CCC Intelligent Solutions (NASDAQ:CCC) held its first-quarter earnings conference call on Thursday. Below is the complete transcript from the call.
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The full earnings call is available at https://edge.media-server.com/mmc/p/uyqapt5m
Summary
CCC Intelligent Solutions reported a strong start to 2026 with total revenue growing by 12% year-over-year to $281 million, surpassing guidance. Adjusted EBITDA rose to $120 million with a margin expansion of 300 basis points to 43%.
The company emphasized its strategic positioning in an AI-driven world, highlighting significant adoption of its AI solutions, which contributed to one-third of its year-over-year growth. AI solutions now account for approximately 10% of total revenue.
A major renewal and expansion with a top five US auto insurer was secured, covering both traditional and AI products, showcasing strong revenue momentum. Additionally, the company made significant strides in the casualty segment, with new multi-year agreements with large insurers like Allstate.
The company continues to focus on expanding its product offerings and AI capabilities, with a strategic emphasis on solving rising complexity in the insurance economy, which is viewed as a key long-term growth driver.
Financial guidance for Q2 2026 anticipates revenue of $283 to $285 million, and full-year 2026 revenue guidance is raised to $1.155 to $1.163 billion, reflecting ongoing business momentum and strategic initiatives.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the CCC Intelligence Solutions First Quarter Fiscal 2026 Earnings Call. this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker’s presentation, there’ll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message device and your hand is raised to withdraw your question. Please press Star one one again. Please be advised today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Bill Warmington, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Bill Warmington (Vice President of Investor Relations)
Thank you operator Good morning and thank you all for joining us today to review CCC’s first quarter 2026 financial results which we announced in the press release issued earlier this morning. Joining me on the call are Gitesh Ramamurthy, CCC’s chairman and CEO, Brian Herb, CCC’s CFO and Tim Welsh, CCC’s president. The forward looking statements we make today about the Company’s results and plans are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause the actual results and the implementation of the Company’s plans to vary materially. These risks are discussed in the earnings releases available on our Investor Relations website and under the heading Risk factors in our 2025 Annual Report on Form 10K filed with the SEC. Further, these comments and the Q and A that follows are copyrighted today by CCC Intelligence Solutions Holdings Incorporated. Any recording, retransmission or reproduction or other use of the same for profit or otherwise without prior consent of CCC is prohibited and a violation of United States copyright and other laws. Additionally, while we will provide a transcript of portions of this call and we’ve approved the publishing of a transcript of this call by a third party, we take no responsibility for inaccuracies that may appear in the transcripts. Please note that the discussion on today’s call includes certain non GAAP financial measures as defined by the SEC. The Company believes these non GAAP financial measures provide useful information to management and investors regarding certain financial and business trends relating to the Company’s financial condition and the results of operations. A reconciliation of GAAP to non GAAP measures is available in our earnings release that is available on our Investor Relations website. Thank you. And now I’ll turn the call over to Gatesh.
