Bandwidth Q1 2026 Earnings Call - AI Infrastructure Plays Critical Role in Record Revenue Beat
Summary
Bandwidth delivered a historic first quarter, posting record revenue of $209 million and raising full-year guidance. The company is capitalizing on a structural shift where AI voice agents are moving from pilot to production, driving demand for its owned global network and Maestro orchestration layer. Management emphasized a land-and-expand model where deeper integration into enterprise workflows, highlighted by a new critical infrastructure partnership with Salesforce for its Agentforce platform, increases usage-based revenue per interaction. Strong momentum in financial services and messaging further validates the platform's role as mission-critical infrastructure for the AI-driven enterprise.
Financial results exceeded expectations across the board, with 20% year-over-year revenue growth and a raise in full-year total revenue guidance to $880-$900 million. The company highlighted a 67% sequential increase in software services ARR, signaling a shift toward higher-margin, embedded revenue streams. Despite typical Q1 seasonality in messaging, commercial demand remained robust, and the enterprise pipeline for large-scale deals positions the company for second-half acceleration. Management maintains a disciplined capital allocation strategy, focusing on debt reduction and share repurchases while investing in the AI moat.
Key Takeaways
- Record Q1 2026 revenue of $209 million, up 20% year-over-year, driven by strong demand in both voice and messaging solutions.
- Full-year 2026 guidance raised: Total revenue now expected to be $880-$900 million (up from $864-$884 million), with adjusted EBITDA raised to $119-$125 million.
- Strategic partnership with Salesforce: Bandwidth selected as critical infrastructure partner for Salesforce Agentforce Contact Center, embedding its communications cloud into governed CRM workflows.
- AI voice agents moving from pilot to production: Management cites a marked acceleration in AI-influenced voice usage, leveraging the owned network's ultra-low latency and reliability.
- Strong enterprise pipeline: Secured two new million-dollar-plus deals in financial services and insurance, replacing legacy telecom providers and integrating AI-driven customer engagement.
- Software services momentum: Software services revenue nearly doubled year-over-year, with sequential ARR exit rate growing 67% to $25 million, highlighting higher-margin, embedded revenue growth.
- Messaging business defies seasonality: Programmable messaging revenue rose 15% year-over-year in Q1, exceeding expectations despite typical Q1 headwinds, driven by commercial consumer brands.
- Usage-based model scales with AI: Revenue per interaction is increasing as AI drives more complex, high-volume workflows, with Bandwidth capturing value through multiple usage components.
- Near-zero churn and high retention: Customer name retention remains above 99%, with adjusted commercial net retention at 110% and average annual revenue per customer hitting a record $244,000.
- Capital allocation discipline: Deployed $11 million in share repurchases and $100 million in convertible note buybacks, maintaining a leverage ratio under 1.25x while supporting growth investments.
- Global network as moat: Management emphasizes the durable advantage of owning the underlying global communications network, which is essential for carrier-grade reliability and regulatory compliance in AI deployments.
- Second-half inflection expected: Large-scale enterprise deals currently in the pipeline are partially deployed and expected to ramp significantly in H2 2026, driving further revenue acceleration.
Full Transcript
Conference Operator, Conference Moderator: Good morning, and welcome to the Bandwidth’s first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the Star key followed by 0. After today’s presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press Star then 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press Star then 2. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ankit Hira of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Ankit Hira, Investor Relations, Bandwidth Inc.: Good morning, welcome to Bandwidth’s 1st quarter 2026 earnings call. I’m joined today by David Morken, our CEO, and Daryl Raiford, our CFO. They will begin with prepared remarks, then we will open up the call for Q&A. Our earnings press release was issued earlier today. The press release and an earnings presentation with historical financial highlights and a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial results can be found on the investor relations page at investors.bandwidth.com. During the call, we will make statements related to our business that may be considered forward-looking, including statements concerning our financial guidance for the full year 2026. We caution you not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements as they may involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to vary materially from any future results or outcomes expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements.
Any forward-looking statements made on this call and in the presentation slides reflect our analysis as of today, and we have no plans or obligation to update them. For a discussion of material risk and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to those contained in our latest 10-K filing as updated by other SEC filings. With that, let me turn the call over to David.
