Trade Desk 10-K 2022-12-31

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UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

FORM 10-K

(Mark One)

For the fiscal year ended December 31, 2022

OR

For the transition period from__________ to ___________

Commission File Number 001-37879

THE TRADE DESK, INC.

(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)

42 N. Chestnut Street

Ventura, California 93001

(Address of principal executive offices, including zip code)

(805) 585-3434

(Registrant’s telephone number, including area code)

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act: None

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act. Yes x No ¨

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or 15(d) of the Act. Yes ¨ No x

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant: (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. Yes x No ¨

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit such files). Yes x No ¨

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, a smaller reporting company or an emerging growth company. See the definition of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” “smaller reporting company,” and “emerging growth company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.

If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act. ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has filed a report on and attestation to its management’s assessment of the effectiveness of its internal control over financial reporting under Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (15 U.S.C. 7262(b)) by the registered public accounting firm that prepared or issued its audit report. ☒

If securities are registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act, indicate by check mark whether the financial statements of the registrant included in the filing reflect the correction of an error to previously issued financial statements. ☐

Indicate by check mark whether any of those error corrections are restatements that required a recovery analysis of incentive-based compensation received by any of the registrant’s executive officers during the relevant recovery period pursuant to §240.10D-1(b). ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act). Yes ☐ No ☒

The aggregate market value of the voting and non-voting common equity held by non-affiliates of the registrant as of June 30, 2022, based on the closing sales price for the Registrant’s Class A common stock, as reported on the Nasdaq Global Market, was approximately $18,431,645,367. As of January 31, 2023, there were 446,505,568 shares of the registrant’s Class A common stock outstanding and 44,289,230 shares of the registrant’s Class B common stock outstanding.

DOCUMENTS INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE

Portions of the registrant’s Proxy Statement for the 2023 Annual Meeting of Stockholders are incorporated by reference in Part III of this Annual Report on Form 10-K to the extent stated herein. Such proxy statement will be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission within 120 days of the registrant’s fiscal year ended December 31, 2022.

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THE TRADE DESK, INC.

ANNUAL REPORT ON FORM 10-K

FOR THE FISCAL YEAR ENDED DECEMBER 31, 2022

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SPECIAL NOTE ABOUT FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the “Securities Act”), and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the “Exchange Act”). Forward-looking statements generally relate to future events or our future financial or operating performance and may include statements concerning, among other things, our business strategy (including anticipated trends and developments in, and management plans for, our business and the markets in which we operate), financial results, operating results, revenues, operating expenses, and capital expenditures, sales and marketing initiatives and competition. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements because they contain words such as “may,” “might,” “will,” “should,” “expects,” “plans,” “anticipates,” “could,” “intends,” “target,” “projects,” “contemplates,” “believes,” “estimates,” “predicts,” “suggests,” “potential” or “continue” or the negative of these words or other similar terms or expressions that concern our expectations, strategy, plans or intentions. These statements are not guarantees of future performance; they reflect our current views with respect to future events and are based on assumptions and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from expectations or results projected or implied by forward-looking statements.

We discuss many of these risks in “Item 1A. Risk Factors” of this Annual Report on Form 10-K in greater detail and in other filings we make from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC. Also, these forward-looking statements represent our estimates and assumptions only as of the date of this Annual Report on Form 10-K, which are inherently subject to change and involve risks and uncertainties. Unless required by federal securities laws, we assume no obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated, to reflect circumstances or events that occur after the statements are made. Given these uncertainties, investors should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements.

Investors should read this Annual Report on Form 10-K and the documents that we reference in this report and have filed with the SEC completely and with the understanding that our actual future results may be materially different from what we expect. We qualify all of our forward-looking statements by these cautionary statements.

SUMMARY OF RISK FACTORS

The following is a summary of the principal risks described below in “Item 1A. Risk Factors” in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. We believe that the risks described in the “Risk Factors” section are material to investors, but other factors not presently known to us or that we currently believe are immaterial may also adversely affect us. The following summary should not be considered an exhaustive summary of the material risks facing us, and it should be read in conjunction with the “Risk Factors” section and the other information contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

• If we fail to maintain and grow our client base and spend through our platform, our revenue and business may be negatively impacted.

• The loss of advertising agencies as clients could significantly harm our business, financial condition and results of operations.

• If we fail to innovate or make the right investment decisions in our offerings and platform, we may not attract and retain advertisers and advertising agencies and our revenue and results of operations may decline.

• The market for programmatic buying for advertising campaigns is relatively new and evolving. If this market develops slower or differently than we expect, our business, growth prospects and financial condition could be adversely affected.

• The effects of health epidemics, such as the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, have had, and could in the future have, an adverse impact on our business, financial condition and results of operations.

• The market in which we participate is intensely competitive, and we may not be able to compete successfully with our current or future competitors.

• Any decrease in the use of the advertising channels that we are primarily dependent upon, failure to expand the use of emerging channels, or unexpected shift in use among the channels in which we operate, could harm our growth prospects, financial condition and results of operations.

• We often have long sales cycles, which can result in significant time between initial contact with a prospect and execution of a client agreement, making it difficult to project when, if at all, we will obtain new clients and when we will generate revenue from those clients.

