stockrowWhat it does
Zeta Global sells consumer intelligence and marketing automation software to enterprises. Its Zeta Marketing Platform combines data about consumers with artificial intelligence to help customers identify audiences, create campaigns and engage people across email, websites, social media, connected TV and other digital channels.
The platform has products for messaging, managing customer data and buying digital advertising. Customers can use them individually or together. Zeta also offers an intelligence suite that combines its own data with information from customers to identify audiences and opportunities for marketing campaigns.
Zeta’s SuperGraph connects identities across different data sources. Its data set includes proprietary, partner and publicly available information about more than 535 million individuals globally. The platform uses that information and machine learning to predict consumer intent, select audiences and adjust messages.
Athena is an interface to the platform’s AI infrastructure, designed to let customers use natural language and voice to interact with data, analytics and marketing tools. Zeta is also developing business intelligence uses that extend beyond marketing campaigns. The company says its Zeta Business Intelligence product helps customers predict outcomes and act in real time.
Zeta was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in New York. David Steinberg is its co-founder, chairman and chief executive.
How it makes money
Zeta earns revenue by selling access to its marketing platform and related services. Customers can purchase its products separately or combine them, add modules and integrations, and increase their use of the platform over time.
The messaging product helps customers segment audiences and automate campaigns across email, mobile, social and other digital channels. The customer data product brings together consumer information from multiple databases and feeds, giving customers a view of existing and potential customers. The advertising product helps customers deliver targeted paid media across channels such as mobile, connected TV and social media.
Zeta Answers adds audience and market intelligence. Zeta offers the suite for a licensing fee and/or an incremental fee based on customers’ use of the platform. Subscription agreements for the suite are typically quarterly or annual. The company also sells technical upgrades, consulting, additional integrations and access to ad-hoc data sources, services and channels. Its usage-based pricing model can make revenue from existing and prospective customers difficult to forecast.
Zeta’s sales approach is to acquire customers and then expand their use of a product or add more products and channels. In 2025, its annual net revenue retention rate was 128.0%, excluding political and advocacy customers because of their biennial activity. The measure compares current-year revenue from customers that also generated revenue in the prior year with their prior-year revenue.
In Q2 2026, revenue was $443 million. Zeta says it is also serving ads on OpenAI’s advertising platform and has developed paid business intelligence use cases with customers.
Customers and how it sells
Zeta serves enterprises across consumer and retail, travel and hospitality, insurance, telecommunications, financial services and other industries. Consumer and retail customers contributed 24% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2025; travel and hospitality and insurance each contributed 11%, telecommunications 10%, and financial services 8%.
At December 31, 2025, Zeta had 2,651 customers, including 184 super-scaled customers. A super-scaled customer is one that generated at least $1,000,000 in trailing-12-month revenue. These customers accounted for 87% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2025.
U.S. revenue was $1.2 billion in FY2025, or 95.5% of revenue. International revenue was $58.2 million, or 4.46%. Zeta is investing in select European regions, although privacy and consent requirements have limited its ability to collect data at sufficient scale in some markets.
Customers use Zeta to reach consumers through channels including email, websites, social media, mobile applications and connected TV. Gap selected Zeta to help build its marketing technology stack, with Athena at the center, under a multiyear agreement.
| Region | Revenue, FY2025 | Share | Change on the year |
|---|---|---|---|
| US | $1.2 billion | 95.5% | 27.9% |
| International | $58.2 million | 4.46% | 88.8% |
Suppliers and costs
Zeta hosts its platform in a hybrid cloud combining public-cloud deployments with self-hosted private-cloud resources. The public-cloud options include AWS, Google and Azure. Zeta also relies on data center and technology vendors for services including floor space, bandwidth, cooling and physical security.
Its consumer data comes from proprietary, partner and publicly available sources. The company invests in obtaining additional data from third-party providers as well as expanding its own sources. Zeta also uses hardware and software from outside vendors for privacy, security and governance work.
