Claritev's 'Year of the Way Up' Is Real — H1 Bookings Already Top All of 2025
Revenue guidance crosses back above $1B as NSA/IDR volume surges, AI moves into production, and the TPA vertical becomes a second engine.
MPLN · Earnings Call · 2026-08-07
The turn is now a trend line
Two years ago, MultiPlan was a company in retreat — a large client was self-insourcing, yields were grinding lower, and the internal mantra was "clarity, alignment, focus." Today, as Claritev, it is calling Q2 2026 its strongest quarter in 15 quarters, and the numbers back it up. Revenue of $257.5M grew 6.6% year-over-year — the fifth consecutive quarter of growth — while adjusted EBITDA of $155.8M was the best in 13 quarters at a 60.5% margin.
The hard work and discipline over the last 2 years of laying the foundation of clarity, alignment, focus resulted in the turn last year, which has positioned us to take advantage of the opportunities in front of us.
The company raised full-year revenue guidance to $1.00–$1.02B — a return above the $1 billion threshold it last crossed in 2022 — and lifted EBITDA guidance to $610–$620M. “On the strength of Q2, we are raising our revenue guide 2 full percentage points to a new range of $1 billion to $1.02 billion, reflecting 4% to 6% growth and marking a return to greater than $1 billion of annual revenue, which we last eclipsed in 2022.” — Doug Garis, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-08-07
Booking the turnaround
The most telling metric is bookings. Claritev booked $74M of ACV in the first half of 2026 — more than all of 2025 ($67.3M) — and is targeting the $100M aspiration it laid out at its March Investor Day. “With $30 million of ACV booked in Q2, we have already surpassed the $67 million we booked for the full year in '25.” — Doug Garis, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-08-07 H1 bookings were up 150%, average deal size grew more than 300%, and 16 deals closed above $1M ACV, up 25% versus last year. Cross-sell and upsell drove 75% of bookings — a direct continuation of the cross-selling story management has hammered since the turnaround began — while five net new logos added fresh new logo growth, including wins in the provider and public sector verticals.
The confidence here is no longer conditional. Travis Dalton had telegraphed the visibility on the prior call: “We have significantly more coverage — pipeline coverage to quota than we had 2 years ago, almost 4.8x, which is a significant number.” — Travis Dalton, President and Chief Executive Officer · 2026-05-07 Doug Garis framed the conversion mechanics plainly: new bookings take 2–4 quarters to hit first revenue, then another four quarters to annualize — meaning today's record ACV is largely funding the 2027 and 2028 growth line.
NSA: where the IDR process meets AI
The clearest evidence of the shift is IDR process volume. Claims volume grew 11% sequentially and 3% year-over-year, reversing recent trends, driven per Garis by "a significant increase in the volume of NSA claims we process driven by a recent client win." Management frames it as durable: as CMS's newly finalized IDR rules raise operational and compliance requirements, Claritev's scale and technology become more valuable — its arbitration outcomes outperform the industry by roughly 8 percentage points, and existing clients are consolidating more NSA workflow onto the platform.
This is not a new bet — the company has been grinding at unit economics for a year. On the November 2025 call, Garis noted “we actually took our unit cost down approximately 70% to service each IDR claim over the last year.” — Doug Garis, Chief Financial Officer · 2025-11-07 What's new is the AI layer. “Over the past 6 months, we've launched AI-powered capabilities that automate provider data validation and ineligibility assessments, improving both speed and accuracy.” — Travis Dalton, President and Chief Executive Officer · 2026-08-07 The logic: nearly half of all IDR submissions are ineligible, so the company is deploying AI at scale to screen out noise before disputes begin — turning a regulatory headache into a competitive moat.
Diversification is finally flowing
"On a comparable basis, excluding the onetime revenue from last year, our total growth in Q2 was nearly 9%," Garis said. The old drag — the single-client decision that carved roughly $15M per quarter out of revenue through 2025 — has now been lapped. In its place: the TPA vertical, the largest contributor to Q2 bookings with several 7-figure deals including Marpai, plus a new Medicare Advantage network build (high 6-figure ACV) and the World Trade Center public-sector win. Management now expects TPA to contribute roughly 30% of total new bookings this year, second only to the payer segment — and the managed services arm of the Services segment is becoming a real, if lower-margin, second engine.
Why it matters
For a company that spent two years in a defensive crouch, Q2 2026 is the first concrete proof that the "year of the way up" is more than rhetoric. Revenue is compounding, EBITDA margin is holding near 61%, free cash flow is inflecting (levered FCF up 49% year-over-year), and management is investing now — $160–170M of capital spend — for revenue that largely begins contributing in 2027–28. The open question is whether the new NSA volume is structural rather than a bolus from a single win, and whether the ACV pipeline converts as modeled. But for the first time in 15 quarters, the honest read of this tape is: growth is back.