Yesterday, Verve hosted its first Capital Markets Day outside Europe, at Citigroup’s headquarters in New York. In our view, the headline takeaways were the reaffirmation of 2026 guidance, the decision not to restate the financial targets for the revenue recognition change, and a more substantive retail media deep dive.

Guidance reaffirmed, the sales productivity inflection is still a second-half event

Management reaffirmed its 2026 outlook of 680 to 730 MEUR revenue and 145 to 175 MEUR adjusted EBITDA, a midpoint uplift of around 17% and 19% on the comparable 2025 base. This sits comfortably with our estimates (2026 revenue of 681 MEUR and adjusted EBITDA of 162 MEUR), so we leave our forecasts unchanged. The 10 MEUR sales force investment remains an upfront drag in the first half. The team has scaled from 54 a year ago to 117, and the company is aiming at approximately 200 by Q2’27. Management described the engine built up over the past year as working well and pointed to some early signals, while setting out the leading indicators it wants to be judged on ahead of the typical nine to fifteen month seller ramp, namely customer onboarding, net dollar expansion, and sales activity. Even so, it expects the actual productivity inflection in the second half, most likely in Q4. In our view, the concentration in the second half is the main risk in the guidance, which is deliberately wide because that inflection is hard to time, and the inflection itself remains unproven.

Targets not restated for the recognition change, an avoidable overhang persists

In our latest extensive report, we flagged that the move to gross revenue recognition left the standing financial targets (30-35% EBITDA and 20-25% EBIT margins) on a stale net basis. These are now overstated against the margins reported on a gross basis, so a restatement during the CMD would have been a natural step in our view. However, management did not address this explicitly and declined to issue new medium-term targets, deferring them until the 1 BEUR revenue milestone is in sight. They conceded this milestone is easier to reach on a grossed-up basis while maintaining that the absolute ambition remains unchanged. We think the absence of a restatement prolongs an interpretability gap, since the published targets cannot be compared directly with the margins the company now reports.

A sharper equity story, though much of it was familiar

In our view, much of the strategic narrative repeated familiar ground, albeit slightly more concrete than before. Management sized the mobile open-internet opportunity at around 68 BUSD, growing at an 11% CAGR, and leaned on the same time-versus-spend gap, an open internet with roughly 69% of US consumer time but only 20% of ad spend, presented as an arbitrage that should mean-revert. We would be more cautious on that framing, since the gap has persisted for years precisely because of the structural deficiencies management itself listed, the difficulty of deploying large budgets across a fragmented supplier base, opaque supply paths, and weaker data, targeting, and measurement than the walled gardens. The bull case is therefore an execution bet on closing those gaps, not a bet that a rebalancing is simply due.

Verve positioned itself as an "Advertising Intelligence Platform" addressing them through a five-tier data framework and predictive targeting that moves intent beyond the search box. The more interesting strand was the closed-loop measurement claim, that Verve can tie spend to real outcomes, such as in-store purchases, rather than proxy metrics, across environments with and without device identifiers. This speaks to the measurement leg specifically, but management was clear that scale and supply-path cleanup remain unfinished, so we would not read it as removing the last reason for the discrepancy. It is a confident repackaging of the thesis rather than a change to it, and tellingly, the breadth of the claim outran the evidence, since the only place the closed loop was demonstrated with an outcome, the 9% sales lift and point-of-sale attribution, sat in German retail media, not in the in-app and CTV core where most of the revenue and the data flywheel reside.

Retail media offered a stronger competitive case and a first look at the economics

During the afternoon deep dive, Verve provided additional color on its retail media strategy. Management sized the retail media market at around 197 BUSD in 2026, now ahead of linear TV and the fastest-growing major channel, and framed Verve’s angle around the gaps incumbents leave open, since spend is online while most CPG sales happen in store, retailer networks cover a single chain rather than spanning several, and the path from awareness to outcome is broken. According to the company, its sofa-to-store approach answers these through a German network that spans multiple retailers, with more than 17,000 stores, 9,000 pharmacies, 830 cinemas, and around 46 million weekly contacts. This ‘compounding outcome engine’ was substantiated by pooled receipt data that feeds an AI layer, which reads category share to the postal code level and directs spend toward defending or winning new regions, with the 9% sales lift measured through a proprietary uplift methodology the company describes as independent.

The company also gave a first brief read on the economics. Campaigns run at roughly EUR 20 to 200K, sold in bundles that combine in-store screens with wallet passes and checkout coupons, at typical take rates of around 20 to 30%. Bare in-store screen CPMs are low, but attaching receipt and purchase data lifts them several-fold, to roughly USD 30 to 80, with management seeing further upside as more data is layered in. It sees the US market as broadly similar to Germany, with a US sales force already targeting CPG and pharma, and partner negotiations well advanced, though without signed contracts yet. We think this is a more defensible and better-understood proposition than we had credited, but the financial case is still incomplete, with no revenue contribution disclosed and only a modest pickup from the 2025 acquisitions reflected in guidance, the broader ramp treated as upside. We therefore continue to exclude it from our estimates while holding more conviction that the optionality is real.

Cash discussed through the securitization lens, the underlying conversion question is left open

On cash conversion, the debate we believe matters most, the day reiterated the Q1 recovery, with LTM conversion after working capital back to around 71% from the depressed 37% of 2025, and confirmed the securitization program has onboarded two further entities (Captify and Dataseat), with the ceiling set to rise, potentially in Q3, toward 125 MEUR and then 150 MEUR. This is reassuring but largely known from Q1, and on our framework, the facility is economic debt, so the added capacity is close to neutral in value terms and funds growth rather than creating it. In our view, the real proof, once again, sits in the second half. Capital allocation remains anchored in organic growth and deleveraging to below 2.5x, with M&A only if transformative, and management reaffirmed its previously communicated plans to move its domicile to Ireland and evaluate USD reporting, providing an option to pursue a direct listing in the US later on.

Thesis intact, we leave our estimates unchanged

Overall, we view the CMD as a coherent but familiar articulation of how Verve intends to compound value, codifying the trajectory we already forecast rather than removing risk from it, with the clearest progress on the credibility of the retail media initiatives. We see no need to change our estimates or view on the company. In our view, the case still rests on Verve proving itself, and the rerating waits on second-half evidence of cash conversion and a sales productivity inflection rather than on the strategic narrative, which we already credit.