• We are subject to payment-related risks that may adversely affect our business, working capital, financial condition and results of operations, including from advertising agencies that do not pay us until they receive payment from their advertisers and from clients that dispute or do not pay their invoices.

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• If our access to quality advertising inventory is diminished or fails to expand, our revenue could decline and our growth could be impeded.

• Current or future global market uncertainties or downturns and associated macroeconomic conditions beyond our control could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

• Seasonal fluctuations in advertising activity could have a negative impact on our revenue, cash flow and results of operations.

• We may experience outages, disruptions and malfunctions on our platform and related offerings if we fail to maintain adequate security and supporting infrastructure and processes, which may harm our reputation and negatively impact our business, financial condition and results of operations.

• Operational performance and internal control issues with our platform may adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations and subject us to liability.

• If unauthorized access is obtained to user, client or inventory and third-party provider data, or our platform is compromised, our services may be disrupted or perceived as insecure, and as a result, we may lose existing clients or fail to attract new clients, and we may incur significant reputational harm and legal and financial liabilities.

• Privacy and data protection laws to which we are subject may cause us to incur additional or unexpected costs, subject us to enforcement actions for compliance failures or cause us to change our platform or business model, which may have a material adverse effect on our business.

• Third parties control our access to unique identifiers, and if the use of “third-party cookies” or other technology to uniquely identify devices is rejected by Internet users, restricted or otherwise subject to unfavorable regulation, blocked or limited by preference signals, technical changes on end users’ devices and web browsers, or our and our clients’ ability to use data on our platform is otherwise restricted, our performance may decline, and we may lose advertisers and revenue.

• The market price of our Class A common stock may be volatile or may decline regardless of our operating performance, and you may not be able to resell your shares at or above your purchase price.

• Substantial future sales of shares of our common stock could cause the market price of our Class A common stock to decline.

• Insiders have substantial control over our company, including as a result of the dual class structure of our common stock, which could limit your ability to influence the outcome of key decisions, including a change of control.

This section contains forward-looking statements. You should refer to the explanation of the qualifications and limitations on forward-looking statements described above.

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PART I

Overview

The Trade Desk, Inc. (the “Company,” “we,” “our,” or “The Trade Desk”) offers a self-service, cloud-based ad-buying platform that empowers our clients to plan, manage, optimize and measure more expressive data-driven digital advertising campaigns. Our platform allows clients to execute integrated campaigns across ad formats and channels, including video (which includes connected TV (“CTV”)), display, audio, digital-out-of-home, native and social, on a multitude of devices, such as computers, mobile devices, televisions and streaming devices. Our platform’s integrations with major inventory, publisher and data partners provide ad buyers reach and decisioning capabilities, and our enterprise application programming interfaces (“APIs”) enable our clients to customize and expand platform functionality.

Our clients are advertising agencies, brands and other service providers for advertisers, with whom we enter into ongoing master services agreements (“MSAs”). We generate revenue by charging our clients a platform fee based on a percentage of a client’s total spend on advertising. We also generate revenue from providing data and other value-added services and platform features.

The Trade Desk is a Delaware corporation established in 2009 and headquartered in Ventura, California.

Our Industry

We believe that several trends in the advertising industry, happening in parallel, will result in programmatic advertising – the buying and selling of advertising inventory using algorithmic software that automates the process -- being the predominant means by which companies reach consumers online and through connected devices.

Some of the key industry trends are:

Media is Increasingly Digital. Media is increasingly digital as a result of advances in technology and changes in consumer behavior. This shift has enabled unprecedented options for advertisers to target and measure their advertising campaigns across nearly every media channel and device. The digital advertising market is a significant and growing part of the total advertising market. As media becomes increasingly digital, decisions based on consumer and behavioral data are more prevalent.

Fragmentation of Audience. As digital media grows, audience fragmentation is accelerating. A growing “long tail” of mobile applications, social media platforms, streaming services and websites presents a challenge for advertisers trying to reach a large audience. Additionally, the number of devices used by individual consumers has increased. Both of these fragmentation trends are opportunities for technology companies that can consolidate and simplify media buying options for advertisers and their agencies.

Emergence of CTV. We are witnessing a generational shift from linear TV to CTV with the convergence of the Internet and television programming. New technologies allow more video content to be delivered seamlessly over the Internet, accelerating consumer demand to watch what they want, when they want and where they want. The worldwide rollout of 5G, the fifth generational standard for wireless networks, has brought significantly faster data transfer speeds with less latency and a better user experience to consumers of mobile video. We believe these technologies will continue to feed consumer demand for CTV and mobile video and bring about new opportunities for content owners and advertisers to connect with consumers. Consumers are increasingly shifting their viewing habits to decentralized CTV providers from traditional linear television, and CTV providers are increasingly providing customers with more choices by offering ad-supported subscription options. We believe these shifts will incentivize content owners to provide more relevant ads using data-driven advertising.

