Bullish on Zeta Global: Athena OS and data-privacy announcements raised my optimism; revenue growth is accelerating, margins improving, and management targets over 20% growth through 2028. Athena financials unknown and custom chips far off, but EV/sales of 5 on 30% CAGR supports potential tenfold over next decade.

I was already optimistic about Zeta Global before last week's Zeta Life conference , but the company announced some products that could potentially increase its business size tenfold over the next decade or so.

Now, this is one of the companies in which I own shares within the "Asymmetric" portfolio. In fact, it ranks second in that portfolio, and that makes me more optimistic about the company’s long-term future .

Today, I want us to review exactly what we learned at the Zeta Global Conference, what was important, and what things might have a greater impact a few years from now.

However, this is a company that continues to achieve cumulative revenue growth year after year. Their profit margins are improving, and everything we heard last week indicates that this trend will continue.

Therefore, I believe the potential for Zeta Global's stock to grow tenfold over the next ten years may be even greater than that.

Okay, let's give a little background on Zeta Global because it's a company you may not have heard of if you're not already invested in it .

Zeta helps organizations make better decisions and deliver proactive intelligence across in-organization marketing channels to accelerate growth. The correct way to think about it is that " Zeta" operates in the demand field.

Through their own data and the data they collect from their customers, they decide where advertising spending will be directed? Will he go to the internet-connected television?

Will he go into email marketing? Perhaps SMS marketing. Also through social media channels.

Zeta works with the world’s largest marketers to help them make better decisions about how to spend their marketing money.

Therefore, they will not be creating the creative content itself, i.e., the image or video that will be used in the advertisement. Instead, they will decide where that money can be best spent to place this advertisement.

So , as I said, this is a demand-side business in its current state. This work is performing very well . Looking at the March 2024 quarter, you can see that revenue growth has doubled at a rate of 37.6%.

You can see that revenue growth has been accelerating in the last few quarters .

And look at this operating profit. So, their operational leverage is improving. They are becoming more profitable. This should continue. Management has set some goals for 2028, to improve adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization ( EBITDA), and to improve the free cash flow margin.

So, everything is going in the right direction. What was announced last week is what is called " Athena OS". Athena OS will be linked not only to the demand side of the business, i.e., the traditional part of Zeta Global, but also to the supply side.

So that they can understand inventory locations, order locations, and pricing structure. But for Zeta, the operating system component, the reason it's called " Zeta OS" is that it's not just about marketing.

It's not just about generating demand. It also relates to the supply side.

How can we ensure that the supply meets your available demand? How do you do that with maximum profitability? How do you do that with maximum efficiency? This is what makes it really interesting for the company. It expands the total addressable market.

We do not know exactly what the financial data for this particular product will be. It will be released as a trial version. Therefore, I think it will be free for early users.

But this is the kind of thing that, with the signing of contracts and with integration with companies like Palantir, by the way, will lead to market expansion and increased value that they will be able to offer their customers.

They also announced what is known as the MCP. This is what is related to automated chat programs.

So, they say they will be able to do the same thing using "Zeta" information. So, now if ChatGPT is where you do your business, you can go into ChatGPT and say, "Okay, contact Zeta and develop a plan to increase my sales by 30% in the US Northwest over the next six months."

This will help you do that using information coming from "Zeta".

So, it's a sort of way to access the "Zeta" platform using your traditional chat programs. I do n't necessarily think this changes the rules of the game much. I think the operating system is more interesting from a growth perspective.

However, many companies are taking this MCP route and do not want to be left behind . Therefore, this is a noteworthy announcement for them.

Another thing that caught my attention was Zeta Global's collaboration with Fireworks to unveil new specialized Athena inference models using Nvidia Neumotron.

What Zeta is trying to do is allow companies to keep their own data private. So, what they 're saying here is that it's built using "NVIDIA NeMo".

It was finely tuned using the "Fireworks" infrastructure . The "Athena" inference models are designed for specialized "Athena" operating system tasks.

Therefore, developing the "Athena" system involves interpreting the language of the domain and following the voice of the brand.

If you are a company called "Nike," you want your advertisement to look different from " Gap," and of course different from competitors like " LuluLemon." Therefore, learning that voice will be really important because you don't want the same voice coming from any automated chat program.

Format and output requirements. Therefore, you can see how the model's specialization itself can be a potential distinguishing factor. The "Athena" inference model supports enterprise data control and sovereign requirements.

Here too, their offer to institutions is that you keep your data, which is your own data. We will not use that data to help train our own models.

I think this is a really compelling offer. This is one of the reasons why they invited Alex Karp from Palantir to perform on stage at Zeta Global. They look at things in a very similar way.

So , I think this is an announcement of a very prominent product and something that may be attractive to more companies on the marketing side of the business , especially with the launch of the " Athena" system.

So, will this lead to increased reliance because you have this data sovereignty in "Zeta" and even in " Palanter"? With all of this moving in the right direction, the fourth thing they announced was that they would be building their own custom chips.

This still seems somewhat far off; perhaps in 2027 we will really see what that will look like. I am interested in hearing more about this in the future.

It seems to be the kind of thing that might enable you to bring some of these inference processes to your workplace. So now, if you are a marketing company, instead of sending all your information to the cloud, and possibly to large laboratories, you can now retain control of it.

Perhaps that is a simple distinguishing factor. Again, I don't think this is necessarily a game-changer, but if you add all of these things together, it will continue to expand Zeta's business market .

And where will this end up ? One of the key metrics to monitor for Zeta is their ability to expand their customer base and the amount of revenue per customer.

Therefore, an expanded client generates $100,000 to $100,000, and a hyper-expanded client generates more than $1 million in revenue. They now have nearly 200 million of these customers, but will that number increase?

As I said, they focused on some of the biggest marketing companies in the world. One of the things they did during the past year was expand into slightly smaller market segments .

Their product, "Athena," was made more accessible to small businesses as well as agencies.

There is still much to learn about how their pricing system works . There is a fixed portion in most of their prices, and then a variable portion that depends on the amount spent via the " Athena" platform.

But again, these are the things that will continue to drive the company's revenue growth. The management has plans to achieve growth exceeding 20% until at least 2028. I wouldn't be surprised to hear some updates about that in the next quarterly report.

Not only with regard to those goals, but I think they will extend those goals to 2031 and 2032 in the coming chapters.

What this ultimately does is make the potential business volume for "Zeta" much larger . If this were just demand-side work, or just marketing and advertising work, there would be a limit to the size of that work in the end.

I certainly believe it could be a business with over 20% growth over the next few years, but you start now by adding "I will help you run your business more efficiently." I will help you get rid of the other systems.

There are many systems for building inventory and ordering raw materials. If all of this can be done within " Zeta," then this is a very high-value position, and it is something that large companies might pay millions or tens of millions of dollars to make their operations more efficient, because there are many people working in the supply chain departments of those companies.

Therefore, it is something worth monitoring . This is the kind of thing, the kind of progress , the kind of advertising that makes me more optimistic about Zeta Global. As I said, this is indeed the second largest investment in the "Ace Metric" portfolio.

Just a company with a market value of $8.4 billion. The enterprise value-to- sales ratio is only five at the moment, with a compound annual growth rate of 30%. I loved what Zeta announced last week.

It will be interesting to learn more about this in the next quarterly report, as they are developing their products at a very rapid pace .

It has only been one year since "Athena" was actually launched to some of their customers. I believe that was in the second quarter of 2025.