David Morken, Chief Executive Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: Thank you, and welcome everyone. Bandwidth has entered 2026 with historic momentum. In the 1st quarter, we exceeded our expectations with record revenue of $209 million, up 20% year-over-year, and record 1st quarter adjusted EBITDA of $26 million. Based on this performance, we are raising our full-year outlook. These results represent far more than a quarterly beat. They are a definitive proof point of our structural advantage in a technology sector undergoing a profound transformation. Our global communications cloud and Maestro orchestration layer are essential infrastructure that make Voice AI possible. Bandwidth is flourishing as the mission-critical foundation for the AI-driven enterprise. Thank you to our customers for growing and innovating with us and to our bandmates for your amazing work. I thank God for giving this team the opportunities to serve together.
We are executing against a clear strategy to power mission-critical communications for the AI-driven enterprise. For voice AI to succeed in production, it requires ultra-low latency, carrier-grade reliability, and deep regulatory control capabilities that only a company that owns the underlying network can provide. This is our moat. It creates durable advantages in economics and performance that are impossible for virtual providers to replicate. We are no longer just enabling AI, we are orchestrating it. Through our Maestro platform, we participate in every interaction, allowing us to capture more value as customer usage grows. As AI increases the frequency and complexity of interactions, our model allows us to grow revenue per interaction, not just per minute. We are seeing this play out as customers deploy AI into their live workflows and rely upon our platform to support mission-critical interactions. A key example is our expanded partnership with Salesforce.
We recently announced that Salesforce selected Bandwidth as their critical infrastructure partner to power voice and messaging for their groundbreaking new Agentforce Contact Center platform. Salesforce is fundamentally re-architecting the contact center for the AI era, bringing together their customer data, digital engagement, and agentic AI capabilities into a single AI-first platform. In Salesforce’s vision, Agentforce Contact Center becomes a native execution layer for CRM. This gives enterprises a single source of truth to achieve faster, more intelligent customer engagement. Salesforce is a longtime customer, and to realize its bold vision for Agentforce, they turned to Bandwidth once again as their critical infrastructure partner. Only we are able to deliver the unique combination of network ownership, real-time orchestration, and global regulatory expertise required to support Agentforce’s high volume AI-driven interactions. This is the result of our years of powering hyperscalers and all the Gartner leaders in CCaaS and UCaaS.
In our partnership, Salesforce has embedded Bandwidth’s communications cloud directly into their governed workflows, enabling the control, observability, and integration depth required for agentic interactions at scale. This is significant for two reasons. First, it adds CRM as a new category of platforms we power. In addition to CCaaS, UCaaS, and conversational AI leaders, we are now partnered with the leading CRM platform as it becomes the system of execution for customer engagement. This expands our total addressable market and positions us to capture meaningful share as CRM platforms take on a larger role in customer interactions. Second, it reinforces our emerging role as critical infrastructure embedded inside governed workflows, where every interaction represents a unit of usage and value creation. This is a blueprint for how we expand value by embedding deeper into core enterprise systems and participating in more workflows on our platform.
As Agentforce adoption grows, we believe revenue will build over time. With AI becoming the primary interface for customer engagement, the traditional contact center stack is being re-architected around agentic workflows. We have a long history of working closely with the leading CCaaS providers, and they continue to innovate and invest in exciting new AI capabilities. The evolution of the category will expand the range of platforms enterprises can choose from, and Bandwidth is positioned to support them all. Our open platform strategy ensures that regardless of which application or AI provider an enterprise selects, Bandwidth remains the underlying communications infrastructure. We’re seeing this same need for mission-critical infrastructure play out in highly regulated industries, particularly in financial services, where we’ve secured large wins over several consecutive quarters, including 2 new million-dollar plus deals.
The first is with a leading U.S. consumer financial services company that has over 70 million active accounts. This customer selected Bandwidth to replace its legacy telecom provider and migrate its contact center to the cloud through our Maestro integration with Genesys and our ultra-reliable Call Assure toll-free voice solution. Our solution delivers the reliability, control, and integration they needed while also enabling their transition to AI-driven customer engagement. We’re now positioned for significant expansion as the customer integrates AI into the next phase of their customer experience transformation. Our second million-dollar plus deal during the quarter is with one of the largest mutual life insurance companies in the world. This customer selected Bandwidth to replace a long-standing legacy carrier. Like many enterprises in regulated industries, this customer required both performance and trust, areas where our owned network and integrated platform provide a clear advantage.