Increased Use of Data. Advances in software and hardware, and the growing use of the Internet, have enabled the generation of user data at an unprecedented scale. Data vendors and other organizations are able to collect this user data across a wide range of Internet properties and connected devices, aggregate it and combine it with other data sources. This data is then made non-identifiable and available within seconds based on specific parameters and attributes. Advertisers can integrate this targeting data with their own data or an agency’s proprietary data relating to client attributes, the advertisers’ own store locations and other related characteristics. Through the use of these types of data sources, together with real-time feedback on consumer reactions to the ads, programmatic advertising increases the value of impressions for

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advertisers and inventory owners, and viewers receive more relevant ads. At the same time, new laws and self-regulatory rules governing the collection, use, and disclosure of personal information continue to impact these practices.

Automation of Ad Buying. The growing complexity of digital advertising and the laws and rules that govern it have increased the need for automation. Technology that enables fast, accurate and cost-effective decision making through the application of computer algorithms that use extensive data sets has become critical for the success of digital advertising campaigns. Using programmatic inventory buying tools, advertisers are able to automate their campaigns, providing them with better price discovery, on an impression-by-impression basis. As a result, advertisers are able to bid on and purchase the advertising inventory they value the most, pay less for advertising inventory they do not value as much and abstain from buying advertising inventory that does not fit their campaign parameters.

Digital Advertising Ecosystem

The digital advertising ecosystem is divided into buyers, sellers and marketplaces, which can be further segmented on the basis of whether participants provide services or technology. We believe that participants on the buy side or sell side should be advocates for their buyers or sellers, while those in the marketplace business should act as a referee or have market-driven incentives to protect or enhance the integrity of the marketplace.

What We Do

We empower ad buyers, by providing a self‑service cloud-based ad-buying platform that enables our clients to plan, manage, optimize and measure data‑driven digital advertising campaigns. Our platform allows clients to execute integrated campaigns across various advertising channels and formats, including video (which includes CTV), display, audio, digital-out-of-home, native and social, on a multitude of devices, including computers, mobile devices, televisions and streaming devices.

• We Are Focused on the Buy Side.** We focus on buyers since they control the advertising budgets. Also, the supply of digital advertising inventory exceeds demand, and accordingly, we believe it is a buyer’s market. We also believe that by aligning our core offerings with buyers, we are able to avoid conflicts of interest that exist when serving both the buy side and sell side. This focus allows us to build trust with clients, many of whom leverage their proprietary data on our platform. That trust and ability to use their own data on our platform, without worrying about it being used by other participants, enables our clients and their advertisers to achieve better results. This trust provides us with the benefit of long-term and stable relationships with our clients.

• We Are an Enabler, Not a Disruptor.** With our platform and related offerings, we enable advertising agencies and other service providers. Advertisers can benefit from a comprehensive solution that combines our platform with the services provided by advertising agencies.

• We Are Data Driven.** Our platform was founded on the principle that data-driven decisions will be the future of advertising. We built a data-management platform first, before building our ad-buying technology. While data from third-party data providers improves campaign performance, our clients’ success often relies largely on our ability to ingest proprietary data directly from brands and their agencies to enable intelligent decisioning that optimizes advertising campaigns. Given our independent buy-side focused approach and our strict protocols governing the ingestion of client first-party data into our data management platform, our clients trust us with their most granular and expressive data. Our technology platform enables an effective use of this data, allowing our clients to run precisely targeted advertising campaigns that help maximize their return on advertising investments. Additionally, we are able to better optimize campaigns by using the data streams that we capture across different devices, so that data from one channel can be used to inform another (subject to appropriate consumer choices). The breadth of data that we make available on our data marketplace from numerous data sources across channels gives our clients a holistic view of their target audiences, enabling more effective targeting across different channels.

• We Do Not Arbitrage Advertising Inventory.** To further align our interests with those of our clients, we do not buy advertising inventory in order to resell it to our clients for a profit. Instead, we provide our clients with a platform that allows them to manage their omnichannel advertising campaigns, on a self-service basis with robust reporting. With our platform, our clients control their campaign spend and are able to access and choose from many inventory sources.

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• We Have Ongoing Relationships with Clients.** We derive substantially all of our revenue from ongoing MSAs with our clients, rather than episodic insertion orders. We believe this approach strengthens our relationships with our clients and helps us grow their use of our platform over the long term, providing us with a highly scalable business model.

• We Are a Clear Box, Not a Black Box.** Our platform is transparent and shows our clients their costs of advertising inventory and data, our platform fee and detailed performance metrics on their advertising campaigns. Our clients directly access and execute campaigns on our platform and control all facets of inventory purchasing decisions. Clients also receive detailed, real-time reporting on all their advertising campaigns. By providing transparent information on our platform, we enable our clients to continually compare results and target their budgets toward the most effective advertising inventory, data providers and channels.

• We Are an Open Platform.** Clients can customize and build their own features on top of our platform. For example, clients may use our APIs to design their own user interface, bulk manage advertising campaigns and link other systems, including ad servers or reporting tools. By using our APIs or by working with our engineering team, clients can invest their own resources to build their own proprietary tools for reporting, campaign strategy, custom algorithms, proprietary data use or other use cases. Our open platform approach enables our advertising agency and service provider clients to provide differentiated offerings to their clients, which we believe leads to long-term relationships and increased use of our platform.

