An analyst here at Canaccord Genuity, and it's my pleasure to introduce Jayme Mendal, CEO of EverQuote, and Joe Sanborn, CFO. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us again this year. It's great to see both of you. Great to see you. Thank you for inviting us. Perfect. You reported pretty strong results last week, so congrats on another solid quarter. Maybe we can start with an overview of the key dynamics you are seeing currently, and maybe remind investors of your outlook for the second half of the year and sort of any long-term targets that you want to highlight. Sure. Thanks, [Maria]. We're glad to be here. Q2, we had a really strong quarter. We had 34% year-on-year revenue growth. Good performance on revenue and VMD on adjusted EBITDA. We actually were at the high end of guidance. We had really nice results in the quarter, 70% year-on-year growth in EBITDA. Some records we set in Q2 were EBITDA margin was a record for us, 14%. Operating cash flow was $25 million in a quarter, a little over $25 million. It's also a record for us and also a record net income, just under $15 million. We're really pleased with that. We ended the quarter with about $150 million in cash as well and no debt. We feel really good about our financial strength. That's how you guys Q2 recap. Feel really good about that. As we looked into the second half of the year, we don't give guidance for the year. We gave guidance for Q3. You see our guidance for Q3 implies a step up from Q2. You look at the range we show on revenues and VMD and adjusted EBITDA, all of them would see at or near record levels. The midpoint of the range and above of our guidance shows at record levels on revenue, VMD, and adjusted EBITDA as well. As we look to, again, having talked about Q4 specifically, the general view, as we've said, is for this year, we see us as continue to have this EBITDA growth, EBITDA margins being sort of at or near our current levels, 13.5% - 14%. Going reverse order, the VMM margin sort of spending the high -20s percent. For those who are new to the EverQuote story, VMM margin is variable marketing dollars divided by revenue, and the difference there being advertising dollars. Revenue for Q4, what you and everyone else has looked at is what we've shared, which is we haven't given guidance, but we've said, "Hey, here's a seasonal pattern." Typically, Q4 steps down from Q3 in our industry. Seasonality is by no means a perfect instrument in our business, given macro events have superseded seasonal events at various times over the past five, six years. That's sort of how we thought about it. The one thing people have asked is, what is sort of the, is there an upside potential given the carriers out there right now? What you see in the industry we serve and helping insurance carriers and agents grow their business, the thing that carriers look at is their underwriting profitability. The metric that's used is combined ratio and underwriting margins more broadly. Those have been quite favorable for carriers. As you've progressed through this year, to quantify those, a lot of carriers try to have their combined ratio in the mid-90s percent as their goal. Many carriers now are in the mid to high -80s percent. You would argue, and that's for the year, as we progress through the year here, they have quite a bit of room to still go. One of the things that has made carriers think through, maybe move a little less aggressively than might be implied by the potential with those margins, is they were trying to figure out the macro dynamics with tariffs and those issues. I think as you've progressed through Q2, people have gotten greater comfort on that. The carriers now go through a period of Q3, which is the normal cat season, losses with storms and things. If that's a normal season, I think there's a potential where carriers may have some extra budget as you get into Q4. We'll see how that plays out. That could be an opportunity. The last time we had that was Q4 of last year, and the last time for that was in late 2020, same time. That's a great overview. Maybe expanding a little bit on that point, how should we think about sort of key growth drivers from enterprise carriers over the next one or two years, and maybe touch on what you see as well? Are you okay? Do you need some water? Carrier underwriting is quite healthy right now, and therefore they all want to grow. Right. We have seen the carriers coming back into the market over the last couple of years. We expect that by the end of this year, we'll have a relatively full carrier panel, meaning all the carriers who spend digitally in our channel are on across a wide geographical footprint. The one exception we've talked about several times before is the state of California, which is notoriously difficult from a rate increase standpoint. Even there, we're starting to see some carriers return to the market and get the rates that they need to resume spending. We think that by early next year, all carriers are going to be fully focused on growth, which is a good backdrop for us. Here in the near term, and I feel like you maybe touched on this a little bit, are you seeing auto inflation and tariffs impacting carriers' willingness to spend a little bit more, be a little bit more aggressive? Is that