PubMatic says its company and the ad industry are at an inflection point. And the SSP is betting its future on agentic AI.
PubMatic reported $80 million in revenue during its Q4 2025 earnings call on Thursday, which was down 6% year over year. It also reported $282.9 million for the full year of 2025, down 3% YOY.
Notably, the company framed these results as strong, since it beat its revenue projections. And, negative growth aside, investors seemed encouraged, with PubMatic’s stock price jumping about 6% in after-hours trading.
According to PubMatic CFO Steve Pantelick, the full-year revenue numbers reflect a downturn followed by a normalization in spend coming from an unnamed large incumbent DSP – cough, The Trade Desk. To offset the impact of this DSP partner, PubMatic has diversified its DSP base with new midtier partners that have room to grow their spend, Pantelick said.
Adoption of PubMatic’s AgenticOS, combined with strong demand in CTV and mobile and a return to growth in display advertising, set the stage for PubMatic’s business to grow by double digits in the second half of this year, CEO Rajeev Goel added.
Going agentic
As far as PubMatic’s long-term prospects go, Goel predicted that, by 2028, 25% of all digital advertising will be “executed autonomously via agentic AI,” and that this share will grow to 50% by 2030.
He said PubMatic’s efforts to position itself as an early agentic AI leader – through the launch of AgenticOS and the company’s participation in the creation of the Ad Context Protocol – will pay dividends as this shift plays out in the coming years.
Since announcing its first agent-executed CTV campaign in partnership with ad agency Butler/Till in January, PubMatic has run more than 250 agentic ad campaigns, Goel said.
Many of these campaigns represent new advertisers on PubMatic’s platform, he said, proving that agentic solutions are bringing in incremental revenue.
Plus, PubMatic collects additional fees for AgenticOS campaigns beyond its usual SSP take rate, Goel said. So, similar to the additional fees PubMatic collects via its Activate direct-to-buyer connection, AgenticOS represents a new revenue stream for the company outside its existing margins, according to Goel.
PubMatic also launched an AI accelerator program aimed at boosting partner adoption of the tech. Almost 100 brands, agencies and streaming platforms have already signed up, Goel said, “making it the fastest early-stage adoption of any product we’ve launched.”
The DSP mix
Other than agentic AI, the other prominent theme in PubMatic’s earnings was the SSP’s evolving relationship with its DSP partners.
Understandably, PubMatic’s full-year 2025 numbers were dinged by The Trade Desk’s decision to classify all SSPs as resellers last August, which resulted in TTD shifting more spend to its OpenPath direct-to-publisher connections that cut SSPs out of the supply chain.
Goel and Pantelick made several references to an unnamed DSP partner dragging PubMatic’s Q3 revenue before spend from this unnamed platform stabilized around August and September. Pantelick noted that, excluding the impact of this DSP and 2024 political spend, PubMatic’s revenue would have been up by 18% YOY in Q4 and up by 9% for 2025.
Diversifying its mix of DSP partners by courting more midtier and specialist platforms is number one on PubMatic’s five-point growth plan, Goel said. PubMatic recently added 50 new DSP partners, Pantelick said, and “reshaped the mix of our largest DSPs towards fast-growing commerce and high-value ad verticals like Pharma.”
In what seemed like an indicator of the stiffening competition between Amazon and The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP is now a top-five buyer on PubMatic, Goel said.
Meanwhile, ad spend from mid-market DSPs increased by 30% YOY in Q4, Pantelick said. And ad spend from the mid-market advertisers represented by these DSPs was the “fastest-growing segment of the market” last year, he added.
The other five points
Second on PubMatic’s five-point growth plan, Goel said, is the aforementioned Activate direct-to-buyer business, which tripled in Q4. Supply-path optimization – of which Activate represents a major share – accounted for 55% of total activity on PubMatic’s platform in 2025.
The third point is continued growth in CTV, mobile and emerging revenue streams.
Excluding 2024 political spend, PubMatic’s CTV revenue was up 50% YOY in Q4. Mobile app growth was up 25% for the quarter. And emerging revenues, which Goel said includes Activate, commerce media and new AI solutions, grew 75% in Q4 and now represent nearly 10% of PubMatic’s total revenue.
Meanwhile, PubMatic’s legacy display ad business was up 20% in Q4.
Points four and five on the list represent emerging AI solutions and internal AI optimizations, respectively. Already 40% of the new code written by the company was AI-generated in the second half of last year. Currently, 10% of PubMatic’s publishers are generating revenue from AI solutions, including AgenticOS and other pub-facing products offered by the company.
“It’s great that it’s in double digits, but that number should be 100% eventually,” Goel said. “We’re still early, and there’s a lot of runway ahead of us.”