Our Platform

At the core of our platform is our bid-factor-based architecture that allows users to define desirable factors and the value associated with those factors. Based on these factors, our platform can compute the value of impressions in real time and bid only for optimal impressions. Because of the granularity of the bid factors, users of our platform can rapidly create billions of different bid permutations with only a few clicks. This expressiveness enables better targeting, pricing and campaign results.

Our platform is powerful and user friendly:

• Easy to Use, Open and Customizable.** Our platform provides multiple easy-to-use automation tools that help our users focus on managing the key elements of their campaigns. Our platform also enables clients to integrate custom features and interfaces for their own use through our APIs.

• Expressiveness.** Our platform allows clients to easily define and manage advertising campaigns with multiple targeting parameters that could result in quadrillions of permutations, which we refer to as expressiveness. We believe that expressiveness provides clients with the ability to target audiences with an extremely high level of precision and thus obtain higher returns on their advertising spend.

• Integrated, Omnichannel and Cross Device.** Our platform provides integrated access to a wide range of omnichannel inventory and data sources, as well as third-party services such as ad servers, ad-verification services and survey vendors. Our platform’s integration of these sources and services enables our clients to deploy their budgets through a wide variety of channels, media screens and formats, targeted in their desired manner, through a single platform.

Some of the key features of our platform are:

• Auto Optimization.** We provide auto-optimization features that allow buyers to automate their campaigns and support them with computer-generated modeling and decision making. In addition, by giving clients full reporting, budgeting and bidding transparency, clients can take control of targeting variables when desired, and apply algorithmic automation when appropriate.

• Advanced Reporting and Analytics Tools.** We provide a comprehensive view of consumers’ interactions with the ads purchased through our platform with robust reporting of performance insights across multiple variables, such as audience characteristics, ad format, site category, website, device, creative type and geography. Better reporting results in better learning, often leading to better campaign optimization and outcomes.

• Data Management and Measurement Tools.** Our platform enables clients to utilize multiple data sets, including from an extensive selection of third-party vendors, in a seamless and easy manner, allowing

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them to further optimize their campaigns with highly relevant data. We also offer a broad selection of third-party measurement partners, which provides our clients with increased optionality to assess campaign performance.

• Koa Artificial Intelligence.** Koa, our predictive algorithmic tools that help platform users make data-driven decisions without sacrificing control or transparency, makes recommendations for campaign optimizations based on its sophisticated analysis of rich data sets. Advertisers can then choose which optimizations make the most sense for their campaigns.

• Informed Media Planning.** Our platform enables clients to use audience insights and strategic goals to help optimize campaign planning, with the ability to generate, analyze and launch data-driven, programmatic media plans. Our tools analyze the actions of existing core audiences with the data we see across the open Internet to deliver fully transparent, performance-focused and ready-to-activate campaigns.

• Private Marketplace Support.** For clients who wish to transact directly with individual publishers, we offer a comprehensive user interface for discovering and transacting via a wide variety of private contracts. Additionally, we offer a solution for advertisers to access publisher inventory via a direct tag in a publisher’s ad server where there is no other programmatic access to such publisher’s inventory.

Our platform enables a media planner or buyer at an advertising agency to:

• purchase digital media programmatically on various media exchanges and sell-side platforms;

• acquire and use third-party data to optimize and measure digital advertising campaigns;

• integrate and deploy their proprietary first-party data within our platform to optimize campaign efficacy;

• monitor and manage ongoing digital advertising campaigns on a real-time basis;

• link digital campaigns to offline sales results or other business objectives;

• access other services such as our data management platform and publisher management platform marketplace; and

• use our user interface and APIs to customize and expand platform functionality.

Our Technology

The core elements of our technology are:

• Scalable Architecture.** Our platform infrastructure is hosted in data centers around the world. Our core bidding architecture is easily adaptable to a variety of inventory formats, allowing our platform to communicate with many different inventory sources.

• Predictive Models.** We use campaign data captured by our platform to build predictive models around user characteristics, such as demographic, purchase intent or interest data. Data from our platform is continually fed back into these models, which enables them to improve over time as the use of our platform increases.

• Performance Optimization.** During campaign execution, our optimization engine continually scores a variety of attributes of each impression, such as website, industry vertical or geography, for their likelihood to achieve campaign performance goals. Our bidding engine then shifts bids and budgets in real time to deliver optimal performance. Additionally, our platform enables clients to set multiple, simultaneous optimization goals for their advertising.

• Real-time Analytics.** Our platform continuously collects data regarding inventory availability. Real-time campaign delivery and spend totals are used to manage campaign budgets and goal caps, as well as campaign reporting. This data is fed back into our optimization engine to improve campaign performance and into machine-learning models for user demographic predictive modeling.

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Our Growth Strategy

The key elements of our long-term growth strategy include:

• Increase Our Share of Existing Clients’ Digital Advertising Spend.** Many advertisers are moving a greater percentage of their advertising budgets to programmatic channels. We believe that this shift will provide us with the opportunity to capture a larger share of the overall advertising spend by our existing clients. Additionally, we plan to promote additional services, data, and incentive plans to our clients, helping us grow our business.