impacting the business? I think the way to think about tariffs is we'll give you some timeline. When we came out in the beginning of April, I think a lot of carriers as well as a lot of businesses were, "What does this all mean?" For carriers, it was something they just, similar to COVID, they never referenced because we haven't seen tariffs been used in many, many years. It created a little bit of anxiety. As you progress through the period, I think you got to the end of Q2 and carriers were much more comfortable with how tariffs will shake out. Just to remind folks, why do tariffs matter to carriers? It really could impact claims costs for them, whether it's new cars coming in and there's higher prices on those cars to replace them or it's getting parts. Those are the dynamics that could affect it. The other dynamic is broader inflation as well could be a question. As you've gone through Q2, I think they've got increasing comfort on tariffs as you had some big announcements out of the administration. In terms of inflation, you're also seeing greater clarity in inflation as we progress. I think that is giving the carriers some comfort. We now will see how they progress into this period. I think that we look as a very favorable backdrop for them. The question is, how aggressive are they or how measured are they in that incremental growth based on that environment? I think different carriers may make different decisions on that. We think that's generally a very good backdrop for us. One question you mentioned at the beginning I didn't answer as I was having my coughing fit is our long-term model, which is, and I think it's probably worth touching on, for investors, people saw us go through the downturn, which was a very difficult time for the overall industry. We helped carriers and agents grow when they didn't want to grow. It was tough to be at EverQuote because that's what we do for them. We obviously had this great period of growth. As we now think about more normalized levels, we'll say, what does this all mean as we think about your business? It's something we have not talked about a lot, two, three quarters ago because investors really want to figure out the current period. As we look ahead, what we've said is we haven't given guidance for 2026, but we've reiterated our view that we will have a medium-term model of averaging 20% growth. Some years will be a little more, some years will be a little less on the top line. VMM, we think will generally be in the levels we're talking about, that high -20s percent. On EBITDA margins, we will end this year probably 13.5%- 14% based on what we've said. We'll add probably 100 basis points a year, give or take, to get to a goal of 20% in the longer term. That's within the context of comments that we made in our prepared remarks in the analyst call about our path to $1 billion. We increasingly, as a business, are this focus on P&C that we started in 2023 with our strategic changes, where we're saying, how do we help those carriers and agents grow more successfully? We're seeing the fruits of that effort. We've just come through a long strategic planning process where we think about the long-term and medium-term time horizon. We're starting to talk about that path to a billion in revenues. We see the light and we're very bullish about it. We're excited about the opportunity. Perfect. Maybe just sort of one broader question. The insurance industry and carriers have historically been viewed as sort of laggards in terms of moving advertising spend online. Where are we in that process? What does that mean for the industry sort of more broadly? Yeah. I think insurance has been probably one of the most laggard industries in terms of its evolution into digital marketing and digital channels. Over the last five years, we've largely, supported by companies like EverQuote, seen the carriers begin to take steps to evolve more quickly. That began five years ago. We really pushed carriers to integrate with our sites so that the data that we pass them could be used to allow consumers to skip right to a rate and dramatically improve their conversion rate over that period of time. Now we're starting to see over the last, I don't know, three, four years, some of these more digital-first carriers really getting some traction, companies like Root or Lemonade Insurance. I think they're beginning to kind of push the envelope as well with the carriers. I would say we're starting to see the technology adoption accelerate among the carriers. As they improve their digital funnels and they improve their ability to bid more sort of effectively into channels like ours, we would expect that these huge marketing budgets will continue to shift from offline channels, TV, brand spend, more into performance digital channels like ours. There is this secular tailwind that we've been talking about since the IPO days, which persists today. To what extent do you feel like you are gaining share from other channels or platforms versus innovation and tools that you're adding to the platform that's sort of helping drive the growth? Yeah. I think as a category, we're gaining share. If you just look at the growth over the last couple of years, I think that as the market recovered, a lot of spend flowed back into our channel