market. And I think with AI coming in, some of this is looking even better than it was before as far as resilience and the opportunity, frankly, to leverage AI to deliver even better results to our customers.

John DiFucci

Analyst

And I think that the unique circumstances around that contract, I think we're fully aware of, and anyone that wants -- we have all that information that's out there. Nice job.

Daniel Ramot

Management

And thank you also for all the work that you did on that. That report was excellent and really enjoyed reading it.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Adam Hotchkiss with Goldman Sachs.

Adam Hotchkiss

Analyst · Goldman Sachs.

I guess, Daniel, to start, as you enter '26 and think about the '26 guide, how should we think about what the RFP pipeline looks like in public transit? What are the mix of deals available out there this year versus what you did in '25? And then maybe, Clara, what are the puts and takes around margins from a mix perspective, particularly on the gross margin front?

Daniel Ramot

Management

Adam, thanks. What we're seeing as far as RFPs coming out of the public transit systems, agency, cities and so forth, if I take a step back and look more broadly, it's pretty consistent year-over-year. For us, what's interesting is that the number of these opportunities today that we're able to go after versus a year ago, feels much larger because of the expansion of the solutions that we're able to provide, the scale that we're at, frankly, the IPO, I think, has really helped as well. And so we're just seeing -- of the RFPs that are coming out of the opportunities that become available, if I try to estimate what percentage of those can we go after at this stage in early '26 versus, say, early '25, it feels like a significantly larger percentage, and you're seeing that in that pipeline number that we disclosed. So you're seeing both more opportunities and then they tend to be larger opportunities just as far as you're asking about the mix. We're increasingly seeing opportunities to take over entire transit networks that we're today feel very well positioned to go after and are winning. So that's the good sign. So I think we feel very bullish about that pipeline of opportunities coming into 2026.

Clara Fain

Management

On the gross margin question, as you saw, the gross margin was consistent quarter-over-quarter, slightly up. The breakdown of the mix of customers buying services was also consistent with about 20% of our customers buying services as well as software. In the long term, we're reiterating our commitment to our 50% target. As Daniel mentioned, the services we provide are core to the business, and they're actually particularly important in the context of AI. We've discussed before that we have multiple levers to get to 50%. But we've also discovered that we have some new levers which are coming faster than expected, Adam, and one of them is AVs. Drivers represent a large chunk of our COGS, about 50%. And that alone could drive a paradigm shift that we're not really factoring into our assumptions. So all the levers are very much in place, and they will contribute over time to gross margin improvement. And in the short term, we believe that gross margin will be consistent with what we've been saying.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Josh Baer with Morgan Stanley.

Josh Baer

Analyst · Morgan Stanley.

Congrats on a strong quarter. I wanted to ask one on the AI moats that you have, but actually not on the data sets and the technology, which I think should be really clear to everyone, and you did a great job demoing that and explaining some of your proprietary data sets. So I want to approach that from a different angle that's sort of unique, I think, to Via and your end market around go-to-market. What do you have -- like how would you characterize your go-to-market moat selling into this government customer base? Maybe a couple of ways to answer like what would it take for a new entrant to effectively sell to government transportation agencies and cities? And you talk about the years of work and investment building up your current go-to-market.

Daniel Ramot

Management

Josh, thanks for the question. I totally agree. There are multiple moats from an AI perspective that we believe we have. You mentioned some of them. I think the go-to-market is probably one of the less appreciated ones. This is a very -- there are very few companies that sell certainly at any scale into this market. It's not just the government market. I think I would just kind of go one level deeper and classify it as the local government, specifically in this case, focused on transit and public transportation. And access to that market is very challenging for a number of reasons. The regulatory requirements, the process itself is tough to get through and requires a huge amount of investment. And then in the end, there's a huge element of trust and relationship and understanding the decision-makers, knowing them. We've invested over a decade in doing that. If you were to come out to the U.S. conference, mayors with us and see the relationships that we've built with mayors across the country, that's not a -- it didn't happen to us. We created this through many, many years of investment and delivering solutions to them. And I actually think our business model factors into that as well. I think if we were just selling software, we would be another software vendor that they have across a list of -- a very, very long list of software vendors by being focused on solutions, by providing them sort of wrapping that go-to-market with consulting, with engineers that support them, with people on the ground to help with the deployment, just creates a huge level of understanding between our company and these customers that then allows us to accelerate our delivery and our go-to-market.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Patrick Walravens with Citizens.

Patrick Walravens

Analyst · Citizens.

Daniel, I'm particularly interested on how you're using intelligence internally and where you see that going. And I'm sure everyone would love to hear your thoughts on Block announced last night that they're laying off 40% of their employees as they're leveraging intelligence across their country -- company. I mean I just wonder what your reaction is to that.

