Katapult at H.C. Wainwright Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Friday, 05 September 2025, Katapult Holdings (NASDAQ:KPLT) presented at the H.C. Wainwright 27th Annual Global Investment Conference, unveiling its strategic initiatives in the lease-to-own (LTO) sector. The company emphasized its technology-driven approach to capturing a larger share of the $60 billion U.S. LTO market. While Katapult boasts strong growth metrics, challenges remain in expanding its market reach.

Key Takeaways

• Katapult operates in a $60 billion U.S. LTO market, with less than 1% market capture.
• The company achieved 30.4% growth in gross originations and over 22% revenue growth in Q2 2025.
• Katapult’s app marketplace facilitated 60% of gross originations in Q2 2025.
• The company projects strong growth for Q3 2025, with gross originations expected to rise 25% to 30%.
• Katapult’s LTO product offers transparency and flexibility, attracting non-prime consumers.

Financial Results

• Q2 2025 gross originations grew by 30.4% year-over-year.
• Revenue increased by more than 22% compared to the previous year.
• Adjusted EBITDA reached approximately $300,000, surpassing initial projections.
• For the full year 2025, gross originations are expected to grow 20% to 25%, with revenue growth of at least 20% and adjusted EBITDA of at least $10 million.

Operational Updates

• In 2024, Katapult’s app generated $127 million in gross originations, with $77 million facilitated by the K-Pay feature.
• By Q2 2025, 60% of gross originations originated from the app marketplace.
• Katapult added nearly 40 K-Pay-enabled merchants, enhancing its marketplace.
• The company offers merchants a risk-free partnership, with no customer default or transaction-related costs.

Future Outlook

• For Q3 2025, Katapult forecasts gross originations growth of 25% to 30% and revenue growth of 20% to 25%.
• Adjusted EBITDA is projected between $3 million to $3.5 million.
• Katapult aims to expand its two-sided marketplace and enhance consumer and merchant engagement.

For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - H.C. Wainwright 27th Annual Global Investment Conference:

Scott Buck, H.C. Wainwright Research Analyst, H.C. Wainwright: Thank you for joining the H.C. Wainwright 27th Annual Global Investment Conference. My name is Scott Buck and I’m an H.C. Wainwright Research Analyst covering the technology sector. Today, I have the pleasure of introducing our presenter. I’d like to welcome Orlando Zayas, Chief Executive Officer of Katapult Holdings, a leading e-commerce-based financial technology company operating in the lease-to-own space. Orlando, welcome.

Orlando Zayas, Chief Executive Officer, Katapult Holdings: Thank you for joining me today. I’m Orlando Zayas, the CEO of Katapult, and I’m going to give you a brief introduction of our innovative lease-to-own product, which is at the core of our emerging growth story. Before we get started, I’d like to direct your attention to forward-looking statements. If you’d like any additional detail, please refer to our most recent 10-K filings with the SEC. Let’s start with the basics. Katapult’s core offering is a lease-to-own or LTO product that allows non-prime consumers to acquire durable goods from hundreds of retailers across the U.S. Our market-leading LTO product is the cornerstone of our two-sided app marketplace as a shopping destination for a growing base of loyal and engaged consumers who rely on Katapult to help them get the essential durable goods they need when they need them. We have a large and growing addressable market.

In fact, we estimate that we and our competitors have captured less than 1% of the $60 billion total U.S. market. We believe that Katapult is differentiated in many ways from the competitive landscape. First, we believe that our LTO product is leading edge from a technology and user experience perspective, and that makes us a favorite among consumers, as shown in our consistent high NPS scores and repeat purchase rates. This, in turn, positions Katapult as a partner of choice as we deliver a pipeline of new, engaged, and loyal customers that allow merchants and waterfall platforms to capture incremental sales. Finally, we have an asset-light marketplace model, which means that we can accelerate our top-line growth. We don’t have to add substantial and incremental costs to our expense base.

