I can't tell you exactly where I'm going to be in five years, but here's what I can tell you. We are going to get to. We are going to be a $10 billion revenue company with a 30% operating margin with at least 75% of our EBITDA converting to free cash flow in the years to come. And by the way, all I have to do to do that...
Okay, I'd like to welcome back for the second time David A. Steinberg, the CEO of Zeta Global. David, it's a pleasure. Thank you for being here.
Nick, I want to be very clear, my first time was your first time. We did your first time together and you know, in that period of time, you have ascended from being Nick to being Mr. Zeta. So, I'm very honored to be on the phone with you or on the Zoom with you and looking forward to it.
I'm honored, too. That's quite the title. And full transparency, anybody who's watching this, I did not assign myself that title.
I just see it all over X. Every time they quote you, they quote you as Mr. Zeta.
Mr. Zeta. Okay. So, what I'd like to do is start off by saying, "What a freaking quarter." Seriously, GAAP profitable, 25% year-over-year growth, topline growth. You got it for a Q1 growth of 40% year-over-year, and a mid-range guide for 2026 full year of 35% growth year-over-year. That's remarkable. Congrats to you and the team. Honestly, just take a moment there. Like honestly, what a quarter.
Let me start by saying I am so incredibly proud of our team. Like this was a team effort. And you know, you don't get to this point by waking up one day and saying you want to do something, right? It takes many many years of hard work. And I was reflecting on this sort of earlier yesterday. You know, there have been two big crises that Zeta has gone through since 2017 to today. The first one was in 2017, we'd really rolled up a bunch of email service provisioning businesses and we were running them in a bit of a disparate way and we had an acquisition component to it, but we saw that our platform was not where the puck was going. I'll use a hockey analogy this week after the US won both men's and women's gold medals which was pretty exciting. And we had to make a decision. Were we going to continue to try to fight the tape so to speak and do what we were doing. We made the decision to architect an entirely new platform which put artificial intelligence and data as foundational to the application layer. And then the next major sort of crisis that got us to where we are today is COVID. During COVID we rearchitected our entire business. And not only did we physically grow in that year, we have grown on a compounded growth rate of greater than 30% a year since COVID.
It's just crazy. And you know, but the decisions we made in those two periods, the first one was AI and data as core, and then the next one was completely rearchitecting the company so we could bring in resources globally not just in disparate places. And really, you know, even though we have many offices, we really run the business as a hybrid, and that came out of COVID. And you know, if you look at the business, obviously last year, 30% profit growth, 44% EBIT growth, 78% free cash flow growth, net income positive for the fourth quarter. And by the way, we're giving guidance to being net income positive this entire year. So, you know, I think that when you look at the numbers, Nick, and we've talked about this in the past, the numbers are the outputs. The inputs are, is the business working? Are you solving your clients' biggest problems? Are you creating the type of return on investment that drives clients to move more and more of their business to us? In the lens that we've been growing an average of 30%, let me be clear, our industry has been growing at 10%. So, we're growing at 3x the industry growth rate and we're taking market share, right? When you can take a dollar of your client's budget and turn it into $6 to $7 in business, they're going to move more to you. And I think that's what you're seeing. And once again, the fact that we are initially guiding, we say initially because we've been public for 18 quarters. We've raised our guidance and beat our guidance 18 quarters in a row. I don't know who else has done that in their first 18 quarters of being a public company. I'm not aware of anybody else who has. The interesting thing is that compounds because when you beat the first quarter, raise the first quarter, you know, the rest of the year and you do that every quarter, by the end of the year, you've like crushed the initial guide if you can continue to do that. So, you know, for us to put out an initial guide of 35% at the middle of the range for this year with 40% EBITDA growth and 40% free cash flow growth, I think that just shows how confident we are not just in the short-term part of our business or sort of sustainability of our business. I think we see ourselves as a 20-plus% organic growth grower for many many years to come. And that's because we are solving our clients' biggest problems. We are so far ahead of our competitors both from a data ownership perspective and a technological perspective. And we're using every tool you can imagine to continue to increase those leads.
Yeah. I give it to you guys because what I would do at this point is classify Zeta as a compounding machine. It's quite remarkable. As I mentioned previously, I have a lot of questions. So, I'd like to get right into it. My first question, this one's on gross margin. Chris on the call said that you guys expect gross margin to expand by 1 to 3% each year until 2020.
Actually, Chris said 100 to 300 basis points, but keep going.
