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Transcript Summary

SmartRent, Inc. (Q1 2026) reported a significant move toward profitability, achieving its second consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA ($0.4 million). Although total revenue dipped 6% to $38.7 million due to lower hub amortization and hardware timing, gross margins jumped to 39.1% following 2025 cost-cutting measures. The company’s IoT footprint reached 911,000 units, a 10% year-over-year increase, keeping them on track for their March to 1 million goal in 2027. Key strategic developments include the Vision 2028 plan, which focuses on doubling the sales force, launching a Value-Added Reseller (VAR) program for smaller markets, and initiating a hardware refresh cycle for older deployments. Management is also aggressively renegotiating legacy contracts for approximately 300,000 units, achieving 33% price increases that will boost SaaS ARPU. Despite a 9% decline in bookings attributed to sales ramp-up and market caution, the company maintains a strong balance sheet with $99 million in cash and no debt. SmartRent anticipates a stronger second half of the year as new sales hires reach full productivity and VAR channels begin contributing.

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SmartRent, Inc.: SaaS Shift Masks Covenant Breaches and Privacy Litigation Risks

Full Earnings Call Transcript — Q1 • 2026-05-06

Operator: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to SmartRent, Inc. first quarter 2026 earnings release. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question-and-answer session. To withdraw your question, press 1 again. I will now hand the conference over to Kelly Reisdorf, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Kelly Reisdorf: Hello, and thank you for joining us today. My name is Kelly Reisdorf, Head of Investor Relations for SmartRent, Inc. I am joined today by our President and Chief Executive Officer, Frank Martell, and Daryl Stemm, Chief Financial Officer. Before the market opened today, we issued an earnings release and filed our Form 10-Q with the SEC, both of which are available on the Investor Relations section of our website. Before I turn the call over to Frank, I would like to remind everyone that the discussion today may contain certain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Various factors could cause our actual results to be materially different from any future results expressed or implied by such statements. These factors are discussed in our SEC filings, including in our Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. We undertake no obligation to provide updates regarding forward-looking statements made during this call, and we recommend that all investors review these reports thoroughly before taking a financial position in SmartRent, Inc. Also, during today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. A discussion of these non-GAAP financial measures, along with the reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP measure, is included in today's earnings release. We would also like to highlight that our quarterly earnings presentation is available on the Investor Relations section of our website. And with that, I will turn the call over to Frank.
Frank Martell: Good morning, everyone. My remarks today are going to focus on the more notable financial and operational accomplishments the team delivered in the first quarter. This progress builds on the momentum we achieved in the second half of 2025. I will also provide some important color on the progress that we are making driving our imperatives that underpin our Vision 2028 strategic plan. Daryl will close out our prepared remarks today with a more detailed discussion. Over the past three quarters, we have focused aggressively on strengthening our leadership team, rightsizing our cost structure, driving increasing levels of operating leverage through process reengineering and automation, and finally, investing in our go-to-market and technology capabilities. I believe that the benefits of this focus were evident in our first quarter operating and financial results. From my point of view, some of the more important proof points of our progress are the following. First, we grew our IoT footprint 10% in Q1 from the prior year. As of March 2026, SmartRent, Inc.'s industry-leading IoT technology solutions are now deployed in over 911,000 rental units across the U.S. These units provide our owner and operator customers with a proven rate of return on their investment while significantly enhancing the experience of their residents. We expect to eclipse the 1 million level for IoT unit installations in 2027. Second, ARR grew 9% year over year to $1 million, or approximately 39% of our total revenue. We expect to drive higher levels of ARR and profitability over the medium to longer term as we continue to expand our deployed IoT footprint. Third, gross profit and margin for Q1 totaled $15 million and 39%, respectively. Gross margins were up 630 basis points in Q1. The upswing in gross profit and margins was driven by a year-over-year reduction in cost of sales and a 32% reduction in operating expenses. Fourth, we delivered positive adjusted EBITDA of approximately $0.4 million in Q1. This was our second consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA. Our