Gitesh Ramamurthy
Thank you Bill and thanks to all of you for joining us today. We had a strong start to 2026 driven by continued customer demand and adoption. The first quarter total revenue grew 12% to $281 million above the high end of our guidance adjusted EBITDA was $120 million, also above the high end of our guidance and adjusted EBITDA margin expanded approximately 300 basis points year-over-year to 43%. We are now more than a year past the acquisition of EvolutionIQ and we continue to see strong momentum across the combined business. Today I want to focus on three themes that frame both our near term momentum and our long term opportunity. First, why CCC’s position to thrive in an AI driven world. Second, how their positioning is translating into strong tangible revenue momentum with several of the biggest companies in the world increasing their commitments to both our core and AI solutions. And third, why solving the problems caused by rising complexity for our customers in the insurance economy is a durable long term growth driver for ccc. Let me start with why CCC is positioned to thrive in an AI driven world. We can do this by first understanding the work our customers need to get done. The insurance economy spans many thousands of companies conducting hundreds of billions of dollars in commerce across tens of millions of unique claim events every year. They operate in a complex, highly regulated industry and may interact with dozens of other companies for any given claim. And the work they need CCC to help them get done are the things that directly drive the operating performance of their business. Take auto insurers for example, who on average pay out about 75% of their revenues on claims. They use the decision engines built into our solutions, uniquely configured for their specific needs to help them pay what they owe. They use the CCC network to activate the tens of thousands of companies they need to integrate with to get consumers back to their lives. And they use the CCC platform to manage that work end to end. In effect, they rely on CCC to manage the most complex, mission critical and consequential work they do. This is true not only across our auto insurance customers, but also each of the more than 35,000 businesses we work with. That translates to CCC’s economic model. We price our products on the measurable value we provide, typically on a five to one ROI basis. We have cumulatively invested billions of dollars in our platform and have deep industry leading functionality. But customers buy our technology because of the real world outcomes they’re able to achieve only by using our solutions to impact the hundreds of billions of dollars we help them process annually. CCC’s data is unique in its combination of scale, depth and recency. We have over $2 trillion of historical data that simply does not exist anywhere else. The data is broad, deep and continuously updated in real time, allowing us to provide benchmarks customers use to assess their operations and to provide hyper local up to the minute inputs that inform hundreds of billions of dollars in individual payouts and repairs. We also take special pride in the trust our customers place in us as partners in their business. Our role connecting the ecosystem has been built on decades of consistent, high quality execution where each participant can feel confident in being able to deliver the best outcome for them and the consumer. Importantly, the outputs generated using our solutions are already accepted and embedded in the core operations of their trading partners. It is therefore no surprise that customers are increasingly looking to accelerate their AI ambitions by leveraging the CCC Intelligent Experience Cloud. Our AI solutions have been the fastest growing part of our portfolio for some time with a scale that has few equals in vertical software. In Q1, our AI based solutions drove approximately one third of our overall year over year growth, growing at roughly 3.5 times the total company growth rate. AI solutions are now approximately 10% of revenue or about $120 million in run rate. These solutions are entirely incremental to our core products with discrete value propositions and ROI that customers validate through intense piloting and testing, demonstrating both the durability of our core solutions and the rapid adoption of our AI tools. While we are tremendously excited about the growth in our AI products, the benefits of marrying AI with deterministic software are becoming increasingly evident to customers. It’s not an either or, it is an and. Governance and trust are bedrock principles in our industry and the efficiency of the CCC platform is particularly well suited to helping customers manage AI at scale. Our systems efficiently process almost 6 billion transactions per day, giving customers a battle tested platform that flexibly handles volume spikes and constant adjustments to their operating rules. To summarize our first theme, CCC is positioned to thrive in an AI driven world because we combine unique real time data embedded workflows and a trusted scale platform that allows customers to deploy AI safely, govern it effectively and realize measurable economic value. My second theme is the strong tangible revenue momentum across the business as several of the biggest companies in the world increase their commitments to both our traditional and AI products. CCC’s customer base includes 27 of the top 30 auto insurers in the US by 2024 direct written premium as well as multibillion dollar repair facility chains. These are some of the largest and most discerning companies in the world with incredible access to leading edge technology capabilities. We are thrilled that one of the top five auto insurers in the US by direct written Premium renewed and extended its partnership with CCC through a new multi year enterprise agreement. This agreement covers our entire auto physical damage suite as well as our entire portfolio of AI solutions related to auto fiscal damage. Following an extensive two year test of those capabilities, the insurer consolidated its APD business onto CCC several years ago and this new agreement both renews the core software relationship and adds the full AI layer, resulting in a meaningful step up in the value of