Weave Communications (NYSE:WEAV) reported first-quarter financial results on Thursday. The transcript from the company's first-quarter earnings call has been provided below.

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Summary

Weave Communications reported a strong first quarter in 2026, with revenue growth accelerating to 17.4% year over year and operating income of $2.5 million, marking significant improvement from break-even last year.

The company added the most locations ever in a quarter, driven by strong performance in upselling new products like insurance eligibility and AI receptionist, and saw an increase in payments revenue.

Weave Communications plans to monetize its Omnichannel AI receptionist through a hybrid subscription model aligned to consumption, with future expectations to capture greater payment processing volumes.

For Q2 2026, the company expects revenue between $67.2 million and $68.2 million and operating income between $2.1 million and $3.1 million, raising full-year revenue guidance to between $275 million and $278 million.

Management emphasized the strategic importance of AI in automating workflows, improving customer interactions, and capturing revenue opportunities, highlighting the company's continued growth and innovation focus.

Full Transcript

Brett White (Chief Executive Officer)

Thank you Mariah and thank you to everyone joining us today. I'm very pleased to share that we've delivered another excellent quarter marked by acceleration in revenue growth and further expansion in operating margin. Both revenue and profitability came in above the high end of our guidance. This marks our 17th consecutive quarter of meeting or exceeding the high end of our revenue guidance. Revenue growth accelerated to 17.4% year over year and operating income was $2.5 million, a significant improvement from break even last year. This continues our track record of strong execution, consistent growth, expanding margins and disciplined operations. We are well positioned for long term success. With a growing customer base and an expanding market opportunity, we see a clear path to building a significantly larger business with our growing suite of solutions. By expanding market share and increasing average revenue per location, we added the most locations ever in a quarter and revenue retention improved in Q1. We saw strong performance in our upsell sales motion with new products like insurance eligibility and AI receptionist. Additionally, payments revenue growth accelerated in Q1 as our customers increasingly used Weave Communications for their payment processing. Weave is purpose built for healthcare. We serve over 40,000 customer locations and billions of patient interactions flow through our platform. That data, combined with nearly two decades of experience, underpins a platform that supports growth and executes that work end to end. Weave's workflows begin with pre care operations focused on acquiring new patients, re engaging existing patients for follow up care and keeping schedules full. Once a visit is scheduled, we automate administrative tasks like confirming appointments, collecting patient information through digital forms and verifying insurance eligibility to ensure appointments are kept and streamline patient intake during the clinical visit. We handle payment processing and help staff address patient financing needs that improve treatment plan acceptance following treatment. Our platform helps manage the practice's online reputation through reviews and manages accounts receivable by following up on unpaid bills and enabling patients to make payments from their mobile device. Throughout the patient journey, Weave Communications manages communication and engagement behind the scenes, reducing time spent on repetitive tasks and empowering staff to focus on the personal side of patient care. Healthcare practices are resilient businesses, but they face significant operational pressures, higher cost of goods, rising labor expense alongside talent shortages and elevated patient expectations. The day to day demands of running a practice often pull skilled staff away from face to face patient care. Weave Communications harnesses the power of AI to automate repetitive tasks. Rather than managing paperwork, practice teams focus on people work. Our deep understanding of healthcare workflows guides how we deliver and use AI through our platform. Our customers start with a Weave Communications core solution that typically includes communications, reviews, appointment reminders and patient recall to fill schedule openings and ensure schedules stay full. Customers pay for these solutions through standard bundles and we have released several AI powered enhancements that streamline practice operations and make these bundles more valuable. More than 50% of our customer locations use at least one of these embedded AI solutions such as Intelligent Reviews Response and Always on Messaging Assistant. Additionally, we have developed AI powered products that we sell as add ons to their chosen bundles. These products include Call Intelligence, Insurance Eligibility and our AI receptionist, weave. Call Intelligence is an AI analytics product that transcribes every call and creates a task list for office staff to follow up on. It highlights missed revenue opportunities and unhappy patients. A physician owner of a primary care practice in New Jersey implemented Call Intelligence as as a coaching tool for his front desk team. Rather than operating without clear visibility or manually reviewing every call, they use AI generated summaries and transcripts to pinpoint the exact moment patient sentiment shifts, dramatically reducing the time required to identify training gaps and freeing them up to provide more one on one coaching. After implementing we've Call Intelligence and updated training. Their unhappy call rate dropped by over 40% in just two months. A multilocation med spa in Philadelphia describes a similar transformation. Every Wednesday, using call intelligence, they review the flagged unhappy calls and follow up with a personal Note. They report 100% client retention rate. Among those follow ups, they shared that they wouldn't have known who needed