Daniel Ramot

Management

Thanks, Pat. That's a really interesting question. We're using -- so there's the obvious stuff. We're seeing incredible gains in efficiency and engineering. I think that's very clear. And I do think that's a paradigm shift in how our teams are working, the rate at which we're able to deliver new product. It's opening up enormous opportunities for us. And we're trying to use these tools, and I think they have been quite successful across the company. So whether it's sort of back-office operations, we've talked about before the way we respond to RFPs. These are extremely complex, I'd say, somewhat convoluted processes that often require hundreds of pages of responses very, very formal and structured. And so the ability to deploy AI to support us in that process, for example, has led to some really nice gains. So across the company, we're trying to deploy these. On the question of how does that affect headcount, I guess it depends what kind of market you are. Our feeling is that in our market, we are just scratching the surface as far as the number of customers that we're able to get to. We're just above 1%. But also within those customers, what we could offer them that at least for me, any gain in productivity that we can achieve, I would like to turn into selling more stuff to more customers faster rather than trying to use that to cut the team in any dramatic way. I guess if you're in a different market and you don't have that opportunity, then maybe that's the right calculus for you. For us, any centimeter -- percent of gain that we can get, we're just going to deliver more value to our customers and I think accelerate our penetration of this market that -- it's not easy to get into this market as I described before. So that's the opportunity that we're trying to pursue rather than necessarily using that to cut our team.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Brian Peterson with Raymond James.

Brian Peterson

Analyst · Raymond James.

Congrats on the results. So Clara, I wanted to understand on Downtowner, how we should be thinking about the financial contributions for 2026. And as we think about M&A opportunities, how does that pipeline look for the next couple of years?

Clara Fain

Management

Brian, thanks for the kind words and for the question. The Downtowner acquisition was not about the revenue contribution. We acquired them to penetrate the Destination Cities market and add 94 customers. And those customers are quite small today, but they have the potential to adopt the entire Via platform. So we're pretty bullish on that and the opportunity there and that we're very excited about. On your general question about M&A, we're particularly excited about the M&A opportunities ahead of us. There's a dislocation in the market, and our industry is not immune to that. And so we're going to continue to be very disciplined, but we're seeing lots of opportunities in the market at attractive prices.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Brad Zelnick with Deutsche Bank.

Brad Zelnick

Analyst · Deutsche Bank.

I guess just with a number of new wins in the quarter, can you tell us how regional network effects played a part in winning new business in what sounded like a strong U.S.-led quarter? And also, how are things progressing internationally?

Clara Fain

Management

Brad, thanks for the question. We were really pleased with the flywheel effect that we're seeing. I think we're sharing two new examples in the earnings today with Ohio and Illinois. And you can see we're seeing an acceleration of revenue at a much faster pace in those flywheel markets. So we have about 19 states that we consider flywheel today in the U.S. So we're getting started. And as we continue to concur more states, we should see accelerations in those markets as well. So we're pretty excited about it. And I would say this is playing out the referenceability and the flywheel effect are playing out as expected. And you can also derive that in our S&M as a percentage of revenue, which has been continuing to come down despite having a record quarter from a net new revenue perspective. You pointed out that the growth has been fueled by the U.S. The U.S. was up 39% this quarter year-over-year. So we're continuing to see really strong results in the U.S. And our pipeline is definitely reinforced up more than 50% year-over-year, reinforced by that strength in the U.S. market.

Daniel Ramot

Management

Brad, I can comment on Europe. Europe is a complex picture, a very interesting and complex one. We have some markets that are strong like the U.K. and then other markets where we're facing some headwinds like in Germany. To try to understand what's happening in Germany, maybe I'll describe the following. We first entered the market, which is typical the same as we did in the U.S. and other places with microtransit. As microtransit is adopted, what we're trying to then transition into is a state where the more and more of our platform is being adopted by those customers. So planning and then eventually that they're acquiring our entire platform. And that is for us to get to that next stage of growth, if you will, that's the transition that's required. In Germany, we were very successful in introducing microtransit. That next phase where adoption of our entire platform is becoming ubiquitous from a change perspective, a regulatory perspective, with the European structure is just proving to take longer than we would have liked, certainly and longer than it took in the U.S. So in Germany, we're just at this interim phase. We're still selling microtransit. We're trying to get to that next level of being able to sell the entire platform. And that really requires -- for that to happen, it requires our customers to change their network to reduce certain fixed routes, replace them with microtransit, combine services that have previously been siloed. That is just -- with the regulatory environment in Europe, it is just proving to be a longer process. I think it's inevitable. We're confident that it is going to happen. It just may take a little bit longer for us to break through and then hopefully see that acceleration come up again.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Alex Zukin with Wolfe Research.

Aleksandr Zukin

Analyst · Wolfe Research.