For those of you not familiar with the LTO product, I’d like to give you a high-level summary of what the product is and why non-prime consumers love it. At the highest level, LTO is a payment option that allows consumers to acquire durable goods like furniture, tires, computers, cell phones, gaming items, appliances, and even jewelry by paying for them over time. At Katapult, we offer LTO for just about any durable good you can imagine. LTO is especially useful for people who don’t have credit yet, are working on rebuilding it, or just don’t have the cash upfront to get the items they need. In fact, nearly one in five U.S. adults don’t have a traditional credit score, and about 30% won’t qualify for traditional financing. LTO gives them a way to buy what they need without the usual roadblocks.

We believe our product and consumer strategies distinguish us in several ways. First is transparency. With the Katapult lease-to-own (LTO), the customer understands the full cost of ownership from the outset. Because we don’t charge interest, penalties, or any type of late fees, there are no unpleasant surprises for the consumer down the line. Second is flexibility. Customers can return the product at any time during the life of the lease, even if the retailer’s return window is closed. With every payment, the customer has the option to continue leasing, buy out the lease, or return the item. We offer lease terms up to 18 months, although on average, our customers complete their leases within seven months. These options make acquiring durable goods for customers more affordable and accessible. Third is fairness. I already mentioned that our terms are clear.

They’re also more affordable than other options available to non-prime consumers. In addition, we have a customer service organization, an innovative app that helps customers stay on top of their payment obligations. If they run into issues, we work compassionately with them to help get them back on track. We don’t pile late fees and penalties up on a distressed customer. We treat them with dignity and respect because we believe that seeing the good in people is good for business. Finally, this non-prime consumer segment has historically been overlooked by the market. Because we treat our customers so well, we can provide our merchant partners with access to a new customer base. We’ve already discussed why lease-to-own (LTO) is a critical product for non-prime consumers.

Given the uncertain macroeconomic times we’re living in, it’s worth highlighting a few more points that underscore the tough position many non-prime consumers have today. 37% of U.S. adults say they would not be able to cover a $400 emergency expense if it arose. More than 40% of U.S. households don’t have enough savings to cover three months or more of living expenses. These are dynamics that many Americans are facing, and Katapult is there to provide this underserved community with the purchasing power they need. With that as a backdrop, let’s go into a few more specifics on our two-sided marketplace. Just two years ago, we launched our Katapult app. Before our app existed, our business relied completely on merchants to refer consumer traffic to us, either through a direct integration, which offers a Katapult lease at checkout option, or through a waterfall financing platform.

We developed a great reputation for converting this traffic into transactions, which were incremental sales for our merchants. This strategy allows us to build relationships with merchants that partnered with us or required a tech lift from our merchants. When we launched our app, our goal was to create an ecosystem that allowed Katapult to connect consumers and merchant partners, enabling commerce whenever, however the consumer wanted to shop. We believe we could turn our app into a marketplace where consumers would choose to start their shopping journey because they trusted Katapult. To do this, we needed to create vibrancy in our marketplace. In addition to the hundreds of direct and waterfall merchant websites that consumers could link to and shop from within our app, we began to methodically add merchants with whom we didn’t have a direct or waterfall relationship in our app marketplace.

We also added Katapult Pay, or as we refer to it as K-Pay. Functionally, this allows consumers to seamlessly check out using our proprietary virtual credit card technology. This technology gives customers choice by allowing them to shop in our app and check out on a merchant website or check out in our app with K-Pay. As our customers enjoy a better experience, Katapult can gather behavioral insights that allow us to create a more personalized customer journey that encourages repeat shopping. With the launch of our app, we also took control of our destiny because it allows us to include merchants with whom we don’t have a direct or waterfall relationship in our marketplace. This means that we can service consumer demand at our own discretion and be a source of traffic to our merchants.

This dynamic creates an even more compelling reason for merchants to want to partner with Katapult. Since our app launched, we have added nearly 40 K-Pay-enabled merchants to our marketplace, which complement the more than 200 direct and waterfall merchants available in our ecosystem. The impact of our marketplace has been phenomenal. In 2024, approximately $127 million of gross originations actually began in our app, and our market-leading K-Pay feature enabled nearly $77 million of those gross originations last year alone. In the second quarter, 60% of our gross originations started in our app marketplace. Before we launched our app, we were 100% reliant on merchants to send us traffic. Now, the majority of our originations are being driven by our own efforts starting in our ecosystem. This development has helped us sustain growth.