Their comprehensive customer experience transformation leverages our Maestro integration with Genesys, our Call Assure toll-free voice, and our trust services, including call verification and number reputation management. Cost savings from modernization are being reinvested into new AI services, which could further increase usage on our platform, redirecting spend away from legacy systems and toward more intelligent, scalable customer engagement with Bandwidth. These examples demonstrate our continued strong momentum in financial services, where scalability, compliance, and resiliency are non-negotiable. Standardizing on Bandwidth enables best-in-class integrations, intelligent call routing, built-in failover, and a clear path to deploying new AI services. This is a land and expand model where initial platform wins immediately demonstrate Bandwidth’s value proposition, leading to higher usage, increased software attachment, and long-term durable revenue growth.
We’re seeing a similar dynamic play out in our messaging business, where enterprises need a robust, reliable platform partner to scale real-time customer engagement across digital channels. During the first quarter, we won an additional high-volume messaging customer with major consumer brands across the retail and restaurant verticals. This customer reached a level of throughput where their previous large provider could no longer meet their requirements and switched to Bandwidth for our proven delivery performance and ability to scale, particularly as they manage tens of millions of messages per month across short code, 10DLC, and toll-free channels. As they add new AI workflows to automate campaign management and customer interactions, Bandwidth’s messaging platform and campaign registration tools ensure reliable execution. This example shows how we’re extending the same land and expand model into messaging.
As customers grow and scale their engagement, activity flows directly through our platform, driving revenue and margin performance over time. In addition to our customer acquisition success in voice and messaging, we are increasingly supporting a growing ecosystem of AI developers building vertical applications on top of our platform. We’re seeing continued momentum in this space with developers building agentic solutions across a wide variety of use cases, from restaurants and hospitality to healthcare, home services, and customer support, where real-time voice and messaging are central to the customer experience. These AI app developers are choosing Bandwidth for the same reasons as our enterprise customers. The ultra-low latency, reliability, and scalability required to run AI applications in production, along with the orchestration capabilities of Maestro. As enterprises increasingly adopt verticalized applications built by third-party developers, Bandwidth becomes the essential communications layer, powering additional usage on our platform.
In summary, we are the mission-critical communications platform for AI-driven enterprises. First, we are executing against a clear and consistent strategy to power mission-critical communications for the AI-driven enterprise, and we are seeing this focus translate into large enterprise adoption across our platform. Second, we are expanding our role inside governed customer workflows as AI moves into production. Third, we are scaling a business model that drives increasing usage, expands revenue per customer, and delivers exceptional incremental gross profit growth. Taken together, we are positioned as the mission-critical communications platform for AI-driven enterprises. I’ll turn it over to Darryl to walk through the financial details of the quarter.
Daryl Raiford, Chief Financial Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: Thank you, David, and good morning, everyone. Bandwidth’s 2026 is off to a historic start. Our first quarter performance was exceptionally strong, with demand for both voice and messaging exceeding our projections and driving results above the top end of our guidance ranges. This robust momentum across all key financial metrics, including revenue, gross profit, adjusted EBITDA, non-GAAP earnings per share, and free cash flow, has given us the confidence to raise our financial guidance for the full year. Our market performance and execution underscore the depth of our competitive moat and the resilience of our business model as we continue to scale our cloud communications platform and drive long-term value for our shareholders. Diving into our first quarter 2026 results, total revenue was $209 million, an increase of 20% year-over-year.
Cloud Communications revenue, which is total revenue less messaging surcharge revenue of $59 million, reached $150 million, a 13% year-over-year increase, driven by growth across our core communications platform. non-GAAP gross profit of $89 million increased 14% year-over-year and marked another quarter of improving gross profit yield on incremental Cloud Communications revenue. non-GAAP gross margin improved 50 basis points to 59.5%, illustrating the structural margin advantage of our unique global owned and operated communications platform. Adjusted EBITDA grew by 17% to $26 million, driven by gross profit growth and the scale of higher revenue across our operating expense base.
Non-GAAP earnings per share rose to $0.38, representing 6% growth, and operating cash flow grew significantly to yield essentially break-even free cash flow, representing a marked year-over-year improvement despite the typical first quarter working capital cycle. Focusing on our first quarter cloud communications revenue growth, both voice and Programmable Messaging solutions exceeded our expectations. For our voice solutions, we reported revenue of $121 million, growing 12%. Both of our voice market categories contributed towards the total voice growth. Within our Global Voice Plans category, we saw broad-based demand producing revenue growth of 12% year-over-year, underscoring both the strength and durability of our installed customer base and the tailwind of AI-influenced voice usage. For our Enterprise Voice category, revenue grew 14% year-over-year to $13 million.
