BigBear.ai Holdings, Inc. Q2 FY2026 earnings call

• Overall Financial and Business Momentum

  • Q2 2026 year-over-year revenue grew 13% and gross margin improved 781 basis points, meeting the company's underlying strategic expectations set during the 2025 business reset
  • Total backlog grew 9% (to $270 million) from the start of 2026, with a healthy sales pipeline and more than 20 new contracts won in Q2 2026 (individual contract values up to $5 million)
  • Net loss for Q2 2026 was $25.7 million, a large improvement from the $228.6 million net loss in Q2 2025, which reflected non-recurring non-cash charges in the prior year period; adjusted EBITDA was negative $11.6 million, down from negative $8.5 million year-over-year due to increased investments in sales, go-to-market, and R&D
  • The company ended Q2 2026 with $410 million in total cash and investments to support growth and M&A activity
  • Achieved CMMC Level 2 cybersecurity certification well ahead of schedule, meeting U.S. federal requirements for protecting controlled unclassified information and strengthening customer trust

• Key Product Deployment and Customer Wins

  • CargoSeer: Signed a 5-year commercial deployment agreement with a regional customs partner in El Salvador, following a successful 12-month pilot. This is the first Central American deployment for the AI-powered cargo inspection platform, which unifies X-ray imagery, trade documents, and structured data to help customs detect contraband, collect correct duties, and speed legitimate trade. Global interest from other customs agencies is growing
  • Generative AI for Disconnected Environments: Won a new contract with U.S. NAVAIR, and expanded the core platform offering for U.S. federal customers with new portable, air-gapped local hardware that supports up to top-secret deployments. The device works across connected and disconnected environments, supports multi-model, multimodal functionality, and offers flexible pricing and white-label options to address customer security and cost needs
  • ConductorOS: Demonstrated successful drone swarm orchestration in military exercises, enabling a single operator to command multiple multi-vendor drones in a degraded communications environment. It also enabled previously incompatible sensor and missile systems to share target data at a U.S. Army exercise, earning approved interoperability status. The open, vendor-neutral architecture addresses the growing need for interoperability across mixed fleets of autonomous systems, especially drones, which are receiving record global defense investment

• Strategic Focus

  • The company is positioned to capitalize on growing global investment in defense and security AI, driven by great power competition, asymmetric threats, critical infrastructure protection needs, and growing trade and border management challenges
  • Completed full integration of two acquisitions (Assage and Cargosear) from the prior six months, with both teams performing well
  • Leadership’s top priorities are delivering top-line revenue growth and pursuing accretive, catalytic M&A targets with clear rapid deployment and scaling potential; the company plans to be aggressive in deploying cash for M&A given the large addressable market opportunity
  • Big Bear AI operates as both a prime contractor and a specialized partner for legacy defense primes, giving it unique flexibility in the market

Total Q2 2026 revenue was $36.7 million, a 13% year-over-year increase driven by growth in generative AI platforms and products. Generative AI platforms and products represented the majority of the year-over-year revenue growth, and contributed a higher revenue mix relative to Q2 2025, which drove overall gross margin expansion. Gross margin for the full company reached 32.8% in Q2 2026, up 781 basis points year-over-year. No separate absolute revenue figures or contribution percentages are provided for individual product segments in the transcript.

• Management reaffirmed full-year 2026 top-line revenue guidance, maintaining the previously stated range of $135 million to $165 million, and confirmed the company is on track to meet this target

• The call notes that forward-looking statements are subject to material risks that could cause actual results to differ from projections, referenced in the company's SEC filings and public disclosures. The specific risks discussed in the call include:
  • Growing global security threats including drone swarm attacks, AI-enabled cyber threats, and asymmetric threats from accessible low-cost powerful technologies, though these trends also increase demand for the company's solutions
  • Operational challenges at global ports and border crossings including limited staff, resource constraints, and balancing security, revenue collection, and trade flow efficiency, which the company's products are designed to address
  • The need for improved cybersecurity and data protection for sensitive government and commercial customer data, which the company addressed through early CMMC Level 2 certification
  • Interoperability challenges across multi-vendor autonomous and defense systems, which is the core problem the company's ConductorOS product solves

No question-and-answer session was held before the conference concluded, so there are no exchanges to summarize.