Zeta had 3,300 employees at December 31, 2025, including engineers and data scientists. It plans to invest in research and development, sales and marketing, international expansion and administrative support. In Q2 2026, cost of revenue was 41% of revenue; the company attributed the year-over-year increase to social-channel adoption by agencies.
- Revenue$1.3B
- Cost of revenue−$513.6M
- Research and development−$117.2M
- Selling, general and administrative−$573.1M
- Other operating costs−$95.5M
- Operating income$5.4M
Competitive position
Zeta competes in markets for marketing automation, customer data management and digital advertising. The company describes the market as fragmented, with competitors often focused on particular uses, industries or data sets. Customers can also choose to build marketing automation tools in-house. Salesforce is a named competitor: Zeta says it displaced Salesforce and other vendors to become Gap’s system of record.
Competition depends on the quality of insights, automation across channels, data management, integration and the scale of identity and audience data. Zeta also faces price cutting and customer price sensitivity, which can put pressure on gross margins.
Our reading: Zeta’s data and identity capabilities are a potential competitive advantage because they connect information from multiple sources to audiences that customers can use in campaigns. The advantage depends on continued access to data and the ability to use it under privacy rules.
Our reading: The combination of messaging, data management, advertising and analytics can make the platform more embedded in customer workflows, although customers can purchase individual products and alternatives exist. Zeta’s patents and proprietary AI systems provide additional protection, but the company notes that intellectual property rights can be difficult to enforce.
| Competitor | Where they compete | Threat (our reading) |
|---|---|---|
| Salesforce | Enterprise customer data and marketing platforms | Medium |
Growth opportunities
Zeta’s growth strategy includes adding enterprise customers and expanding within existing accounts. It seeks to cross-sell products, add features and channels, and capture more of customers’ marketing spending. Zeta Answers can serve as an entry point, after which customers may adopt more products or use existing ones more extensively.
The company is investing in sales capacity, product development and data sources. It also plans to expand internationally and into business-to-business marketing. The number of super-scaled customers rose to 184 at December 31, 2025 from 148 at December 31, 2024.
Zeta is extending the platform into business intelligence. Its customers have used that product to examine entertainment audiences and retail partnerships. Athena adds a voice and natural-language interface; more than 40% of super-scaled customers were monthly active users in Q2 2026, according to the company.
Partnerships are another part of the strategy. Zeta says it deepened its Snowflake relationship and has over 100 shared customers. Its data cloud was fully integrated with Palantir Foundry as of July 31, and the company reported receiving multiple agreements for initial combined sales. OpenAI powers Athena’s voice, while Zeta says its own models make the decisions.
For 2026, Zeta expects revenue of $1.818 billion at the midpoint of its guidance.
- $458.3MFY2021
- $591.0MFY2022
- $728.7MFY2023
- $1.0BFY2024
- $1.3BFY2025
- $1.8BFY2026 guidance
Structural risks
- Large-customer retention: Zeta’s success and revenue growth depend on adding, growing and retaining super-scaled customers. These customers generated 87% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2025.
- Privacy and data use: Changes in privacy laws, security requirements or consumer behavior could affect data collection and use. Consent requirements have already restricted expansion in some international markets where Zeta has not collected enough data for certain customer use cases.
- Competition and technology: Rivals can improve their products, cut prices or introduce new technologies. Zeta’s results depend on differentiating its platform and continuing to invest in and develop its offerings.
- Revenue variability: Usage-based pricing makes customer revenue harder to forecast. Marketing activity is historically higher in the fourth quarter than in the following first quarter, while political and advocacy revenue also varies with election cycles.
- Third-party dependencies and expansion: Zeta relies on data center operators and technology vendors. International operations add regulatory, staffing and intellectual property challenges, while acquisitions can bring integration difficulties and unexpected costs.
Bottom line
Our reading
Our reading: Zeta combines recurring software access with usage-based revenue, and its expansion strategy depends on customers adopting more products and channels. Its data and integrated tools can support that strategy, but a large share of revenue comes from super-scaled customers, while privacy rules, competition and third-party dependencies constrain how the business can grow.