Friday, November 13th, 2026 – 12:00 pm
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Ready for Liftoff?
The mobile growth marketing platform reported its second-ever quarterly earnings on Thursday after the market closed. Shares were up by almost 25% overnight after the company exceeded its revenue target and projected an optimistic profit margin outlook moving forward.
Liftoff earned $237.5 million in Q3 2026, up from $179.5 million during the same period last year. And Liftoff delivered what investors really like to see: It earned $86.7 million in profit in the quarter, after taking a $5.7 million loss in Q3 a year ago.
Liftoff is pitching itself to Wall Street as riding two tailwinds.
There’s the overall growth of the mobile economy, to which the company’s growth is pegged; that growth is being boosted by an influx of AI-generated apps.
And, secondly, there are the outsized revenue gains Liftoff earns through AI advancement compared to the relatively low investment the company must shell out for AI and data infrastructure.
LLMs are great at coding apps and are thus “lowering the barrier” for companies or individuals to churn out a serviceable app, Liftoff CEO Jeremy Bondy told investors. “In the first half of this year alone, new apps released in the Apple App Store doubled versus the prior year to roughly 560,000.”
Each of these new apps has its own demand for new users. “For Liftoff, that means more demand for user acquisition,” Bondy said.
AI products are also separately “changing where search and discovery starts” for consumers, he said.
For one thing, that means “answering more questions without sending people to a website,” Bondy said. And that new dynamic – where the open web is no longer a reliable traffic and user acquisition vehicle – incentivizes businesses to invest more into their own apps, where they still can “build direct relationships with their customers,” he added.
AI search isn’t the only thing putting pressure on the open web when it comes to user acquisition. Apple’s iOS 27 machinations are also a drag on cross-site user tracking.
AppLovin, which reported earnings a week ago, said that Apple’s obscure plan to stamp out web tracking for all iOS devices will shift marketing budgets from the mobile web to mobile apps.
And Bondy added some color, arguing that the mobile app advertising market is “drastically under-monetized” right now at about seven cents per hour, in terms of average earnings per attention time. That’s less than a sixth of what TV earns. Which means plenty of room for growth.
Speaking of growth opportunities, there is also the fact that mobile marketing gains have, to date, mostly accrued to mobile gaming apps, Bondy said.
Gaming is a category dominated by AppLovin, which is about 40x times bigger than Liftoff, in terms of the market cap. But more than half of Liftoff’s business is outside gaming
Gaming apps are a valuablefork over money when they’re using an app (rather than just being blasted by ads without making a purchase)
“Someone who spends money in a game is also a potential high-value customer for a retailer, a social media app or a streaming service,” he said. And those are the categories in which Liftoff is positioned to grow, he said, as AppLovin has in the gaming space.
However, those nongaming apps are more prone to seasonal fluctuations than gaming apps. Which can be a good or bad thing, depending on how revenue is currently ebbing and flowing.
For instance, Liftoff rode the momentum from the FIFA World Cup and is seeing a similar surge for the NFL season, as advertisers are investing more in live sports. But it’s like surfing waves as they come, rather than riding a predictable cycle of consumer engagement ups and downs.
But Bondy noted that Liftoff has been able to convert periodic or event-based customers (like a marketer investing in promoting their app around the World Cup) into steadier, higher-spending accounts.
Liftoff had 396 customers who spent more than $100,000 in the past 12 months, Bondy said. That’s up from 362 customers at the same time last year.
Another important factor from the investor perspective is that Liftoff benefits from the AI revolution without having to financially support it.
Bondy said Liftoff has been able to greatly refine its ad targeting and personalization on the back of AI advances. The models are better at identifying a big spender from a retailer app, which makes that user a more valuable target in a gaming app, for example.
The models also now have greater longitudinal data, so they’re better at understanding long-term trends and how ROI develops over a year or more. However, the campaign returns from the week immediately after the budgets are spent are still the most important data for the model’s decision-making, Bondy said.
Meanwhile, he added, Liftoff’s profit margin expansion in the past year was propelled by the company’s relatively low cost of infrastructure and AI services. The company’s entire capital expenditures (which encompass AI and data infrastructure costs) for Q3 was $14 million, or approximately 6% of revenue.
In contrast, some companies that Liftoff competes with in mobile performance marketing (namely, Meta and Google) have committed hundreds of billions of dollars to their capex expenses.
“As a reminder, our business is capital light,” Bondy told investors yesterday – and he periodically reminded them of this fact throughout the call.
Bondy also reminded investors that Liftoff will be discontinuing its reporting of “Core Advertising” revenue going forward because advertising is now almost the entirety of the company’s business. And Liftoff has dropped the other (more expensive and subscription software-based) parts of its business, like a mobile ad network (perhaps you recall Vungle, which turned into Liftoff five years ago), and game developer analytics toolkit (an acquisition of GameRefinery).
Liftoff’s Core Advertising revenue segment earned $237 million of the company’s $237.5 in total earnings for Q3. Which illustrates why it no longer sees any need to break ads out as a separate line item.
And Bondy sees nothing but green fields ahead for AI-optimized advertising.
“Broadening the horizons in which we’re optimizing for our advertisers,” he said, “there is just a tremendous amount of space for us to continue to grow this business.”