and into EverQuote specifically. With respect to taking share within our channel, you know, EverQuote has been very, very focused on helping carriers improve the performance of their spend in our marketplace. We've been rolling out products to help drive that, and we're starting to get real critical mass adoption on some of these products. For example, we have a product called Smart Campaigns, which is an AI-powered bidding product that, when a carrier adopts it and they allow us to basically take over their bidding for them, we'll see on average, you know, a 20% or so improvement in their ad spend efficiency. The pattern is typically they'll adopt Smart Campaigns, we'll take over their bidding, we'll drive more spend efficiency, and then we'll start to see their budget with us increase. That's a pattern that is now sort of well-worn. Through that, I think we've been taking some share and we'll continue to take share over time. I mean, to that point, it sounds like those products have been doing pretty well and sort of driving more spend on the platform. Are there any other sort of products or capabilities that you are maybe looking to add that you can talk about? I would probably start with our agency network. We have the largest network of local agents who rely on EverQuote to source insurance shoppers locally who go online to buy insurance. The kind of analog out there in the internet marketplace world would be like a Zillow or a CarGurus where you have these local dealers or real estate agents who rely on a partner like them to help them get leads or referrals. We do that for local insurance agents. For many years, we have sold insurance agents leads. Over the last two or three years, we have really begun to invest in developing a more holistic platform to support local agents' growth. On top of our strong foundation with leads, we've begun expanding to other products, telephony services, marketing services, all technology-driven. We're starting to get some real adoption. We're seeing the kind of product penetration per agent increase. We have a very large agent base, 6,000 or so agents. We are really focused on becoming their one-stop growth shop, consolidating their marketing budgets with EverQuote. Let's talk about sort of your customer acquisition strategy and channel mix. Historically, I think you deployed spend predominantly across search. What are your thoughts on scaling other channels like video or social? Yeah. Historically, we've always had a fairly balanced traffic portfolio. Search is a part of that portfolio, but we operate across many channels with many partners. However, as you note, video, social, some of these upper-funnel channels, which are not industry-specific, were drawn down during the hard market. As monetization kind of left the category, it became harder to compete in these platforms. Now, as monetization has come back stronger than ever, I think insurance as a category will be very competitive in these platforms. We've got some history operating in them at scale. We've begun sort of reactivating channels like video, like social platforms. We're already starting to see some good traction there, and we expect those to contribute to our growth over the next couple of years. In terms of search, we're starting to see AI-generated search sort of taking more queries from traditional search. What does that mean for your company and for the industry broadly? Yeah, so EverQuote, I mean, for better or worse, we're in this kind of fortunate position that we don't rely on organic search results. We don't have, you know, our traffic is almost 100% paid traffic. Where the disruption has occurred in the search landscape is predominantly in the organic search results. For better or worse, we don't have organic traffic, and we've been almost entirely unaffected by any changes that have gone on with Google. I'd go sort of further to suggest that insurance as their number one monetizing category in a very, you know, bottom sort of funnel out of search is likely to be, I think, less disruptive for a longer period of time than probably most other categories. That being said, we see a big opportunity as consumer behavior shifts and people start shopping more through, you know, the ChatGPTs of the world. There's going to be a lot of traffic flow with insurance intent that emerges in these platforms. Right. What we're paying very close attention to is how these platforms allow that traffic to sort of engage with third parties. There's probably a few ways it can play out. It's probably not going to be one single answer. A, they could allow companies like ours to build integrations with them, plugins. You've seen ChatGPT showcase things like this in travel with booking and some of their product demos. Number two, they could rely on content more like traditional search where you have to put content out there that gets picked up in the training runs. Through that, you get referrals out. Number three, they could develop paid advertising platforms. Our sense is it'll probably be all of the above, depending on the platform. In terms of paid advertising for us, we would be very well equipped to just begin competing for that traffic. I think we will. With the other two, again, we're starting with a clean slate. We're