As of Q2 2025, we’ve delivered 11 consecutive quarters of year-over-year gross originations growth while increasing the lifetime value of customers. The trends are similar when you look at our app marketplace activity. We’ve built a track record for strong and consistent marketplace growth, and we believe we can continue to leverage our app marketplace to create value for all our stakeholders. Now that you have an understanding of our marketplace fundamentals, let’s dive a little deeper into the compelling value for merchants and consumers. Starting with our direct and waterfall merchants, we’ve already highlighted the benefit of introducing retailers to a new pool of engaged shoppers. Beyond that, our marketplace technology offers quick and easy paths to integrations. Once we partner with merchants, they benefit from high repeat rates and lower abandoned cart rates.

They also don’t face any risk from customer defaults or returns, and they don’t pay any transaction-related interchange costs. In short, we offer access to multiple growth channels with compelling financial returns. Our direct and waterfall channels are highly complementary to our K-Pay channel. I’ve already given you the background on K-Pay, so I’ll just cut to the bottom line. This feature allows us to onboard a new merchant and begin facilitating leases without any tech support from our merchant. Even if a merchant has not yet integrated in Katapult as a direct or waterfall option, we can, at our discretion, add them to our marketplace and begin sending them incremental sales, a win-win for Katapult and merchants. With this full suite of go-to-market channels, we have become a full-service, self-generated marketplace.

We’ve gone from simply being a payment method to being a growth partner to our merchants and a destination for consumers. This 2.0 transformation has happened in less than two years. I’m going to pivot now to discuss our customer value proposition. We’ve already talked about why our non-prime consumers need LTO, but who are these consumers? First off, I think you’d be surprised on how many non-prime consumers there are across the U.S. Consider this. According to a 2024 report from Financial Health Network, about 70% of Americans are classified as financially vulnerable or financially coping. That’s over 180 million people. 53% report that their spending is higher than their income, and more than 70% say they don’t have a prime credit score.

Whether we’re talking about a consumer who has no established credit, is credit challenged, or perhaps even has good credit but is worried about cash flow, Katapult’s fair and transparent LTO provides a large underserved community of consumers with options to acquire the durable goods at fair and transparent terms. For these consumers, we offer a more affordable path to ownership. If you consider this example of the refrigerator purchase, on average, our LTO will save consumers a minimum of $300 compared with their most commonly used payment alternatives. Our marketplace growth strategy is simple. We have put the fundamental drivers in place, which includes our innovative technology, and this allows us to grow our merchant base, expand our customer reach, while maintaining high customer retention. This growth market is delivering.

We continue to increase the velocity of our two-sided marketplace, drive consumer engagement even higher, and are making strong progress against our merchant engagement initiatives. All this activity allowed us to achieve across-the-board growth in our second quarter. Gross originations grew 30.4%, revenue was up more than 22%, and we delivered about $300,000 in adjusted EBITDA. All these results exceeded our Q2 outlook. Looking ahead, we expect this momentum to continue. Our outlook for Q3 calls for 25% to 30% gross originations growth, 20% to 25% revenue growth, and $3 million to $3.5 million of adjusted EBITDA based on our year-to-date results and our momentum. We’ve raised our full year 2025 gross originations outlook and reiterated our outlook for revenue and adjusted EBITDA. For gross originations, we expect growth in the range of 20% to 25%, and for revenue, we expect to achieve at least 20% growth.

Finally, we expect to deliver at least $10 million of positive adjusted EBITDA. We are incredibly excited about the future. We also remain grounded in our mission and our roots. We are focused on the most important ingredients of our success: our customers, our merchants, and our team. For consumers, we provide fair and transparent LTO that allows them to acquire the durable goods they need from merchants they trust. For merchants, we provide a growth partnership that gives them access to a non-prime consumer who may not have been able to purchase their goods without our LTO. These benefits are the foundation of the Katapult app marketplace, which is allowing us to deliver results for all our stakeholders. Thank you for your time today. If you have any questions, please feel free to send us an email at ir@katapult.com.

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