the partnership. Our largest and most sophisticated customers are also deepening their commitment to the CCC platform by expanding the scope of their relationship into casualty. Casualty remains one of the largest growth opportunities for CCC. Our acquisition of EvolutionIQ expanded our capabilities in this area through the creation of medhub for Auto Casualty, an AI documents insight solution now embedded within the CCC platform. Medhub adds meaningful new functionality that is helping customers manage complex casualty workflows and is helping to advance our pipeline. Last quarter we announced at Liberty Mutual, the sixth largest auto insurer in the United States and one of the largest PNC insurers globally selected US. They have since begun deploying a significant portion of their casualty business on the CCC platform. In April we signed a multi year agreement with Allstate for their third party casualty business. All of these wins are validation of large customers increasingly recognizing that CCC’s platform and comprehensive suite of solutions represent their best path to embracing an AI driven future. This dynamic is playing out across our entire business, including on the repair facility side. Adoption of our core and AI solutions in the market continues to grow with more than 6,500 repair facilities now using our AI-estimating capability. our industry conference next month, we plan to introduce even more exciting innovations for the repair facilities. In summary, we are seeing this differentiated positioning translate into tangible revenue momentum as some of the largest insurers and repair organizations in the world deepen and expand their relationships with CCC across both our core software and AI solutions. My third theme is how solving for rising complexity is expanding CCC’s value proposition and driving long term growth. The most important structural trend in the insurance economy is rising complexity. Vehicles are more sophisticated, medical and casualty claims are more involved, regulatory requirements continue to increase. Every claim requires more decisions, more coordination and more judgment all the time. We see advancing vehicle technology as a significant tailwind for CCC over time with many new product possibilities on the horizon. The multi decade trend in advancing vehicle safety technology has shown a repeated pattern of frequency reductions being more than offset by increases in severity to fix these systems when they are damaged that causes claim dollars and complexity to rise, which grows the industry and creates additional growth opportunities for ccc. Over the past decade, personal auto claim counts declined by less than 1% annually while average dollars per claim grew approximately 6% per year, driving about 5% annual growth in total claims dollars paid. We believe that going forward, claims cost growth is going to outpace claim frequency moderation and our insurance customers will be managing an increasing level of total claim spend. That means our software and AI capabilities remain mission critical as customers manage growing claim complexity and spend over time. The rising complexity inherent in our industry combined with the growing appetite across our customer base to adopt both our core and AI solutions gives us confidence in our long term growth outlook. Stepping back the common thread across all three themes is rising complexity. As claims become more complex and customer appetite for AI increases, CCC’s platform data and workflows become even more essential, giving us confidence in a long term growth opportunity. To help us navigate towards that future, we have added another experienced technology leader to our Board of Directors, John Schweitzer. John brings more than three decades of leadership experience across enterprise technology and global go to market organizations including senior roles at Salesforce, Informatica, SAP and Oracle. With the addition of John, Neil DeCresenzo and Barack Elam over the last 18 months, we have deliberately strengthened our board to support platform strength, AI innovation and durable value creation while preserving neutrality across the ecosystem we serve. We are pleased with our strong start to the year and continue to be incredibly excited by our near term momentum and the long term opportunity in front of us. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Brian who will walk you through our results in more detail.
Brian Herb (Chief Financial Officer)
Thanks Gitesh. As Gitesh outlined, Q1 was a strong start to the year with revenue growth and profitability ahead of expectations, increasing adoption of our AI solutions across our largest and most sophisticated clients, and continued execution on our capital allocation priorities including return of capital to shareholders. Now let’s turn to the numbers. I’ll review our first quarter 2026 results and then provide guidance for the second quarter and the full year. Total revenue in the first quarter was $281 million, up 12% from the prior year period and above the high end of our revenue range. Please note that all this growth is organic. Of the 12% growth, 9% was driven by cross sell upsell and the adoption of solutions across our existing client base. Approximately three points of growth came from new logos within this position. We did see more than a point of impact from a combination of timing and one time items including true ups on subscription contracts and transactional strength in casualty. In the quarter, Emerging Solutions contributed about 4 points of growth. Primarily driven by EvolutionIQ are AI based APD solutions, diagnostics and build sheets. Emerging Solutions continue to represent an important and expanding part of the portfolio, accounting for approximately 11% of the total revenue in the first quarter of 2026 and growing approximately 50% year over year with the largest contribution from our AI Solutions. Turning to our key metrics of Software Gross dollar Retention or GDR in software Net dollar Retention or mdr, GDR captures the amount of revenue retained from our client base compared to the prior year period. In Q1 2026 our GDR was 98% down from 99% last quarter. Please note that since we started reporting this …
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