watching what happens with the platforms carefully. My sense is we will make certain investments that position us quite well as these platforms start to open up and it becomes more clear exactly how you engage with the traffic flow through them. Yeah, I guess to that point, given that the insurance industry deals with sensitive information and a lot of rates are not available out there online, right? Do you think it's realistic to expect AI agents to be used in the insurance space? I think you will see, you know, it depends what the AI agent is being used for, right? If you're saying, if you look at, you know, making a dinner reservation, right? I think the AI agent will be able to make a dinner reservation for all of us very soon. In fact, they already can, right? When you get down to a category like insurance, where there's regulation involved, there's not rate transparency like out on the internet, right? It becomes a much, much longer, I think, longer path to get to a point where an AI agent could actually complete that full buying journey for you. Can it assist, you know, as starting from the top of the funnel to get you sort of further down and create a more seamless experience? Absolutely. That's our sort of vision for where to begin. We've already begun to introduce AI voice agents into our call center workflows, which do the very top of funnel qualification of a consumer before we refer them out to, you know, to a local agent or a carrier. The idea, the path, I think that the journey that we're on is to start there and begin to kind of work your way down funnel as both the technology allows and the kind of industry dynamics allow. That makes sense. I want to switch gears here and ask you about your other vertical, just home and renters. What are some of the dynamics within that vertical? What are some of the products that you're excited about? How should we think about growth there going forward? Sure. Home and renters are about 10% of the business. Just to give a sort of benchmark from a premium standpoint, it's about 50% of auto. There is some room to grow just to get to kind of parity, though, you know, home is a slightly more complex product. It's not clear that you'd get all the way to 50%. We do expect growth from the home vertical to outpace auto over time. The more recent dynamic is that the home market has gone through a similar kind of hard market cycle as the auto insurance market. In the last quarter or two, you're starting to see carrier profitability get back to where it needs to be. There's been a little bit of market dynamic, I think, constraining the growth of home. We've managed to grow through it, but I do think the conditions will be more favorable over the next year or two than they were over the last year or two. Extending beyond home and renters, within the P&C umbrella, and we're really focused on P&C and remaining within this market, there are other verticals that carriers are really trying to pull us into. Some of the more ancillary lines like the toys, boats, motorcycles, RVs, things like that, as well as small business lines. I wouldn't be surprised if we make certain investments to begin to expand into other non-auto verticals within that P&C umbrella as well. You just answered my question, so I don't need to ask it. Let's talk about financials for a minute. As we think about the next couple of years, how should we think about the balance between volume and pricing going forward? Sure. Just to give some context, we've had shopping levels at elevated levels for some time. Why is that? Consumers got rate increases that were sticker shock, and so they started shopping. What happened in the early part of the recovery is the consumers were shopping, but there were not coverage options for them, right? Carriers did not want to acquire consumers, so there was demand but not availability. What you've seen in this period, in a recent quarter, was much more heavily driven by pricing than the consumer volume increase. Consumer volume has remained at elevated levels. I think we might have thought that consumer levels would start to moderate a bit. They've sort of remained at elevated levels. We think that will continue in the near term, but we think you'll start to see that moderate as you get into next year. I do think there's a dynamic where, in any given quarter, price or volume can change from quarter to quarter. This is at the highest levels. You have consumers who have been shopping for some time, and that is sort of continuing. Got it. I know you're not providing guidance for next year or any sort of outlook for next year. More broadly, how should we think about sort of your continued momentum in the business versus tough comps in the first half? Yeah, so I think the second half, so I'll start with the second half of this year, and we talk about guidance there or comparison. It's fair to say we do have some difficult comps in the second half. Just to give context, first half of this year, we grew like 50%, 55% year -on -year. First half of 2025 to first half of 2024. Then you look at last half of 2024 to last half of 2023. If I remember correctly, it's like 165% year -on -year growth. Certainly, second half is definitely a more challenged type of comps for growth this year. The midpoint of