outreach without it. Our solutions provide these practices with protection from otherwise invisible and preventable revenue leakage. Our customers are increasingly reliant on our AI functionality. In Q1, our platform handled over 300% more AI interactions than Q1 last year. The growth is being driven by both expanded AI features and products and increased customer adoption. Today, our text based AI receptionist directly handles appointment scheduling and answers common questions such as office hours and accepted insurance providers. Our customers have highlighted a number of ways the AI receptionist has increased the production of their dental practice. One is by reducing no shows and appointment cancellations. Another is effectively converting leads to new patients. A dental practice recently reported that using our AI receptionist they saw patient new patient volume grow 37%. This had a meaningful impact on the business's financial profile as their new patients spend three times as much per visit than existing patients. Next week we will release our Omnichannel AI receptionist to customers on select integrations which will significantly increase these capabilities by supporting both voice and text modalities. We anticipate that the agent will be more broadly available late this quarter. Weave delivers seamless task execution, transcription and summarization and preserves context through a single unified view of conversations and analytics across every bot to human handoff. We are uniquely positioned to deliver this capability because we own the full stack. We make the entire experience connected, visible and actionable. Initially, the agent will be able to effectively manage dozens of workflows including scheduling, answering common questions and completing handoffs between AI and humans. We have mapped out hundreds of additional workflows which will steadily be added to the agent skillset. It will become a more effective and skilled teammate every week. Customers who are using this latest solution are getting significant value from it and it is changing the way they operate. One dental office signed onto the pilot because the staff was completely overwhelmed by voicemail and increased call volumes on Mondays. By implementing our AI receptionist, patients got their questions answered more quickly and more appointments were kept. The doctor highlighted. Quote we only get paid when patients come in, so protecting the schedule matters. We have had several instances where patients started to cancel at the last minute, saw the cancellation fee warning from the AI agent and decided to keep the appointment. End quote. A dental practice in Florida joined the pilot to address missed calls outside of business hours and an overwhelmed front office team during the day. The result is that missed calls have dropped by roughly 80% with a similar decrease in weekend voicemails. An additional benefit is that an improvement is the improvement in care continuity. Patients dealing with emergencies or last minute scheduling conflicts can now get help when they need it most. For the front office team, the day simply runs smoother with fewer interruptions, less time managing calls on hold and a lighter start to the week. These are just two examples, but the early results confirm that providing our customers with an always on teammates to autonomously fulfill daily tasks will change the way these practices do business. This makes Weave Communications more mission critical than ever by increasing the production and revenue capture of the practice, which provides an additional way to grow our revenue per location by competing for a portion of the labor budget. We plan to monetize the Omnichannel AI receptionist through a hybrid subscription model largely aligned to consumption. Our ability to monetize will grow as practices expand their utilization of this always on teammate that manages the complete patient lifecycle. In the future, we expect to capture even greater payment processing volumes as we process co pays by intelligently managing the intake process and collecting outstanding balances. The future of Weave Communications is agentic and proactive, converting leads to booked appointments, filling holes in this schedule with patients on the verge of slipping through the cracks, collecting critical patient data in advance of appointment, recommending financing options to drive higher treatment plan acceptance, garnering online reviews and collecting on outstanding patient balances. Our current and future success with AI is a result of nearly 20 years of data and deep domain expertise that informs the development of healthcare specific workflows. Most patient facing workflows for a practice originate from or terminate through a phone call or a message. Our communication platform gives us a significant advantage as Weave Communications owns and manages this control point and natively executes these workflows through the trusted primary business phone number which leads to higher patient engagement. These interactions often require data transfers with practice management systems and we have the largest library of authorized practice management systems integrations available. Weave Communications is the all in one partner that practices can use to standardize work and efficiently grow their business. Practices that use Weave Communications are smarter, built to scale and feel more human. We focus on the day to day operations so the rest of the practice team can focus on the people they care for to close. I want to thank the Weave Communications team for their continued focused execution. Q1 was a great quarter and our future is bright. I'm very excited about the recent product launches and what we have on the horizon. Our financial results improved while delivering increasing value for our customers. We are well positioned for success in the new AI frontier. We will continue to lean into our strengths and our scale to deliver innovative solutions that help our customers improve their business outcomes. I also want to thank our customers, partners and shareholders for your continued trust. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jason to walk through the financials in more details.

