$60.8M Revenue, Record 45% EBITDA Margin: Brooks Pierce Leads Inspired Entertainment’s Strong Q2
The headline decline is mostly by design – the real story is what Inspired chose to keep.
Inspired Entertainment posted second-quarter 2026 revenue of $60.8m, up 6% on the previous quarter but down 24% against a year earlier. Read that drop cold and it looks like a bad quarter. It wasn’t. The fall is largely deliberate – and the Inspired Q2 2026 results are better understood as a story about margin, mix, and a supplier repositioning around its most profitable business.
Why the Inspired Q2 2026 results defy their own top line
Start with the number Inspired wants you to see. Adjusted EBITDA of $27.1m, up 14% sequentially, at what the company calls a record 45% Adjusted EBITDA margin. That margin claim carries a footnote – the company says the record is measured on a basis excluding any periods with a UK VAT rebate – so it’s a company-attributed record, not an independent one. Worth naming. But the direction is real.
The revenue decline, meanwhile, is mostly self-inflicted in the good sense. Inspired divested its UK holiday parks business and restructured its pubs operation, which together stripped out roughly 30% of prior-year revenue. Those were lower-margin lines. Cutting them drags the top line down and pushes the margin up. That’s the trade.
What the segment numbers actually involve
Retail Solutions brought in $36.2m, down 37% year-on-year – again, the divestiture effect – while the company pointed to strong terminal performance in the UK and Greece. Virtual Sports held roughly flat at $8.9m.
The segment that carried the growth was Interactive. Revenue rose 15% year-on-year to $15.7m, with segment Adjusted EBITDA up 13% to $10.3m. That growth landed after the UK increased remote gaming duty on 1 April 2026 – a cost pressure that hits online revenue directly. Growing through it is the more persuasive data point in the release.
The operator read on a supplier trading scale for margin
Here’s the part that matters for anyone on the platform or content side. Inspired is publicly making a choice most suppliers make quietly: sell revenue to buy margin. For a content director or platform head, the practical signal is distribution. Inspired’s Virtuals content is now live across Playtech’s established operator network – the first customer went live via a SaaS agreement in Q3 2026, with Malta Lottery streaming Virtual Sports into more than 160 venues. It also launched day one in Alberta’s newly regulated market in Q3 2026 alongside FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, Rush Street Interactive, Caesars Entertainment and bet365.
That’s the reach that decides whether a supplier’s content actually earns its margin. If you’re planning virtual sports or online content procurement for 2027, Inspired’s expanding footprint is a name that now shows up in more of your markets by default.
CEO Brooks Pierce framed the quarter as “clear evidence that our transformation is translating into expanding margins and continued earnings growth.” Executive Chairman Lorne Weil struck the capital-allocation note, describing a company “gaining share, expanding profitability and reducing leverage.” The read on both: this is a management team asking to be judged on earnings quality, not revenue size.
The caveat worth naming
Two things temper the story. First, this is a single-source company release – the record margin and market share gains are Inspired’s own framing, unverified independently. Second, the balance sheet still carries a total stockholders’ deficit of $(15.6)m and long-term debt of $319.4m, even after repaying more than $23m year to date. Unrestricted cash fell to 22.0m(23.2m including restricted cash) from $42.0m at the end of 2025. The deleveraging is real, but so is the leverage. This is a turnaround in progress, not a finished one.
Inspired Q2 2026 results: what to watch next
Management reaffirmed its full-year 2026 Adjusted EBITDA target of 112m-118m and updated its free cash flow conversion outlook to 20%+, from a prior 20%-25% range. That change lowers the visible floor rather than lifting the ceiling – the company frames it as increased visibility into cash generation, which is worth reading precisely rather than as an upgrade. A new content studio is due online in Q4. The question for the next two quarters is whether the higher-margin model holds as new markets and new content ramp, or whether the 45% margin was a mix-shift peak rather than a run rate. The second half will answer it.
Source: Inspired Entertainment, Inc.