net loss on a GAAP basis fell from $40 million to $4 million year over year, benefiting from significantly lower cost run rates and a 2025 non-cash impairment charge that has no counterpart in 2026. And finally, we ended March 2026 with $99 million of cash and no debt, providing us with financial flexibility to execute against Vision 2028 with confidence. Our focus and accomplishments so far in 2026 are part of a longer-term strategy, which we call Vision 2028. I discussed Vision 2028 in some depth on our last earnings call. As you may remember, it is a three-year program built around two clear priorities. First, accelerating profitable growth by expanding our installed IoT footprint at a compound double-digit growth rate from 2026 through 2028 and, at the same time, expanding our portfolio of data-driven insights and solutions that deliver industry-leading customer ROI. Second, achieving higher levels of profitability and cash flow through accelerated growth and a highly scalable operating model. We will operationalize these priorities through five strategic pillars. First, growing our installed base at a double-digit pace. Second, scaling a world-class go-to-market organization. Third, deepening platform integration with data, analytics, and AI. Fourth, simplifying our hardware architecture while investing in next-generation capabilities. Lastly, strengthening our internal operating rigor to drive sustainable profit and free cash flow. I will provide more detail on each of these strategic pillars during subsequent calls. On this call, I plan to touch on our focus relative to accelerating profitable growth. Specifically, I believe that SmartRent, Inc. has a number of significant opportunities in the following areas. Our first opportunity is centered around deepening our penetration in the portfolios of our existing customers. Currently, our installed base of 911,000 IoT units serves roughly 600 customers who collectively own or control more than 6 million units in the U.S. That means we have deployed smart technology in roughly 15% of the addressable portfolio within our existing customer base, and 85% remains a significant expansion opportunity. Our March to 1 million initiative is first and foremost a story about converting that white space. As our installed base matures, we are also focused on a second key growth opportunity, which is establishing a cadence of hardware refreshes, which is a natural milestone for a platform at our scale and one that deepens our relationships with our longest-tenured customers. Our IoT platform currently stands at over 911,000 units installed with smart hubs connected to more than 3 million devices across approximately 3,500 properties. Equipment deployed in the company's early years is now approaching end of life. We are working proactively with customers to plan refreshes in an organized way. This ensures customers continue to benefit from our latest hardware and insights, and it gives SmartRent, Inc. a sizable hardware revenue cadence as the business matures and equipment is replaced. The third opportunity we have is expanding our reach to small and medium multifamily owners and operators as well as merchant builders through a dedicated SmartRent, Inc. team supplemented by the value-added reseller, or VAR, program that we recently launched. That program is designed to access this opportunity in a capital-efficient way, leveraging partners with established market presence rather than scaling a direct sales force to effectively address this segment. And our fourth growth opportunity is expanding our software and hardware solution sets that are powered by AI as well as our unique data repository. SmartRent, Inc.'s market leadership has been built on delivering measurable and significant ROI for its customers. We believe that we can expand the benefits within our existing footprint and for new customers through the introduction of solutions that leverage the unique insights from our data collected from millions of connected devices. We are accelerating our use of AI and other techniques that make the adoption of additional solutions in the near to medium term a significant opportunity for the company. Looking forward to the remainder of this year, we remain laser-focused on expanding our footprint of installed IoT units in line with our March to 1 million program. Despite current market headwinds, we are pushing to accelerate the growth of our core revenues while delivering positive adjusted EBITDA and cash flow for the full year. In terms of the market, although many of our customers remain cautious, we believe our solutions provide compelling ROI in all market conditions and that the long-term demand picture for our platform remains positive, as market fundamentals gradually improve. Daryl will provide additional color around market conditions in a couple of minutes. To wrap up my prepared remarks today, I want to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of the SmartRent, Inc. team as well as the support of our shareholders. Over the past three quarters, we have made significant progress on many critical fronts and are now increasingly well positioned to achieve the goals that we have outlined in our Vision 2028 strategic plan. With that said, I will now turn the call over to Daryl. Thank you, and good morning, everyone.