Growth was driven by both recent customer additions and increasing momentum as enterprises scale on our Maestro platform. In Programmable Messaging, revenue rose 15% year-over-year to approximately $30 million. This performance exceeded our projections, particularly given the typical first quarter seasonal headwinds we often encounter. Turning to our operating metrics, our reported net retention rate for the first quarter was 102%. Adjusted to normalize the cyclical political campaign revenue impact, our commercial net retention rate was a healthy 110%. We believe this adjusted view more accurately reflects underlying organic commercial demand and customer expansion. Customer name retention remained well above 99%, indicating near zero customer churn, a remarkable and unique track record that we expect to continue.
Average annual revenue per customer reached a new high of $244,000, reflecting the mission-critical nature of our platform and deep integration with our customers. Taken together, these metrics demonstrate continued expansion within our existing customer base as customers increase their usage, adopt more of our services, and deepen their reliance on our platform. In the first quarter, we progressed our balanced capital allocation strategy. We deployed approximately $11 million in cash to mitigate share dilution by 700,000 shares while repurchasing $100 million in aggregate principal of our 2028 convertible notes at a discount to par. This resulted in a long-term debt leverage ratio of less than 1.25 times. Shares acquired under our $80 million repurchase authorization were purchased at an average price of $15.93.
Looking ahead, we intend to maintain this opportunistic approach, prioritizing debt reduction and dilution management while remaining steadfast in our commitment to prudent cash flow management and a strong, flexible balance sheet. Turning to our second quarter 2026 outlook, we expect revenue to be in the range of $214 million-$220 million, representing 20% growth year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $24 million-$27 million, representing 20% growth year-over-year. non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of $0.35-$0.37. Turning to our improving full year outlook, we are raising our full year 2026 guidance to reflect the first quarter beat and continued demand strength. Our positive outlook for the remainder of the year is underpinned by three significant growth catalysts.
First, the transition of AI-driven traffic into high volume production. We are seeing a marked acceleration in our global voice category as AI voice agents move beyond the pilot phase into full-scale deployment. This organic growth is generating volume that leverages the carrier-grade reliability and ultra-low latency of our owned network, further expanding our competitive moat. Second, a robust enterprise pipeline poised for a second half inflection. We expect growth to accelerate as our record pipeline of large-scale deals completes onboarding. Our role as a mission-critical partner is validated by Salesforce selecting Bandwidth to power Agentforce alongside our significant million-dollar-plus wins in financial services this quarter. These partnerships cement our position as the foundational infrastructure for next-generation engagement. Third, the continued expansion of high-margin software services. As enterprises integrate more deeply with our platform, they are increasingly adopting unique services within the Bandwidth communications cloud.
During the quarter, software services revenue nearly doubled year-over-year, with its sequential ARR exit rate growing 67% to $25 million. This provides a powerful tailwind for both long-term business durability and incremental profitability as we scale. We now expect for the full year 2026 total revenue to be in the range of $880 million-$900 million, representing 18% growth year-over-year at the midpoint, compared to our prior range of $864 million-$884 million. Within total revenue, we expect Cloud Communications to be in the range of $616 million-$624 million, representing 10% growth year-over-year at the midpoint.
Adjusted EBITDA outlook to be in the range of $119 million-$125 million, representing 31% growth year-over-year at the midpoint, compared to our prior range of $117 million-$123 million. Non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of $1.77-$1.83, representing growth of 26% year-over-year at the midpoint, compared to our prior range of $1.66-$1.74. Additional modeling details underlying our full year 2026 outlook are as follows. We expect net interest expense to be in the range of $1 million-$3 million. Depreciation expense to be in the range of $38 million-$42 million.
Adjusted effective tax rate to be in the range of 20%-21%. Weighted average diluted shares outstanding of approximately 35 million. For capital expenditures, we expect these to be in the range of $24 million-$26 million. With that, I’ll now turn the call over to the operator for Q&A.
Conference Operator, Conference Moderator: Thank you. We’ll now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. If you’re using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then 2. In the interest of time, please limit yourself to 1 question and 1 follow-up. At this time, we’ll pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from Erik Suppiger from B. Riley Securities. Please go ahead.