Jason Christiansen (Chief Financial Officer)

Thanks Brett and good afternoon everyone. The first quarter was a Great start to 2026 for weave with improved revenue growth, strong gross margins and much improved operating income as we continue to execute across the business. In the first quarter we produced 65.5 million in total total dollars revenue which represents acceleration to 17.4% year over year growth driven by payments which again grew more than twice the rate of total revenue and the addition of new locations. We added more gross and net locations in Q1 than in any previous quarter and the specialty medical vertical continued to be the largest contributor. Gross Profit grew over 19% year over year to $47.9 million. Gross margin for the quarter was 73.2% representing a year over year improvement of 110 basis points. This margin improvement in Q1 was primarily driven by scale in our customer support model, ongoing efficiencies in our cloud infrastructure and hardware device costs, and the growing contribution of higher margin payments revenue. Customer support has been able to scale partly due to the benefits of using AI to deflect calls and effectively manage the caseload tied to a growing customer base. We also saw strong growth in the number of locations using our payment processing solutions, increased processing volume per location and a higher net take on payment transactions. These factors contribute to an expanding subscription and payment processing Gross margin of 78.4% in aggregate, the underlying progress and growing mix of high margin payments revenue clearly highlights a path to achieving our target long term gross margin profile of 75% to 80%. Turning to our dollar based revenue retention metrics, we believe our reported metrics found the floor in Q1 as monthly retention rates positively inflected in the quarter and were higher than the second half of 2025. Our dollar based net revenue retention rate in Q1 was 92%. Our dollar based gross revenue retention rate was 89% and remains very strong for companies serving SMB customers. As a reminder, our reported dollar based revenue retention rates are a weighted average of the previous 12 months monthly retention rates. As such, it can take multiple quarters for improvements to show through in reported metrics. Total operating expenses for Q1 were 69% of revenue. As mentioned in our previous conference call, Q1 expenses are seasonally higher due to the reset of payroll tax limits and benefit renewals. Taking general and Administrative expenses were $10.2 million and decreased over 180 basis points year over year to 15.6% of revenue from 17.4% of revenue in the prior year. Research and development expenses were $8.6 million or 13.1% of revenue. Research and development expenses decreased slightly year over year due to the increased capitalization of software development in Q1 2026 as development efforts tied to new products have increased. Our Omnichannel AI receptionist development has been a key contributor. Sales and Marketing expenses totaled $26.6 million or 40.6% of revenue. Sales and marketing expenses increased year over year largely due to increased advertising expenses and sales costs. Q1 is seasonally higher in advertising expenses due to increased events and prospect re engagement after the holidays. We added a payment sales team and channel Sales team in 2025, expanded our inbound upsell and mid market sales teams, and most recently reintroduced a sales development team. We continue to optimize our sales and marketing activities to deliver more profitable growth and we anticipate some improvements in sales and marketing efficiency as a percentage of revenue starting in the second quarter of 2026. Operating income for the quarter was $2.5 million compared to break even in Q1 2025 operating margin was 3.9%, a 380 basis point improvement over the prior year and more than a 20 basis point improvement sequentially. We are really pleased with how the quarter developed as we converted 26% of the revenue growth year over year into incremental operating income. The 26% incremental margin is a significant improvement over the 6% incremental margin produced in Q4 2025. Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow, we ended the quarter with $72.7 million in cash and short term investments, a decrease of $9 million sequentially. Cash used by operating activities in Q1 was $5.7 million and free cash flow was negative $7.1 million. Q1 cash flows and March 31 balances on the balance sheet are impacted by large seasonal disbursements, including the payout of our annual bonuses and significant prepaid software renewals which will not recur until Q1 of next year. Additionally, we used $1.6 million in cash on the net settlement of vesting equity awards which reduces dilution from RSU vests. We expect free cash Flow to be positive for the first half of 2026. Looking ahead, we look to build on our strong Q1 and are encouraged by the opportunities in front of us. We remain committed to delivering improving margins while maintaining our bias toward growth. We continue to make targeted investments in growth initiatives which reflects our ability to balance growth while making investments into our business. For the second quarter of 2026, we expect total revenue to grow to be in the range of $67.2 million to $68.2 million. We expect second quarter operating income to increase from Q2 last year to be in the range of $2.1 million to $3.1 million. As a reminder, Q2 operating expenses will increase sequentially as annual merit increases take effect in early Q2 for the full year 2026, we are raising our outlook and expect total revenue to be in the range of $275 million to $278 million. We are also raising our outlook for non Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) operating income and expect it to be in the range of $10.5 million to $13.5 million. We expect our weighted average share count for Q2 to be approximately 79.6 million shares and approximately 79.8 million shares for the full year. With that, I'll turn the call over to the operator for Q and A.

