Mobile ad tech has spent two years trying to convince Wall Street it is more than a gaming side business. Liftoff Mobile just filed the first hard evidence from its side of the ledger, and the numbers hold up even after accounting for the costs of going public.
Liftoff, which trades as LFTO on the Nasdaq, reported second quarter 2026 revenue of $220 million on August 12, up 35% year over year and 7% quarter over quarter. It was the company’s eleventh straight quarter of revenue growth, according to its earnings release, and it came with adjusted EBITDA of $132 million, a 60% margin, up from 53% a year earlier. Core advertising revenue, the segment that strips out lower-margin services, grew 36% year over year to $219 million.
A quarter that still carries IPO scars
The headline number that could spook a casual reader is the net loss: $4 million for the quarter. Liftoff’s release attributes that entirely to $45 million in non-cash expenses tied to its IPO and other capital markets activity, the kind of one-time charge that shows up when a private company converts its equity structure for public markets. Strip that out and the underlying cash generation tells a different story: trailing 12-month free cash flow of $184 million, up 142% year over year, and trailing 12-month operating cash flow of $237 million, up 90%.
That is the split every newly public ad tech company has to manage in its first few quarters: a GAAP income statement still absorbing transaction costs, next to a cash flow statement that is supposed to be the real pitch to investors. Liftoff’s numbers on the second measure are strong enough that the company raised its full year 2026 guidance to $870 million to $880 million in revenue and $510 million to $518 million in adjusted EBITDA, implying a margin near 59%.
Liftoff’s report lands in the middle of a broader earnings season in which ad tech companies have had to defend their numbers vertical by vertical. Viant’s own second quarter report showed a similar pattern of investors parsing where ad dollars are actually flowing, while Roku’s results underscored how much of the ad spend running through even the largest platforms still depends on outside demand-side infrastructure. Liftoff’s pitch is that its own infrastructure, not a partner’s, is what is compounding.
Why “not just gaming” matters to the rest of the app economy
Liftoff built its business inside mobile gaming, where user acquisition spend is high, churn is brutal, and ad tech vendors compete on how precisely they can predict which install will pay back its cost. That is a real market, but it is also a cyclical and increasingly saturated one. Liftoff’s own description of its business, in the language it used to describe itself in the earnings release, is built around a “diverse, global customer base across gaming, consumer, and emerging app categories,” not gaming alone.
That framing matters because it is the same test every performance-marketing platform built on mobile is now facing: prove the machine learning model that worked for a install-heavy, high-frequency category like gaming can transfer to categories where the unit economics, seasonality, and user intent look nothing alike. Liftoff’s CEO, Jeremy Bondy, tied the quarter’s growth directly to the company’s AI layer rather than to any single vertical.
“Q2 marked our eleventh consecutive quarter of revenue growth and reinforced a pattern we have seen over time: better advertising performance gives customers reason to increase their spend with us. Cortex’s continued self-learning and discrete model improvements both contributed to that performance this quarter,” said Jeremy Bondy, Liftoff’s Chief Executive Officer. “Our integrated advertising platform, powered by Cortex machine learning, is designed to serve all verticals in the app economy, and we believe we’re still in the early innings of our growth story in a large, expanding, and structurally under-monetized market.”
What it means for the marketing leader
For a marketing leader running app install or app engagement campaigns, the relevant signal here is not Liftoff’s stock price. It is what a scaled, machine-learning-driven bidding platform looks like when it is forced to publish its unit economics in public. Liftoff’s president and chief financial officer, Tarek Kutrieh, made the connection between growth and efficiency explicit.
“Our strong financial results reflect the durability of our financial model,” said Tarek Kutrieh, Liftoff’s President and Chief Financial Officer. “Adjusted EBITDA margin expanded meaningfully, as our revenue scaled faster than our cost base. That operating leverage, combined with our capital light architecture, converted growth into significant free cash flow. We see a clear opportunity for continued sustainable, profitable growth.”
That is a useful benchmark for any marketing team evaluating a mobile-focused DSP or ad network: margin expansion alongside revenue growth is a sign the underlying model is genuinely improving performance, not just buying volume. A platform that grows revenue only by cutting price or absorbing more spend without a corresponding efficiency gain is telling a different story than one whose EBITDA margin is climbing at the same time.
How to evaluate the next platform pitching “beyond gaming”
Liftoff is not the only mobile ad tech vendor making this pitch, and its Q2 report gives marketing and growth teams a template for testing similar claims from other vendors. Ask for the same three things Liftoff’s release volunteered: whether revenue growth is broad across verticals or concentrated in one, whether margin is expanding or just holding steady as volume grows, and whether the company can show operating cash flow, not just adjusted revenue, moving in the same direction.
Liftoff’s third quarter guidance calls for revenue of $217 million to $222 million and adjusted EBITDA of $124 million to $128 million, a 57% to 58% margin. If the company hits that range while continuing to grow outside gaming, it will have done something few mobile ad tech platforms have managed since the last wave of app-economy IPOs: turned a public earnings report into confirmation, rather than a test, of its pitch.