our guide for Q3 shows 15-ish percent at the midpoint. We haven't talked specifically about Q4, but you would say it might be down with seasonality because remember, Q4 of last year actually went against the seasonal trend, was actually up. You have even a more challenging Q4. All that being said, put aside the bounciness within the year, within the quarters, you're looking at a year that's 30% growth, a good, and with EBITDA margin at 14%. I think that's a pretty good combination of, that's a Rule of 40 and then some, and also very high cash converting. We feel good about that. As you go forward, I think you still can, as you look to the first part of next year, we would say we haven't been too specific in it right now, but I would say that we see a dynamic where by the end of this year, we'll have a full carrier panel back in line within the marketplace. At what levels we will see, but we'll think most carriers will be back in the marketplace by the end of the year. I think the dynamic then, one of the wild cards will be what happens with states like California, which are still a ways on getting there, although we're seeing some signs, whether that kicks in in Q1 or Q2 in a meaningful way or the second half, I think that may look at what the comps are. Again, I go back to the high level. We're going to average 20% growth next year and how it plays out specifically, we'll give you a little more as we get to Q4. Got it. That makes sense. I want to ask you about your capital allocation priorities. More specifically, yesterday you announced an agreement to buy over $20 million worth of stock from your largest shareholder. Maybe talk about the rationale behind that decision, that transaction, and how should we think about the remaining balance within your share buyback authorization? Sure. High level, we had about $150 million cash at the end of Q2. At this trajectory, we'll probably be close to $200 million by the end of the year, give or take. The decision we looked at, and when we think about capital allocation, there's sort of three pieces. First is the strength of the balance sheet. Having a fortress balance sheet is really important in our mind for two reasons. One is it gives us strength to endure. As we think about working with companies, they want to work with a strong financial partner. We have that. I think it also, from a mindset of how we think about investments, I can tell you during more thin balance sheet periods, as I refer to them in 2023, some of the investments that had very strong ROIs, we wouldn't have considered because the payback periods were so long. You think about some of the technology investments we're making in AI and things, those are longer-term investments. They will not drive meaningful benefit this year, even next year, but they're critical to building that long-term differentiation in competitive mode. Fortress balance sheet, number one. Number two is we've talked about this idea of how will M&A play into the industry over time. We don't believe M&A is required for us to achieve the growth targets we discussed. At the same time, we believe there's an opportunity to emerge as the leader in this space, the winner in this space over time, and scale could be part of that. We could see some amount of dollars going towards M&A. The third part is how do we return capital to shareholders. We've thought about this and we announced on our last Monday on our earnings call, we announced a $50 million buyback plan. We said it was our first buyback plan to be executed over the next 12 months. We said it'd be opportunistic in how we executed it. As we thought about that $50 million, really it was two things that we wanted to convey to investors. Really, I guess there were three things. One is we feel very good about our cash flow generation. We feel very good about the trajectory of our business. Third is we think our stocks are a pretty good buy. If there's any investors, this is the time to think about that message. We think it's a pretty good buy. That's how we thought about allocating the $50 million to a share buyback. In terms of how we execute the share buyback, we announced yesterday morning that we bought back $21 million from our largest investor, David Blundin, who's a co-founder of the business and our Non-Executive Chairman. We're very fortunate how this worked out. David's position went from 21% to 19%. Very modest for him. He was taking the investments to, he's an early-stage investor, is putting the money into investments in his fund, which is heavily focused on AI. He wanted to do that. It was a chance for us to acquire stock in a very efficient manner because it didn't impact the liquidity in the public market, which we loved. I think the last piece in our minds was it was a way for us to really jumpstart the program and the price at which we purchased that was, you know, the special committee of the board, I think, got a very good pricing relative to any sort of benchmarks of VWAPs and discount, et cetera. Over time, how we use the program, it's still be opportunistic, but we were pleased with our first move on it. Perfect. That was a great recap. It was a great discussion, gentlemen. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you all for coming. Thank you, Maria. Thank you.