• Grow Our Client Base.** We have extensive relationships with many advertising agencies and other service providers, and we believe that, given the decentralized nature of the advertising industry, we have the opportunity to expand our relationships within these agencies and with additional agencies, advertisers and service providers. We expect to continue making investments to grow our sales and client service team to support this strategy.

• Expand Our Omnichannel Capabilities.** We believe offering clients capabilities across all media channels and devices enables advertisers to manage highly effective omnichannel campaigns, where data from each channel can inform decisions in other channels. We believe these capabilities will continue to further strengthen our relationships with our clients. We intend to continue investing in innovation across all channels, including the integration of new inventory sources within CTV, other video, audio, mobile, social, native and digital out of home.

• Extend Our Reach in CTV.** Television is the largest category of advertising spend, and we believe that the future of television is CTV, the streaming of media and video on demand through subscription and ad-supported streaming services and connected devices. We plan to continue investing significant resources in technology, sales and support staff related to our CTV growth initiatives.

• Continue to Innovate in Technology, Data and Measurement.** We intend to continue innovating and improving the technology underlying our platform and enhance its features and functionalities. We view data as one of our key competitive advantages and we will continue to invest resources in growing our data and measurement offerings, from clients, third-party providers and our proprietary data and product capabilities.

• Expand our Offerings, Including Unified ID 2.0.** We have developed Unified ID 2.0, a new open-source identity framework, which is currently in use with approved partners. The Unified ID 2.0 aims to preserve the value of relevant advertising on the open internet without reliance upon third-party cookies, while giving consumers transparency and control over their data. Unified ID 2.0 operates by transforming email addresses or phone numbers into an advertising identifier (a “UID2”) that is designed not to directly identify the individual. Subject to appropriate guardrails, participants in Unified ID 2.0 can then use this UID2 in connection with our platform and other services, including ad buying and reporting. We have worked to cultivate industry-wide support and collaboration for the Unified ID 2.0 approach, and we intend to continue these efforts. EUID, a European-focused version of Unified ID 2.0, is likely to be released in a limited beta in 2023.

• Expand Our International Presence.** Many of our clients serve advertisers on a global basis, and we intend to expand our presence outside of the United States (“U.S.”) to serve the needs of those advertisers in additional geographies. As we expand relationships with our existing clients, we are investing in select regions in Europe and Asia. In particular, we believe that China, India, and Indonesia may represent substantial growth opportunities, and we are investing in developing our business in those and other markets.

Our Clients

Our clients consist of purchasers of programmatic advertising inventory and data. As of December 31, 2022, we had over 1,000 clients, consisting primarily of advertising agencies or groups within advertising agencies that have independent relationships with us, manage budgets independently of one another, are based in different jurisdictions and are served by unique Trade Desk teams. Many of these agencies are owned by holding companies, where decision making is decentralized such that purchasing decisions are made, and relationships with advertisers are located, at the agency, local branch or division level. Our client count includes only those parties that have signed MSAs with us and have spent more than $20,000 on our platform.

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Our clients typically enter into MSAs with us that give users constant access to our platform. The MSAs do not contain any material commitments on behalf of clients to use our platform to purchase ad inventory, data or other features. Generally, these MSAs have one-year terms that renew automatically for additional one-year periods, unless earlier terminated, and are terminable at any time upon 60 days’ notice by either party.

Our clients are loyal, as reflected by our client retention rate of over 95% in 2022, 2021 and 2020. In addition, our clients typically grow their use of our platform over time.

If all of our individual client contractual relationships were aggregated at the holding company level, one holding company, Publicis Groupe, would have represented more than 10% of our gross billings in 2022. If all of our individual client contractual relationships were aggregated at the holding company level, two holding companies, Publicis Groupe and WPP plc, would each have represented more than 10% of our gross billings in 2021. We generally do not have contractual relationships with holding companies; rather, in most cases we enter into separate contracts and billing relationships with various of their individual agencies and account for those agencies as separate clients.

Our Advertising Inventory and Data Suppliers

We believe that we are an important business partner for suppliers of programmatic advertising inventory and data as we represent one of the largest sources of buy-side demand within the digital advertising industry.

We obtain digital advertising inventory from over 100 directly integrated ad exchanges and supply-side platforms, providing us with access to a breadth of programmatic advertising inventory across computers, mobile devices and CTV.

We believe that our data marketplace represents an important distribution channel for third-party data vendors. As of December 31, 2022, we have integrated our platform with more than 200 third-party data vendors whose products we make available for purchase through our platform.

Sales and Marketing

Given our self-service business model, we focus on supporting, advising and training our clients to use our platform independently as soon as they are ready to transact.

Once a new client has access to our platform, they work closely with our client service teams, which onboard the new client and provide continuous support throughout the early campaigns. Typically, once a client has gained some initial experience, it will move to a fully self-service model and request support as needed.

To help train our clients, suppliers and other digital media participants, we have created an e-learning program called The Trade Desk Edge Academy. We believe that this initiative is an important component in our strategy of enabling rapid onboarding to our platform.

Our marketing efforts are focused on increasing awareness for our brand, executing thought-leadership initiatives, supporting our sales team and generating new leads. We seek to accomplish these objectives by presenting at industry conferences, hosting client conferences, publishing white papers and research, engaging in public relations activities, expanding our social media presence and launching advertising campaigns.

