Online used car auction platform ACV Auctions (NASDAQ: ACVA) reported Q1 CY2026 results topping the market’s revenue expectations, with sales up 11.8% year on year to $204.2 million. The company expects next quarter’s revenue to be around $215 million, close to analysts’ estimates. Its GAAP loss of $0.06 per share was $0.02 above analysts’ consensus estimates.
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ACV Auctions (ACVA) Q1 CY2026 Highlights:
- Revenue: $204.2 million vs analyst estimates of $201.9 million (11.8% year-on-year growth, 1.1% beat)
- EPS (GAAP): -$0.06 vs analyst estimates of -$0.08 ($0.02 beat)
- Adjusted EBITDA: $17.1 million vs analyst estimates of $14.52 million (8.4% margin, 17.8% beat)
- The company reconfirmed its revenue guidance for the full year of $850 million at the midpoint
- EBITDA guidance for the full year is $75 million at the midpoint, above analyst estimates of $74.33 million
- Operating Margin: -4.5%, up from -7.9% in the same quarter last year
- Free Cash Flow was $65.08 million, up from -$23.37 million in the previous quarter
- Market Capitalization: $940.3 million
Company Overview
Founded in 2014, ACV Auctions (NASDAQ: ACVA) is an online auction marketplace for car dealers and wholesalers to buy and sell used cars.
Revenue Growth
A company’s long-term sales performance is one signal of its overall quality. Any business can put up a good quarter or two, but the best consistently grow over the long haul. Thankfully, ACV Auctions’s 21.3% annualized revenue growth over the last three years was impressive. Its growth beat the average consumer internet company and shows its offerings resonate with customers.
This quarter, ACV Auctions reported year-on-year revenue growth of 11.8%, and its $204.2 million of revenue exceeded Wall Street’s estimates by 1.1%. Company management is currently guiding for a 11% year-on-year increase in sales next quarter.
Looking further ahead, sell-side analysts expect revenue to grow 12.1% over the next 12 months, a deceleration versus the last three years. Despite the slowdown, this projection is above the sector average and implies the market sees some success for its newer products and services.
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Cash Is King
If you’ve followed StockStory for a while, you know we emphasize free cash flow. Why, you ask? We believe that in the end, cash is king, and you can’t use accounting profits to pay the bills.
ACV Auctions has shown decent cash profitability, giving it some flexibility to reinvest or return capital to investors. The company’s free cash flow margin averaged 6.6% over the last two years, slightly better than the broader consumer internet sector.
Taking a step back, we can see that ACV Auctions’s margin expanded by 11 percentage points over the last few years. This is encouraging because it gives the company more optionality.
ACV Auctions’s free cash flow clocked in at $65.08 million in Q1, equivalent to a 31.9% margin. This cash profitability was in line with the comparable period last year and above its two-year average.
Key Takeaways from ACV Auctions’s Q1 Results
We were impressed by how significantly ACV Auctions blew past analysts’ EBITDA expectations this quarter. We were also glad its full-year EBITDA guidance slightly exceeded Wall Street’s estimates. On the other hand, its EBITDA guidance for next quarter missed and its revenue guidance for next quarter was in line with Wall Street’s estimates. Zooming out, we think this was a mixed quarter. The stock traded up 7.7% to $5.61 immediately after reporting.
So do we think ACV Auctions is an attractive buy at the current price? We think that the latest quarter is only one piece of the longer-term business quality puzzle. Quality, when combined with valuation, can help determine if the stock is a buy. We cover that in our actionable full research report which you can read here (it’s free).