OPERATOR

We will now begin the question and answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star1 again. Please pick up your handset when asking a question. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q and A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Alex Sklar with Raymond James. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Alex Sklar (Equity Analyst)

Great. Thank you. Brett. First one for you. Just in terms of the record locations added, where do you see that incremental pickup versus some of the prior quarters and what are you seeing in terms of the land sizes of relative to a year ago across your different bundles? Thanks.

Brett White (Chief Executive Officer)

Sure. So we had really strong performance across all of our verticals and all of our motions. So I think, you know, as Jason mentioned, medical was strong, but dental was actually quite strong as well, which was terrific to see because that's the largest part of our business. So I think broad performance across all verticals for new locations added and then also all of our emotions. We had a strong bookings quarter in mid market, added some good logos there both inbound and outbound Performed well adding locations and then on just the adding the mrr, not not location based. Our upsell team had a terrific quarter. You know all the new products that we've released over the last 12 months are really getting traction now, which is terrific to see. And then on the land side on, on asp, I think it's pretty consistent with what we've seen over the last several quarters. Obviously you know, the upsell motions adds to the, you know, average revenue per location for the businesses that are adopting those products. Great color there and then a follow up on payments. I don't know if you want to take this or Jason, you talked about higher usage in the quarter, maybe some color on what drove that and then the enhanced payment integrations with some of those bigger practice management vendors. What's the potential unlock there from that announcement? Thanks.

Jason Christiansen (Chief Financial Officer)

Thanks Alex. Really we saw very strong payments performance across a number of vectors. I think the thing some of the product functionality that we talked about at the end of 2025 that we delivered, which includes bulk collection capabilities, the ability to send multiple collection requests through one one motion, the payment reminders, the follows up on unpaid invoices and then the surcharging capabilities, all of them contribute, contributed to the additional pickup. Surcharging was a very strong quarter for us. We saw the most, the most adoption increase in adoption of surcharging here in Q1 as we've seen so really encouraging across those use cases. And then you can't discount the impact that adding payment integrations has on the payments business. We're still pretty early stages. We've got a handful of payment integrations done with more to come and I think that continues to. That will continue to just be an unlock for us as we're able to really just streamline some of the office workflows, the pain points that staff experiences and help these practices reduce their day sales outstanding and their AR balances. And so AI Receptionist is going to be part of that story as we look forward as we're able to become more proactive in collecting on those balances and also help introduce the collections on the front end as part of the intake process. Okay, great. Thank you both for the color and nice results.