Technology and Development

Rapid innovation is a core driver of our business success and our corporate culture. We prioritize and align our product roadmap with our clients’ needs, and we aim to refresh our platform weekly. Our development teams are intentionally lean and nimble in nature, providing for transparency and accountability.

We expect technology and development expense to increase as we continue to invest in the development of our platform and related offerings to support additional features and functions, increase the number of advertising and data inventory suppliers and ramp up the volume of advertising spending on our platform. We also intend to invest in technology to further automate our business processes.

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Seasonality

In the advertising industry, companies commonly experience seasonal fluctuations in revenue. For example, many advertisers allocate the largest portion of their budgets to the fourth quarter of the calendar year in order to coincide with increased holiday purchasing. Historically, the fourth quarter of the year reflects our highest level of advertising activity and the first quarter reflects the lowest level of such activity. We expect our revenue to continue to fluctuate based on seasonal factors that affect the advertising industry as a whole.

Our Competition

Our industry is highly competitive and fragmented. We compete with other demand-side platform providers, some of which are smaller, privately held companies and others are divisions of large, well-established companies such as Google and Adobe. We believe that we compete primarily based on the performance, capabilities and transparency of our platform as well as our focus on the buy side. We believe we are differentiated from our competitors in the following areas:

• we are an independent technology company focused on serving advertising agencies and others on the buy side of our industry;

• our client relationships are based on MSAs as opposed to campaign-specific insertion orders;

• our platform provides comprehensive access to a wide range of inventory types and third-party data vendors;

• our platform allows clients to build proprietary advantages by integrating custom features and interfaces for their own use through our APIs; and

• our technology provides highly expressive targeting.

In addition, we believe new entrants would find it difficult to gain direct access to inventory providers, given their limited scale and the costs that additional integrations impose on inventory providers.

Our Human Capital

We believe our values of vision, agility, grit, openness, generosity and being full hearted are an important component of our success. Behind all our innovations are the talented people around the world who bring them to life. To continue to produce such innovations, we believe it is crucial that we continue to attract and retain top talent. We strive to make The Trade Desk a diverse and inclusive workplace, where our people feel they belong, with opportunities for our employees to grow and develop their careers, supported by strong compensation, benefits and health and wellness programs, and by programs that build connections between our employees and their communities. To ensure we live our values and our culture stays unique and strong, our board of directors and executive team has put significant focus on our human capital resources.

As of December 31, 2022, we had 2,770 full-time employees in 19 countries. Regionally, North America, Asia Pacific (“APAC”) and Europe, Middle East and Africa (“EMEA”) make up approximately 63%, 18% and 19% of our workforce, respectively.

Diversity and Inclusion

We are committed to fostering a culture of inclusion and belonging in which all employees are empowered to bring their whole, authentic selves to work every day. At The Trade Desk, we believe in the people who work for us, and we prioritize diversity and inclusion as part of our investment in our people. Our goal is to create a culture where we value, respect and provide fair treatment and opportunities for all employees. We conduct an annual employee survey to give employees the opportunity to provide feedback on our culture. This survey is managed by a third-party vendor to encourage candor and solicit feedback on many aspects of engagement, including company leadership, culture, inclusion and career development. Our leaders review the survey feedback and work with their teams to take action based on survey results.

We demonstrate this commitment through a strategy of education, celebration, donations to the community, diversification of our talent and the creation of forums for internal dialogue and listening. As of December 31, 2022, our global leadership team is 71% male and 29% female.

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Talent Development

Despite our rapid growth, we still cherish our roots as a startup and our company culture of ownership. We empower employees to develop their skills and abilities by acting on great ideas regardless of their role or function, which translates into personal investment in building our organization. We work to provide an environment where talented individuals and teams can thrive in fulfilling careers.

To set our global team up for success, we define key competencies for roles that are aligned with our values and extend to all levels of leadership regardless of experience and role. We encourage everyone to create individual development plans leveraging competency frameworks tied into their chosen career path, outlining a specific plan and actions to increase proficiency or learn new skills. We seek to provide a wide range of learning and development opportunities in both individual and group settings with formal, social and experiential learning.

Compensation and Benefits

We provide compensation and benefits programs to help meet the needs of our employees and reward their efforts and contributions. We seek fairness in total compensation with reference to external comparisons, internal comparisons and the relationship between management and non-management compensation.

In addition to salaries, we provide competitive compensation programs commensurate with our peers and industry. Such compensation and benefit programs may include bonuses, equity awards, 401(k) plans, healthcare and insurance benefits, health savings and flexible spending accounts, paid time off, family leave, family care resources, employee assistance programs and tuition assistance, among many others. Such programs and our overall compensation packages seek to facilitate retention of key personnel.

Health, Safety and Wellness

The success of our business is fundamentally connected to the well being of our people. Accordingly, we are committed to the health, safety and wellness of our employees. We provide our employees and their families with access to a variety of innovative, flexible and convenient health and wellness programs. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we implemented significant changes, such as implementing a hybrid work model that includes both in-person work and working from home, which we determined were in the best interests of our employees, as well as the communities in which we operate, and which comply with applicable government regulations. We continue to evolve our programs to meet our employees’ health and wellness needs.