Erik Suppiger, Analyst, B. Riley Securities: Yeah, thanks for taking the question. Congrats on a solid quarter there. Can you speak a little bit about some of the developments going on with some of the frontier model providers like Google and OpenAI in terms of their advances in their ability to support AI voice technologies? If that’s.
Daryl Raiford, Chief Financial Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: Certainly, Erik, and thanks for.
Erik Suppiger, Analyst, B. Riley Securities: Is that making a difference to Bandwidth?
Daryl Raiford, Chief Financial Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: Certainly. Thanks for joining, Erik. There are a number of these announcements just in the last 10 days. I think most recently, the voice model that Grok came out with, before that Gemini, OpenAI. These models are focused on improving the text-to-speech, speech-to-text legacy experience that has a number of different challenges associated with it. We’re excited about the voice focus that the frontier models have. It really does accelerate lots of the performance and quality for voice agents, and that is very favorable as a tailwind for our platform and our approach to serving voice agents globally on our platform.
Erik Suppiger, Analyst, B. Riley Securities: Are they putting much behind marketing those services? Are you fully capable of integrating with those services?
Daryl Raiford, Chief Financial Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: On the first point, they have been very forthright and expansive in talking about the new voice-focused models. In fact, one of them talked about it displacing one of their sister company’s contact center legacy experience in resolving 70% of tickets in the contact center environment just with that voice model last week. These things have just been announced. There’s no reason that we shouldn’t be able to support voice agents utilizing these models fully, and that they will complement the quality that we offer for PSTN delivery of voice agent experiences, again, across 80 countries plus.
Erik Suppiger, Analyst, B. Riley Securities: Very good. Thank you.
Daryl Raiford, Chief Financial Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: Thank you, Erik.
Conference Operator, Conference Moderator: Our next question comes from Patrick Walravens from Citizens. Please go ahead.
Patrick Walravens, Analyst, Citizens: Thank you. Dave, congratulations to you and all the bandmates. Really fantastic. 2 questions. I guess one’s a follow-up. First of all, can you tell us a little bit more about the Salesforce partnership? In your remarks, you talked about how they’re fundamentally re-architecting the contact center. Tell us a little bit more about that and where you fit in. Also, are customers buying into
David Morken, Chief Executive Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: The way they’re fundamentally re-architecting the contact center. Hey, Pat. Thanks. Appreciate the congrats, and want to congratulate our Chief Operating Officer, Devesh Agarwal, for delivering fantastic results with all of our bandmates. To answer your question on Salesforce.
Patrick Walravens, Analyst, Citizens: Yeah.
David Morken, Chief Executive Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: I think the team at Salesforce, Marc Benioff, the longtime founder and CEO, and their whole team have a compelling vision for every sales call to be a conference call. That vision of having an agent aware of all the context of your customer experience is powerful. We believe in it as well. When we say that they are absolutely challenging the legacy assumptions around contact center, it’s more like a context center now, where an agent is both fully aware of all your needs, wants, wishes, your sentiment, and can share or suggest or complement or correct a sales rep or an operations representative of your company in real time. It is a revolution. No question about it.
Their headless approach just last week saying that they’re taking the face off the UI and allowing agents to directly engage with the system of execution within their CRM Salesforce platform. It’s powerful. I don’t think that it can be overstated very easily. In terms of the second part of your question, Pat, are companies embracing this? I don’t think companies have a choice. The level of intelligence that is now going to be available to real-time customer interactions through an approach like Agentforce is taking is differentiated. It is competitively ahead of its peer group and cohort, and I think everyone will follow.
Patrick Walravens, Analyst, Citizens: All right. Fantastic. For my follow-up, if someone does, you know, if you have a big airline or a big bank or whatever, that decides that they’re gonna move forward with Salesforce on their new approach, how does Bandwidth make money? What are the dynamics there?
David Morken, Chief Executive Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: You bet. Great question. We make money on a usage-based model based on interactions. We are powering in announcement already every one of those calls. When every call becomes a conference call, there are multiple usage components to that we benefit from. It’s They’re obviously rely on us for high quality, resiliency, footprint, all kinds of our advantages that we’ve enjoyed for the last 15 years. Our usage-based model is the approach we take to powering these experiences, and there are multiple units of usage now with AI involved.
Patrick Walravens, Analyst, Citizens: Fantastic. Thank you.
David Morken, Chief Executive Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: Thank you, Pat.