OPERATOR

Your next question comes from the line of Hannah Rudoff with Piper Sandler. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hannah Rudoff (Equity Analyst)

Hi guys, thanks for taking my question. It's nice to see the growth acceleration in Q1. I just wanted to ask on AI receptionist you talked about hybrid subscription and consumption pricing, I guess. Jason, could you just expand on what this looks like. I know you've talked about tapping into labor budgets in the past and I guess, have you thought about pricing this on more of an outcome based pricing model?

Jason Christiansen (Chief Financial Officer)

Sure. So what we mean by hybrid is, you know, we'll have a monthly fee for the product which will come with a number of phone calls, a number of phone interactions that are handled by the agent. And as your usage increases, then you can move to a higher tier, which gives you more, more phone calls that the agent will take. So basically you can scale the receptionist up and down and the monetization is really tied to the number of calls it handles. So you could imagine, you know, a practice may want to use it just for nights and weekends. So you know, that will, that would probably be on the lower end of the call handling or they might want to use it, you know, 24, 7 to actually be a fully always on teammate. In which case the number of calls handled would, would go up and then the pricing would go up as well. So right now that's the pricing that we're, we're practicing or we're launching with. And as far as outcome based pricing, yeah, it's, it's absolutely on our pricing team's radar. But we're gonna, we're gonna start with kind of this hybrid, you know, usage model and test that and see how that goes. The one thing I would add to that is as we think about some of the additional workflows that we deliver, there is built in or inherent pricing on that side. When you think about payments. As we integrate payment workflows into the AI receptionist, we'll also be able to collect on the outcomes of actually collecting balances on behalf. But there's a lot more thought going into it that will continue to iterate over time. And maybe one thing just to highlight on the AI receptionist that Brett alluded to, where offices will be able to scale the utilization up or down. One of the unique things about WEAVE and our ability to do that or support that is because we own the full communication stack on the back end. Offices can insert the agent anywhere they want within the interaction flows. So offices will have the control to dial that up to scale that back hours where they want it in. Like if for calls coming in where they want it in the call tree where they don't when they wanted to escalate it or hand it off to a human when they don't. And so that's part of the adoption that Brett's talking about is offices might start with, start with nights and weekends and see how it starts to actually deliver in real meaningful bookings and see the same results that the customers we highlighted are getting. They'll be able to inject it more and more directly with how their practice operates. And that's unique to us because of the full stack that we own, where it's all in one place.

Brett White (Chief Executive Officer)

Yeah. To expand on that a little bit, if I could, Hannah, we recently showed one of our large DSOs. This functionality basically pull up a screen, it's basically a flowchart, and you grab the AI receptionist and you move it wherever you want. So you can say I want it to pick up only at lunch or you can say I want it to pick up only after the third ring or I want it. And so, you know, just showing this, the capability and the flexibility of moving the agent anywhere you want in the call tree is really, really powerful. And I'm sure that practices will experiment with it and see how it works best for them.

Hannah Rudoff (Equity Analyst)

That makes a ton of sense and it's nice to see that users can completely customize how they use the AI receptionist. My second question is on nrr. I know we've talked about this metric being a little complicated just with it being location based, but I guess how should we think about or when should we expect AI to help drive an expansion in that NRR metric?

Jason Christiansen (Chief Financial Officer)

Yeah, I guess I'll just start with highlighting what I talked about in the prepared remarks, which was where we. We've started to see an inflection within the monthly. The monthly net retention metrics, not the weighted 12 month average, but the direct monthlies here in Q1. You know, the contribution. There's an interesting thing with our business which is customers have continued to land heavy whenever we bring new capabilities and we're able to deliver meaningful value. And so how exactly AI starts to drive the expansion of our net revenue retention is tough. We have better opportunity today with the release of these new products that we've brought to market and what's coming more than we've had in the past. And so that's something that we're leaning into. We're optimistic about also realizing that they may continue to land heavy as well and how that dynamic will play out. The one thing that I anticipate to continue to be true, which is regardless of what happens with net revenue retention as a metric, the average revenue per location, we anticipate that to continue to grow. Q1, we saw growth again in the revenue per location. If you look over the last two years, it's grown about 10% at the same time, net revenue retention has decreased as a metric. And so I think we're very optimistic about what these products can do and contribute though.