Development of International Markets

We have been increasing our focus on markets outside the United States to serve the global needs of our clients. We believe that the global opportunity for programmatic advertising is significant and will continue to expand as publishers and advertisers outside the United States seek to adopt the benefits that programmatic advertising provides. To capitalize on this opportunity, we intend to continue investing in our presence internationally. Our growth and the success of our initiatives in newer markets will depend on the continued adoption of our platform by our existing clients, as well as new clients, in these markets. Information about our geographic gross billings is set forth in Note 12—Segment and Geographic Information of “Item 8. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data” in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Intellectual Property

The protection of our technology and intellectual property is an important component of our success. We rely on intellectual property laws, including trade secret, copyright, patent and trademark laws in the United States and abroad, and use contracts, confidentiality procedures, non-disclosure agreements, employee disclosure and invention assignment agreements and other contractual rights to protect our intellectual property. We have a small number of patents; however, historically, we have not patented our proprietary technology in order to keep our technology architecture, trade secrets and engineering roadmap private. Our patent applications may not result in the issuance of any patents, and our issued patents may not actually provide adequate defensive protection or competitive advantages to us.

Collection and Use of Data; Privacy and Data Protection Legislation and Regulation

To power our platform, we and our clients currently use pseudonymous data about Internet and mobile app users to manage and execute digital advertising campaigns in a variety of ways, including delivering advertisements to end users

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based on their geographic locations, the type of device they are using, their interests as inferred from their web browsing or app usage activity or their relationships with our clients. Such data is passed to us from third parties, including original equipment manufacturers, application providers and publishers. We do not use this data to discover the identity of individuals, and we currently contractually prohibit clients, data providers and inventory suppliers from importing data that directly identifies individuals onto our ad buying platform. In connection with some of our newer offerings, including Unified ID 2.0 (and soon, EUID), we do allow users of those services to disclose some directly identifying information, such as phone number and email address, with us for purposes of transforming that information into pseudonymous identifiers to use on our platform.

Our ability, like those of other advertising technology companies, to collect, augment, analyze, use and share data relies upon the ability to uniquely identify devices across websites and applications, and to collect data about user interactions with those devices for purposes such as serving relevant ads and measuring the effectiveness of ads. The processes used to identify devices and similar and associated technologies are governed by U.S. and foreign laws and regulations and dependent upon their implementation within the industry ecosystem. Such laws, regulations, and industry standards are changing frequently, including those relating to the level of consumer notice, consent and/or choice required when a company uses data for certain purposes, including targeted advertising, or employs cookies or other electronic tools to collect data about interactions with users online.

In the United States, both federal and state legislation govern activities such as the collection and use of personal data, and data privacy in the advertising technology industry has frequently been subject to review by the Federal Trade Commission (the “FTC”), U.S. Congress, and individual states. Much of the federal oversight of digital advertising in the United States currently comes from the FTC. Relying on Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which prohibits companies from engaging in “unfair” or “deceptive” trade practices, the FTC pursues alleged violations of representations concerning data privacy protections and acts that allegedly violate individuals’ data privacy interests. However, there is increasing consumer concern over data privacy in recent years, which has led to a myriad of new and proposed legislation and regulation both at the federal and state levels, some of which has affected and will continue to affect our operations and those of our industry partners.

Although California was the first state to enact an omnibus consumer privacy law in 2018 (known as the California Consumer Privacy Act or CCPA), by the end of 2023, four other states will have similar laws: Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, and Utah. Further, updates to the CCPA take effect January 1, 2023. These state laws define “personal information” broadly enough to include many online identifiers provided by individuals’ devices, applications, and protocols (such as IP addresses, mobile application identifiers and unique cookie identifiers), individuals’ location data, and hashed versions of email addresses and phone numbers. The CCPA created individual data privacy rights for consumers in the State of California (including rights to deletion of and access to personal information), special rules on the collection of consumer data from minors, new notice obligations and new limits on and rules regarding the “sale” of personal information (interpreted by many observers to include common advertising practices). In addition to extending many of the CCPA compliance obligations (such as data privacy rights and enhanced notices) to the other four states, those laws and the updates to the CCPA focus even more significantly on advertising activities, mandating all businesses that engage in certain advertising uses of consumer personal information to offer and honor an opt-out of such activities, including, in three states, through browser or device-based preference signals. (Terminology varies slightly among some of the state laws, referring to such practices as “processing for targeted advertising” or “sales” or “sharing” of personal information, but the opt-out requirement exists under each state’s law.) Importantly, as a consequence of these obligations, the availability of data within our platform and the advertising ecosystem more broadly may decline, potentially making our platform and services less valuable to our clients.

The requirement in California and eventually in Colorado and Connecticut to honor users’ requests to opt out of certain disclosures and uses of data for advertising purposes through preference signals, such as the Global Privacy Control (“GPC”) or more generally an opt-out preference signal, reflects a broader attention that data privacy advocates, the media and some government regulators, such as the FTC, have devoted to digital advertising in recent years. If the use of the Global Privacy Control or similar technical signals is adopted by many Internet users, is imposed by additional states or by federal or foreign legislation, or is agreed upon by standard setting groups, we may have to change our business practices, our clients may reduce their use of our platform, and our business could be harmed.