Daryl Stemm: Today, I will walk you through our first quarter financial results in more detail, covering revenue, margins, operating expenses, and cash, and then offer some perspective on how we are thinking about the rest of the year. Total revenue for the first quarter was $38.7 million, a decrease of approximately 6% from $41.3 million in 2025, driven primarily by a $2.6 million decline in non-cash hub amortization revenue and a hardware comparison against an especially strong prior-year quarter. Although total revenue was down 6%, importantly, cost of sales was down by 15%, primarily driven by our cost alignment actions in 2025. Excluding non-cash hub amortization, core revenue was $36.6 million, essentially flat to the $36.7 million in the prior-year quarter, and we believe that is the more representative measure of the underlying volume of our business. Within the revenue mix, SaaS revenue was $0.2 million, up 9% year over year; SaaS revenue now represents 39% of total revenue. Hardware revenue was $15.4 million, down 18% year over year from $18.8 million, which reflected an unusually large customer order that contributed to an elevated prior-year comparison. Professional services revenue was $6 million, up 55% year over year from $3.9 million in the prior-year quarter, reflecting improved deployment volume within our installation teams. Before I move to margins, I want to address bookings, which were 16,592 units, down 9% year over year. Four things drove the shortfall. First, our new enterprise reps are still ramping. Q1 reflects early-stage output from a team that is not yet at full productivity. Second, our contract renewal work shifted some signings into later quarters. Third, hardware refresh conversations with long-tenured customers consumed sales capacity that would otherwise have gone towards new bookings. Fourth, the broader market environment has operators being deliberate about capital deployment decisions in a way that affects the timing of new commitments. These are timing and ramp issues. In other words, these are cyclical and not structural demand issues. Total gross profit was $15.1 million compared to $13.6 million in 2025, with total gross margin expanding 630 basis points year over year to 39.1% from 32.8%. This improvement reflects the structural cost actions we took in 2025, better operating discipline, and a more favorable revenue mix as SaaS becomes a larger share of the total. Professional services gross profit improved dramatically from a loss of $3.4 million in the prior-year quarter to approximately breakeven in Q1 2026. This is now our third consecutive quarter of positive professional services margins, reflecting genuine structural improvement in how we are executing installations and durable ARPU increases. Hardware gross margin was 18.2%, down approximately 760 basis points year over year, reflecting product mix and lower shipment volumes. Operating expenses in the first quarter were $20.2 million, a decrease of 32% from $29.9 million in the prior-year quarter. That $9.7 million year-over-year reduction is the direct result of the cost alignment actions taken in 2025 and also reflects the elimination of one-time costs primarily related to concluded legal proceedings. At the same time, we are actively reinvesting in our go-to-market organization, and we believe the sales and marketing line on our income statement will increase as we add headcount and build out the commercial infrastructure Frank described in connection with the fulfillment of our Vision 2028 imperatives. Net loss for the first quarter was $4.4 million compared to $40.2 million in 2025. The prior-year figure included a $24.9 million goodwill impairment charge that does not have a current-year counterpart. Excluding that, operational net loss improved from $15.3 million to $4.4 million year over year, meaningful improvement driven by both margin expansion and the lower cost structure created by actions taken in 2025. Adjusted EBITDA was $0.4 million and was positive for the second consecutive quarter compared to a loss of $6.4 million in the prior-year quarter, reflecting the combined effect of SaaS margin expansion, cost discipline, and improved professional services execution. We ended the quarter with $99 million in cash, no debt, and an undrawn $75 million credit facility. Cash decreased by approximately $6 million from approximately $105 million at the end of 2025. As we communicated previously, cash use in the first quarter was expected, as these results reflect the timing of annual incentive compensation payments. We view this use of cash as seasonal rather than a go-forward cash consumption level. Working capital remained healthy. Accounts receivable declined to $36.8 million from $47.4 million at year-end, reflecting strong collections resulting from continued workflow changes executed in the quarter. Inventory came down to $24.4 million from $26.7 million, consistent with our more disciplined approach to hardware procurement and forecasting. We remain confident in our ability to deliver positive adjusted EBITDA and positive free cash flow on a full-year basis. Before opening the call for questions, I want to offer a few comments related to how we are thinking about the rest of the year. On revenue, we expect continued ARR growth primarily driven by expansion of our installed base. Hub amortization revenue will continue to decline, and we expect it to be less than $5 million for the full year. It was $2.1 million in Q1, which creates a modest headwind to reported total revenue but improves the quality of our revenue mix as non-cash revenue becomes a smaller component. We expect revenue to improve as the year progresses, primarily driven by our sales team reaching fuller productivity and our VAR channel beginning to contribute. We are not providing quarterly guidance, but we expect the second half of the year to be stronger than the first. Our expectation is to be adjusted EBITDA profitable for the full year, and on cash, we expect to be free cash flow positive on a full-year basis, with Q1 seasonal use not reflective of our expected annual results. We will now open the call for questions.
Operator: We will now begin the question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question. And if you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Your first question comes from the line of Ryan John Tomasello from KBW. Please go ahead.