Hannah Rudoff (Equity Analyst)

Makes a ton of sense. Thanks, guys.

OPERATOR

Your next question comes from the line of Parker Lane with Stifel. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Jack McShane

Yeah, hi, this is Jack McShane on for Parker. Thanks for taking the questions today. I wanted to go back to the strong quarter of location additions and I'd be curious to hear if in any way you're seeing the AI product set and roadmap, you know, really resonating with prospective clients and whether this potentially drove, you know, the really strong location, addition, quarter.

Brett White (Chief Executive Officer)

Yeah, so I'll start. So, you know, because of our sales model, what's, what's super interesting is we generally sell what we have available to deliver, you know, kind of immediately. So what, what? So the majority, I would say the vast majority of the sales success in, in the quarter was on the core products that we have now, our core engagement platform, plus some of the newer products that have come out recently. We don't really sell futures just because of the SMB nature of our customers. However, what resonates very well with larger customers, DSO multi-location, is the roadmap. So I think the most of the upsell and. Well, I know the upsell and the new additions this quarter were primarily based on, or almost exclusively based on our current product set, what they were going to get next week, what they're going to go live on next week, which gets us even more excited about the next 12 to 24 months because then we can get these customers on board, happy with the core platform and then come back to them with new products, additional products, especially the AI receptionist.

Jack McShane

Yeah, no, makes sense. And then just to follow up, when you think about the ideal customer profile for the AI receptionists and what you're rolling out soon with everything around the omnichannel receptionist, is there a portion of your customer base that you think the product makes the most sense for? You know, in particular, maybe it's more relevant in mid market due to their scale or SMB due to staffing constraints or maybe even on like the vertical side, there may be puts and takes between, you know, the old core TAM versus specialty medical in terms of ripeness for adoption.

Brett White (Chief Executive Officer)

Yeah, so it's a, it's a great question. And you know, as we build our Personas for our core platform and additional products, we really give a lot of thought to this. So the AI receptionist is getting really favorable reviews across the board. And they're really different use cases. So if you're a small practice, you want to cover the phones at lunch over the weekends because all you need to book is a couple potential lost appointments. And it pays for itself. So, you know, you can see a small practice. Some small practices say, well, I'll try it because, but I really want to have that personal experience. But then they find out how many calls they're missing and it's really not a personal experience. So the value proposition definitely resonates in low end. Then you think about the high end who practices multilocation practices. They're very, very serious business operators. They understand the economic value very clearly. And so this, you know, the upsell products that we have, whether it be, I mean, call intelligence, is going really well with, you know, kind of larger, more sophisticated practices. We expect the AI receptionist, you know, we're piloting with them with them now. It's been received very well. So when we look at the Personas for the additional products, specifically AI receptionists, it really works. There is a strong use case kind of all the way across the spectrum.

Jason Christiansen (Chief Financial Officer)

Yeah. And when you look at it by vertical, you see similar phenomenon with just how they, how they operate. Right. Like many, many dental practices might only be in the office four days a week, and so they have extended weekends where they need more coverage. That this is really impactful. If you flip over and you look at like a veterinary clinic, they have incredibly high call volumes that flow into their practices. And so the value proposition of a receptionist that can help them manage, especially if there's staffing shortages with the demands of pet owners to bring their sick or injured or whatever it is the situation is with their, with their loved animal. Having a resource in place that can help address their needs is also very relevant. And so it is universal across the end markets that we serve and across the sizes, as Brett highlighted.

Jack McShane

Great, thank you.

OPERATOR

Okay, I think that that concludes. Sorry to interrupt. Yes, that concludes the Q&A portion. So I will now turn the call back to Brett White for closing remarks. Go ahead.

Brett White (Chief Executive Officer)

Okay, well, thank you all very much for joining the call and thanks again to the WEAVE team for such a terrific quarter. And I look forward to chatting again in about 90 days.

Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.