Congrats on a solid report. Maybe for Daniel and Clara for both of you, I think you both mentioned opportunities, specifically both on the new product side with some of the AI-powered software that you're introducing. And Clara, you mentioned some opportunities with the autonomous vehicle adoption that should be pretty gross margin accretive, I think maybe a little bit even sooner than what we had in our models. And I'm curious kind of how we should think about that playing out for the coming year. Obviously, we have the guidance. If you could comment on kind of where the investments are for the coming year over and above what we kind of had in our model. And how we should think about gross margin progression, particularly through the year as we look at the guidance based on those products coming to market.

Clara Fain

Management

Alex, thanks for the question. And I think you're right to point out that there are some potential step function changes to gross margin from organic efforts around AI and autonomous vehicles. The timing of those is quite interesting to think through. I would say in the very short term, we believe that gross margin will be consistent with what we're seeing, but has the potential to have step function improvement from these levers. And these levers definitely include AI products at scale where we're seeing really nice opportunities as well as the acceleration of the AV rollout with some of our AV partners. And again, we're feeling increasingly confident that, that will happen. In the future that may not be in the next quarter or 2, but it's not too distant either.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Michael Turrin with Wells Fargo.

Michael Turrin

Analyst · Wells Fargo.

You mentioned starting the year with record pipeline. You're also guiding for very stable growth throughout this year. So I was just hoping you could give us a bit more context around what drives the consistent growth profile you're expecting throughout the year, the visibility you have into what you're guiding for? And then also, how should we think about timing in this market around converting pipeline to bookings and revenue? I'm just aiming to tease a bit more around the durability of the growth profile you're expecting for investors here.

Clara Fain

Management

Thanks, Michael. That's actually an insightful question. I'm glad you asked the question. It's worth remembering the model that we're in. We are selling long-term contracts that are multiyear with committed budgets and volume kickers to our customers, meaning that as we sit today, we have over 95% visibility in our revenue guidance for the next 12 months. Meaning that most of the revenue is coming from deals that are already live, contracted or won and about to be contracted. So we have really high visibility into the guidance that we've shared. Now looking forward, we are -- the pipeline is an interesting leading indicator where we're seeing an increasing pipeline of over 50% starting this year. It takes on average 9 to 10 months from a deal to get from opportunity creation to close. So that pipeline on average should convert throughout the year, but really towards the second half of the year, and it's really a good indicator for the demand that we're seeing for 2027. That's how we think about it internally. Obviously, it's on us to execute on the pipeline with the existent win rates to be able to deliver the durability of the growth, but the leading indicator is there.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Jonathan Ho with William Blair.

Jonathan Ho

Analyst · William Blair.

Congratulations on the strong quarter. I just wanted to understand a little bit more about AI Labs and the opportunity that you see sort of with that launch. And what sort of drove the decision? Like what are customers specifically focused on achieving with AI?

Daniel Ramot

Management

Thanks, Jonathan. Really appreciate the question. It's been -- for a very long time, we've been thinking that the access that we have to our customers at the highest levels of municipal decision-making is pretty unique and something that we should be able to leverage to diversify and grow into other areas. The challenge has always been that there's so much to do in our own space in transit, so many new products to build, solutions to develop that we've never quite had the bandwidth to do that and go into these other areas, and we want to remain very focused. What we're seeing with AI and this acceleration in our ability to build product very, very quickly is that all of a sudden, we have a way in a scalable way, not just one-off things that we then can't scale to build solutions that extend beyond transit. And we are hearing from our customers in many conversations that in addition to transit, they're saying to us, if you could do what you did for us in transit in the way we -- I mean, I'll just throw out a couple of examples, the way that we process small business applications, how we deal with sanitation, that would be transformational. And no one else is really doing that for us and no one understands these needs. These are conversations anywhere from mayors to city managers, city council members, but all the way down to staff. And so we've seen these opportunities. I think what's unique about this period is that we have the ability to go after them in a way that I think can be very successful and scalable. And so that's what we're trying to do.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Scott Berg with Needham & Company.

Scott Berg

Analyst · Needham & Company.

Congrats on a really nice quarter. I wanted to focus on the gross retention metric at 98% that you said was your best ever, certainly would be one of the best in my coverage universe today. But did you do anything different in 2025 to help power those results? And how do we think about your assumptions around gross retention into your '26 guidance?

Clara Fain

Management

Thanks, Scott. Thanks for the question. We've been executing at very high levels of gross revenue retention forever. So part of it is the mission criticality of the platform. But I think this quarter, we reached a record high gross revenue retention, particularly because our customers are benefiting from the entire platform. So as we sell more products to our customers, we are seeing an increasing gross revenue retention with these customers, and it just increases the strength of the platform. So as we think about why we're getting to these levels of retention, I think it definitely comes back to the ubiquity of the platform and our ability to sell more products to these customers and having them benefit from them as we continue to scale.

Operator

Operator

This concludes the question-and-answer session and we will conclude today's conference call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.