Table of Contents
Kambi reported a 13.5% year-on-year revenue increase in Q2 2026, from €40.5m to €45.9m, in a quarter that included the company’s first fully AI-traded World Cup.
The result reverses the revenue decline Kambi posted in the same quarter last year. Adjusted EBITA more than doubled to €7.6m from €3.7m, for a margin of 16.5%, while operating profit rose to €5.8m from €1.6m. Operating expenses fell 0.6%.
On the back of the quarter, Kambi raised its full-year adjusted EBITA guidance from €20m-€25m to €23m-€27m.
CEO Werner Becher said on the Q2 earnings call that the company has “turned a corner”, and credited part of the improvement to Kambi’s transition to AI-led trading. The World Cup served as the largest test of that system to date.
World Cup shifts in volume and product
78 World Cup matches fell within Q2, and Kambi processed more than €1bn in tournament turnover across its turnkey sportsbook partners, taking over 100 million bets at an operator trading margin of 18%.
Comparisons with the 2022 tournament are imperfect given the four-year gap, but average turnover per match rose by around 20%.
The geographic mix changed sharply. Kambi’s partners in the Americas generated 57% of World Cup 2026 volume, up from 38% in 2022, helped by kick-off times that suited American audiences and fell at awkward hours for European viewers.
The product mix moved too. Live bet builders made up 22% of all live bets, up from 3% in 2022.
AI traded all 104 matches
Kambi recorded more than 1 million unique betting combinations in the World Cup final alone, a volume of live pricing the company says would be impractical to support with manual trading.
“Our AI trading system priced and traded all 104 games pre-match and live, delivering a product of high quality without the need to increase the number of human traders, as we noted other companies had,” Becher said.
Becher argued the tournament will widen the gap between Kambi and rivals still trading manually.
“With our offering now automated, others still reliant on manual trading will need to scale back down now to a lighter offering, with all the domestic leagues, the Premier League, as an example, starting soon again,” he said.
Football is now traded entirely through AI at Kambi, and tennis is close behind: Wimbledon and the French Open were both AI-traded this year. Basketball, baseball and ice hockey are next in line. Becher said that in the near future “90% of our turnover will be channeled through our proprietary AI system.”
The staffing consequences are already visible. CFO David Kenyon confirmed that headcount has dropped below 1,000 and will keep falling, a pattern seen elsewhere in the supply side as LSports made cuts in its own AI-driven restructure and layoffs spread across the sector in 2026.
April downtime stays in the accounts
The quarter was not clean. A technical downtime issue hit Kambi in April, and Kenyon chose to keep the impact inside the company’s ordinary results rather than strip it out as an exceptional item.
“We didn’t think you should look at that as completely exceptional. Of course, it hasn’t happened to that extent to us very often, but it’s part of the business. Things can go wrong, and just because it doesn’t happen very often to us doesn’t mean we wanted to exclude it to inflate our profits,” Kenyon said.
Investors appear to have accepted the trade-off. Kambi’s share price traded up around 10% after the results were published.
The next test comes quickly. The European domestic leagues restart within weeks, and Kambi will run them on the same automated system while rival B2B suppliers decide how far and how fast to follow. Whether AI trading extends to basketball, baseball and ice hockey on schedule will show if the World Cup was a one-off proof of concept or the new baseline.
Source: Kambi