Ryan John Tomasello: Thanks. I was hoping you could elaborate on the initiatives underway to scale the sales organization—just maybe any parameters around how many sales reps you currently have, the hiring plans, and just overall, Frank, the strategy there to build out more capacity and improve the productivity. Thanks.
Frank Martell: Sure. Thanks, Ryan. We are going to double the on-staff sales team. We have been recruiting very heavily the last six months. We are trying to make sure that we get the highest-quality people on board, so that takes a little bit of time, but we are going to add about 25% in the next three months. We have those candidates identified, so that is ongoing. Secondly, I would say that Daryl mentioned it, but we have had a very heavy period of resetting the original founder contract base that we have, which will make up a significant difference in the profitability of the company going forward, and Daryl alluded to that. So there has been adding people but also freeing up people that have been really focused on the effort to renegotiate those contracts, and we are making significant progress there, but it takes a bit of time. We launched a VAR program, and it is a very focused program around geographic white space and using primarily installation partners that we feel really good about. We will not limit it to that, but that is the focus initially. We are getting good traction there. That is really focused on getting an economical shot at the smaller mid-market. As I mentioned in my remarks, we have a pretty good opportunity in the existing base that we have, but also we have a lot of white space in the mid-mass market. We are very hopeful, and I think we are ramping up. We should have a couple more partners. We have one on board now that we have worked with for many years, and that is, I think, immediately accretive from an order book standpoint. The plan is to get to eight to ten as we progress over the next four quarters. So it is internal and external, and we are cleaning up the prior contractual regime, so all that is underway. I would expect that we will have an impact on Q2 and then progressively thereafter a more significant impact on the bookings rate.
Daryl Stemm: Frank, thanks. I wanted to add one point with regard to the renewal activity. The renewal activity had no impact on the Q1 financial results; however, the completion of our first three renewals from early-stage customers by the end of this year should have a positive impact on our SaaS ARPU of about $0.05 per unit per month. That is a pretty significant improvement. It goes through to the bottom line, so a nice accretive impact to our profitability. It also sets the stage for further SaaS ARPU improvements in the following years because those renewals have both escalation clauses built into them as well as, as these customers expand across their portfolios, it will have an increased impact as a result of more of their units being on the newer, higher prices.
Ryan John Tomasello: And then maybe just dovetailing on those legacy contracts, Daryl, the $0.05 uplift is nice to hear. But maybe if you could elaborate more broadly on approximately how many units those legacy contracts relate to, where the pricing stands on those, and how you are thinking about the magnitude of what those renewal uplifts could look like, including on the three that you have gotten so far?
Daryl Stemm: The three on average have about a 33% increase on their original pricing. The primary impact is simply to bring those early customer contracts more in line with current market pricing. They received large discounts when they originally signed because they were early adopters, and also these are relatively large customers, so they are going to enjoy the benefit of discounts based on their volume. Again, the notion is simply to bring them more in line with current market pricing. We had very aggressive growth between the years 2019 and 2023, and so those units that are on our platforms are really subject to these renewals. Different customers have different lengths of subscription agreements, and we are just now entering the first phase of these renewals. One last reminder is that most of these customers, due to the size of their portfolios, rolled out deployments over multiple years. The reason why we do not see the impact of these renegotiations all at once is that, over a period of multiple years, their individual community subscriptions will expire and then be renewed at these new higher prices. I would say, just rough order of magnitude, we are talking about one-third of the current deployed units—approximately 300,000 out of roughly 900,000 in total—are subject to these renewals.
Ryan John Tomasello: Great. And then just last one for me before I hop back in the queue. But, Daryl, it looks like, despite the sequential growth in installed units, ARR actually declined sequentially and SaaS ARPU declined sequentially. Anything to call out there in terms of drivers? Thanks.
Daryl Stemm: I would say the primary driver is two counterbalancing items. One is we experienced some churn off of our Smart Operations solution that had a negative impact on SaaS ARPU of about $0.11. The addition of new deployed units mitigated about half of that reduction. As a reminder, we have tended to experience higher churn on Smart Operations and virtually no churn off of the IoT portion of our solution set. We would expect that we will continue to make up ground off of the Q1 losses through the continued deployment of new units as well as the impact of these renewal rates.
Operator: A reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1. At this time, there are no further questions. Thank you all for attending. You may now disconnect. Goodbye.