In partnership with
Happy Holidays! Hope you are having a great Thanksgiving week. We are excited to dive into our thesis of one of our favorite stocks. For this week’s stock, Zeta Global, we are broadening our array of companies that we want to invest in so that we could diversify our portfolio into the AI marketing space, a space that we think will continue to boom with the digital world growing. As we say in all of our newsletters, this is not financial advice and this is just factual information mixed with how we are planning on investing our money.
Zeta Global is an AI-powered marketing cloud company. Its platform helps brands acquire, retain, and engage customers using first-party data, machine learning, and deep analytics. It combines customer-data infrastructure with adtech and marketing automation to deliver personalized omnichannel marketing campaigns. The company also uses its proprietary identity graph and data assets to help clients target high-value audiences more efficiently. In short, Zeta is both a data + AI layer and a campaign execution engine, positioning itself as a modern replacement for legacy marketing clouds.
Looking at where most of Zeta’s revenue comes from is direct platform services, its SaaS marketing product which is around 70%. It also generates income from data services, partnerships, and other political and advocacy businesses. Zeta separates their customers into different categories of super scaled customer, and scaled customers based on how they were billed for the period.
Zeta has grown pretty significantly recently, In Q3 of 2025, Zeta reported $337M in revenue which is a 26% YoY increase. They had a 14% free cash flow margin and adjusted EBITDA expanded about 40%. They expanded their super scaled customer base to 180 which is a 25% increase.
The way their product works is that the customers pay an annual or multi-year subscription fee to access Zeta’s marketing platform. The platform license is part of that fee. On top of the base subscription, Zeta charges for volume-based utilization like how much of the platform the customer uses, data calls etc. Zeta also pays third party media owners, publishers, or partners on a revenue share or cost per basis. This is somewhat similar to how the Beehiiv platform works. Zeta also gets money from more than just their software, their customers buying media execution. Zeta charges for professional services, implementation, and onboarding, account management, and consulting services. We are guessing that these are probably one-time services and not recurring which is something to factor in. Two of there biggest “partners” or integrations are with snowflake and AWS. With Snowflakes data cloud and Zeta marketing platform it helps their customers enrich their first and third party data. Zeta uses AWS for infrastructure and to support its operations.
The biggest thing that stands out to us when looking at the most recent earnings report from Zeta Global is the 26% revenue growth from the third quarter of fiscal year 2024 to the 3rd quarter of fiscal year 2025. Any company that is obtaining double digit revenue is proving that the company is growing at a great pace and there is clear demand for the product. Bigger competitors like Salesforce and Adobe are currently sitting barely above double-digit growth, and we think this stock has a long way to go.
The next thing that stood out to us from their recent report shows exactly why companies should continue to use Zeta Global for their marketing. Yes, historically companies usually grow over time, but we think there are many companies currently out there right now that are not growing at a 59% pace over a 5+ year period who would really appreciate the services Zeta has to offer.
This slide shows the sheer scale that Zeta Global is currently operating in, and across many different industries. Even if some sectors were to scale back operations and their marketing expenditure, the company seems to almost be sector recession proof. The biggest eye-catching category is almost 50% of tech companies are being served by Zeta Global.
MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT
Just this week Zeta Global announced the acquisition of Marigold’s enterprise software business for up to $325 million. The deal includes Marigold’s key brands. In terms of payment: Zeta will pay $100M in cash + 5.33M of its Class A shares upfront, plus seller notes for up to $125M (which could be cash or stock). Marigold’s business serves over 100 global enterprise brands, including 40+ Fortune 500 companies. This gives Zeta much stronger footing in the enterprise market technology space, especially for loyalty and retention use-cases. For our newsletter readers who do not know what market technology means, it is the automation of marketing across the internet. The acquired business reportedly has over 90% of its revenue as subscription-based, which fits nicely with Zeta’s goal for recurring, predictable cash flows, which is a main thing we believe that the company has lacked in the past. Because many of Marigold’s customers are large enterprises, Zeta can cross-sell its AI/data marketing platform (its “One Zeta” model) into them. The biggest positive that we are seeing is the positive as to how this acquisition helps expand Zeta’s global footprint, including more penetration in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) and potentially APAC.
Following the deal, Zeta raised its 2025 and 2026 guidance for revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and free cash flow. This signals that Zeta’s leadership is confident not just in growth, but in the financial benefits of the acquisition and shown in this chart below is this revenue growth. The company is expecting another 6% of revenue growth, using some of its free cash flow that it is currently sitting on to make the deal happen.
The information provided in this newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and should not be considered financial, investment, or legal advice. I am not a licensed financial advisor, and the opinions expressed are my own. Any investments, trades, or financial decisions you make are at your own risk. Always do your own research and consult with a qualified professional before making financial decisions. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
Make Every Platform Work for Your Ads
Marketers waste millions on bad creatives.
You don’t have to.
Neurons AI predicts effectiveness in seconds.
Not days. Not weeks.
Test for recall, attention, impact, and more; before a dollar gets spent.
Brands like Google, Facebook, and Coca-Cola already trust it. Neurons clients saw results like +73% CTR, 2x CVR, and +20% brand awareness.
The New Framework for Enterprise Voice AI
Enterprise teams are automating more calls than ever — but without a consistent framework, deployments become unpredictable, costly, and slow to scale.
The BELL Framework introduces a structured way to design, test, launch, and improve Voice AI agents with reliability.
Get the guide enterprises are now using to de-risk voice automation and accelerate deployment.
Last Time the Market Was This Expensive, Investors Waited 14 Years to Break Even
In 1999, the S&P 500 peaked. Then it took 14 years to gradually recover by 2013.
Today? Goldman Sachs sounds crazy forecasting 3% returns for 2024 to 2034.
But we’re currently seeing the highest price for the S&P 500 compared to earnings since the dot-com boom.
So, maybe that’s why they’re not alone; Vanguard projects about 5%.
In fact, now just about everything seems priced near all time highs. Equities, gold, crypto, etc.
But billionaires have long diversified a slice of their portfolios with one asset class that is poised to rebound.
It’s post war and contemporary art.
Sounds crazy, but over 70,000 investors have followed suit since 2019—with Masterworks.
You can invest in shares of artworks featuring Banksy, Basquiat, Picasso, and more.
24 exits later, results speak for themselves: net annualized returns like 14.6%, 17.6%, and 17.8%.*
My subscribers can skip the waitlist.
*Investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Important Reg A disclosures: masterworks.com/cd.