Conference Operator, Conference Moderator: Again, if you have a question, please press star then one. Our next question comes from Joshua Reilly from Needham. Please go ahead.
Joshua Reilly, Analyst, Needham: All right, thanks for taking my question. Maybe just starting off, you know, Global Voice Plans revenue growth was really strong at 12% year-over-year. I guess, what are you seeing from these customers in terms of their adoption of AI driving incremental growth relative to maybe some other factors like new customer ramps? We know there’s been a lot of $1 million plus customers ramping there. Maybe you can just give us a sense of what was the relative driver of that strong 12% growth there.
David Morken, Chief Executive Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: Josh, thanks, and thanks for your good question. I’ve got with me today John Bell, our Chief Product Officer. Let me invite him to respond to your good question.
John Bell, Chief Product Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: We see broad-based adoption of AI and integration of voice agent technologies by our customers. Our customers are making it very easy for enterprises to realize real economic value from voice agents. We see that consistently across our customer base. In addition to that, we do see new entrants as well, coming into the market, AI native companies that we are enabling. We also announced our Bandwidth Build program, which allows new entrants to easily onboard as customers. We’re really excited about that as well. Both a mix of existing customers, integrating voice agents and driving their business, as well as new entrants coming into the market.
Joshua Reilly, Analyst, Needham: Got it. Maybe just a follow-up on the $1 million-plus customers. If you look at the, you know, $1 million-plus customers that you added in 2025, would you say that all of those now are in the run rate tier of revenue as of this point in 2026? How are you thinking about, you know, the net new $1 million-plus customers that you’ve added year to date thus far in 2026 relative to 2025? Can you add a similar number, even more, $1 million-plus customers this year versus last year? Thank you.
Daryl Raiford, Chief Financial Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: Hello. Hey, this is Daryl. I’ll take that question. It’s nice to speak with you. The short answer is no. The $6 million, much larger than a million-dollar deals we announced last year are not fully in the run rate right now. In fact, five of them are less than 50% deployed, with one being fully deployed and now nearly exceeding 120% of our initial estimated contract value. We’re really excited about what’s to come when I said the inflection in terms of enterprise and second half acceleration.
We’re really excited about the one that has fully deployed and more because as I said in the prepared remarks, as soon as that occurs, the client immediately understands the value proposition that the communication cloud brings, and it allows for our land and expand and cross-sell, upsell model. We’re really excited about that. In terms of your second point about the momentum of enterprise greater, much greater than $1 million deals, we did announce 2 this quarter. We have a view into our pipeline, and we think that we’re very much on pace with last year or to exceed.
Joshua Reilly, Analyst, Needham: Got it. Very helpful. Thank you, guys.
Daryl Raiford, Chief Financial Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: Thank you.
Conference Operator, Conference Moderator: The next question comes from Arjun Bhatia from William Blair. Please go ahead.
Arjun Bhatia, Analyst, William Blair: Perfect. Congrats on the solid quarter here, guys. Maybe, I’ll start on the messaging side because it seems, you know, usually, I think Daryl, you called it out, but usually there’s a Q1 seasonality dynamic where there’s a dip down in Q1 from Q4. It seems like the year-over-year growth rate is actually accelerating there. I’m curious what’s driving that. Is that AI volumes starting to layer in? How do you expect that to sort of play out through the rest of the year, even with political layering in the back half here?
Daryl Raiford, Chief Financial Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: We were pleasantly surprised with the strength given the in Programmable Messaging. As you said, given the typical seasonal headwinds that occur in the first quarter. We saw, you know, pretty strong commercial and civic engagement messaging. Of course, we had announced a couple messaging customers won last year that began to deploy and onboard more fully as well. We had a favorable compare for that. Yeah, the dynamics, the market dynamics plus our customer onboarding exceeded our expectations.
David Morken, Chief Executive Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: Arjun, I’d only add to that, this is David, that performance wasn’t due to political in the, in the quarter. It was largely commercial, and that squares with the announcement that we had about our messaging win. That was a commercial consumer brand messaging platform for both retail and restaurant verticals, and that was a major win and consistent with the success we’re seeing that has nothing to do with the seasonal civic traffic.
Arjun Bhatia, Analyst, William Blair: All right. That’s very helpful. Just maybe, a broader question if I, if I can, and I don’t know, maybe this is for you, David. Just as AI becomes more prominent, like what is the change you expect in the business to play out, you know, not just through 2026, but over the next couple years? Like, it seems like your product is there, but how does it impact the revenue model, your visibility into your revenue stream, the customers maybe that you even are going to serve? I’m just curious what this evolution might look like for Bandwidth, over the next couple years.
David Morken, Chief Executive Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: We believe the next billion users of the global PSTN are significantly going to be voice agents. We’re building for those agents, as are many other broad AI infrastructure companies. We’ve launched ways like command line interface for agents to be able to autonomously sign up and secure service. We obviously know how to comply with Know Your Customer while we do that. Look, over the next 2 years, to your good question, we’re going to do a terrific job in being understood broadly as the best place for voice agents to speak with people around the world over the PSTN. We think we’ll do that with differentiation on our vertically integrated universal platform and our global footprint. We’re starting to see the beginning of that, I think, in these results.
Let me pause, and invite John Bell, our Chief Product Officer, to also opine on your question.
John Bell, Chief Product Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: Yeah. I would just add that a big part of our role right now is helping our customers transition to this new world and helping both the human agents and the voice agents work together in a harmonized way. That creates a very big opportunity for us, and a lot of value for our customers to help them quickly realize the economic value of voice agents in their businesses.
Arjun Bhatia, Analyst, William Blair: Wonderful. Very helpful. Thank you, guys, and congrats again.
Daryl Raiford, Chief Financial Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: Thank you.
Conference Operator, Conference Moderator: The next question comes from James Fish from Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.
James Fish, Analyst, Piper Sandler: Hey, guys. Congrats on the Agentforce side of things. Just wanted to circle back to on the political side. Was there any political messaging impact this quarter?
Daryl Raiford, Chief Financial Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: There was no meaningful political impact this quarter. Again, we are, you know, for full transparency, we are really believing that that impact will be exactly like we’ve seen in the last 2 cycles, which is very, you know, second-half weighted, just given the dynamic of how campaigns work. We’re calling in our guide for right at $15 million of political campaign messaging benefit and that’s what we see right now. We haven’t really changed that. As we get into the first of July and then beyond, we’re gonna have a lot better sense with our customers of where this campaign dynamic is headed, but we’re looking for about $15 million net effect in Cloud Communications revenue this year, second half.
James Fish, Analyst, Piper Sandler: Yep, makes sense. Thanks, Darryl. Then look, your new business look pretty strong here. Agentforce isn’t even kind of in the numbers at this point from your language here, what are you guys seeing with cloud conversions across kind of that core unified and CX market? Are we finally getting to a point where enterprises are really starting to shift over towards the cloud on especially the CCaaS side? Could the new FCC proposals of more human onshoring here change anything for you guys underneath?
David Morken, Chief Executive Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: I’ll handle the second part of your question first, and then invite John to talk to the first, if I could. Nothing about the regulatory change augurs negatively for us. The voice agent revolution will apply equally, and if anything, I think bodes well for the partners we work with and the call volumes we support. We’ve got an extraordinary global and domestic network underneath all of these initiatives, so we’re not deterred or concerned about that migration or change at all.
John Bell, Chief Product Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: Yeah, I’d add, the move to the cloud did certainly enable a lot of the enterprises to easily adopt voice agents, which we’re excited about. I would also add that a core benefit of Maestro is even for customers who still have a lot of their human agents and the software for their human agents on-prem, we are still able to voice agent enable them. That is a tremendous benefit of our Maestro platform.
James Fish, Analyst, Piper Sandler: Thanks, guys.
John Bell, Chief Product Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: Thank you.
David Morken, Chief Executive Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: Thank you, Jim.
Conference Operator, Conference Moderator: This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to David Morken for any closing remarks.
David Morken, Chief Executive Officer, Bandwidth Inc.: Thank you, operator. In closing, our first quarter performance underscores Bandwidth’s expanding role as the mission-critical foundation for the AI-driven enterprise. By combining our unique global owned and operated network with the increasing velocity of the Maestro platform, we are capturing more value as customers deploy agenic AI into live production workflows. Compared to prior cycles, our growth today is increasingly complemented by embedded AI workflows and software attachment rather than episodic traffic alone. Our raised full year guidance reflects this momentum and the scale of our record deal pipeline. We remain committed to a disciplined capital allocation strategy that balances strategic investment in our AI moat with opportunistic shareholder returns, ensuring long-term value creation. Thank you very much.
Conference Operator, Conference Moderator: This concludes our conference call today. You may disconnect your lines. Have a nice day.