As our business is global, our activities are also subject to foreign legislation and regulation. In the United Kingdom and the European Union (including the European Economic Area (the “EEA”) and the countries of Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway), or EU, separate laws and regulations (and member states’ implementations thereof) govern the processing of personal data, and these laws and regulations continue to impact us. The General Data Protection Regulation

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(“GDPR”) and now the U.K.’s version of the GDPR, which both apply to us, the GDPR define “personal data” broadly, and it enhances data protection obligations for controllers of such data and for service providers processing the data. These laws also provide certain rights, such as access and deletion, to the individuals about whom the personal data relates. IAB Europe previously collaborated with the digital advertising industry to create a user-facing framework (the Transparency and Control Framework, or “TCF”) for establishing and managing legal bases under the GDPR and other U.K. and EU privacy laws including the ePrivacy Directive (discussed below). Although the TCF is actively in use, its viability as a compliance mechanism is under review by the Belgian Data Protection Authority and others and we cannot predict its effectiveness over the long term (as further detailed in the Risk Factors section). Continuing to maintain compliance with the requirements of European privacy laws and regulations, including monitoring and adjusting to rulings and interpretations that affect our approach to compliance, requires significant time, resources and expense, and may lead to significant changes in our business operations, as will the effort to monitor whether additional changes to our business practices and our backend configuration are needed, all of which may increase operating costs, or limit our ability to operate or expand our business.

Additionally, in the EU, EU Directive 2002/58/EC (as amended by Directive 2009/136/EC), commonly referred to as the ePrivacy or Cookie Directive, directs EU member states to ensure that accessing information on an Internet user’s computer, such as through a cookie and other similar technologies, is allowed only if the Internet user has been informed about such access, and provided consent. A ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union clarified that such consent must be reflected by an affirmative act of the user, and European regulators have continued to agitate for more robust forms of consent, including by bringing enforcement actions against large platforms, including Amazon, Facebook and Google, concerning their cookie consent mechanisms. These developments may result in decreased reliance on implied consent mechanisms that have been used to meet requirements of the ePrivacy Directive in some markets. A replacement for the ePrivacy Directive is currently under discussion by EU member states to complement and bring electronic communication services in line with the GDPR and force a harmonized approach across EU member states. Although it remains under debate, the proposed ePrivacy Regulation may further raise the bar for the use of cookies, and the fines and penalties for breach may be significant. We cannot yet determine the impact such future laws, regulations and standards may have on our business.

To address the transfer of personal data from the EU to the United States, like many U.S. and European companies, we have relied upon, and are currently certified under, the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield Frameworks. The Privacy Shield Framework, however, was struck down in July 2020 by the Court of Justice of the European Union as an adequate mechanism by which EU companies may pass personal data to the US. Other EU mechanisms for adequate data transfer, such as the standard contractual clauses, were also questioned by the Court of Justice and whether and how standard contractual clauses can be used to transfer personal data to the United States is in question. In June 2021, the European Commission published revised standard contractual clauses, and shortly thereafter the European Data Protection Board promulgated guidance on implementation of the new clauses. In October 2022, the White House released an executive order implementing a new EU-U.S. data transfer mechanism, the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework (“DPF”). The European Commission launched an assessment of the DPF’s adequacy, which is expected to be completed in 2023. If granted, an adequacy determination would help quell the legal uncertainty of cross-border transfers of personal data. However, until an adequacy determination is granted, the validity of the standard contractual clauses as a transfer mechanism remains uncertain. If all or some jurisdictions within the EU or the United Kingdom determine that the new standard contractual clauses likewise cannot be used to transfer personal data to the United States and if the DPF is not ultimately adopted, we could be left with no reasonable option for the lawful cross-border transfer of personal data. In such circumstance, if we nonetheless continue to transfer personal data from the EU to the United States, that could lead to governmental enforcement actions, litigation, fines and penalties or adverse publicity, which could have an adverse effect on our reputation and business or cause us to need to establish systems to maintain certain data in the EU, which may involve substantial expense and cause us to divert resources from other aspects of our operations, all of which may harm our business. Other jurisdictions have adopted or are considering cross-border or data residency restrictions, which could reduce the amount of data we can collect or process and, as a result, significantly impact our business.

We participate in several industry self-regulatory programs, mainly initiated by the Network Advertising Initiative, or NAI, the Digital Advertising Alliance, or DAA, and their international counterparts. Our efforts to comply with the self-regulatory principles of these programs include offering end users notice and choice when advertising is served to them based, in part, on their interests. We believe that this user-centric approach to addressing consumer data privacy empowers consumers to make informed decisions on the use of their data.

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Available Information

We file Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, proxy statements and related amendments, exhibits and other information with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”). You may access and read our filings without charge through the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov or through our website at http://investors.thetradedesk.com, as soon as reasonably practicable after such materials are electronically filed with or furnished to the SEC pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Exchange Act.

Website addresses referred to in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are not intended to function as hyperlinks, and the information contained on our website is not incorporated into, and does not form a part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K or any other report or documents we file with or furnish to the SEC.

Investing in our Class A common stock involves a high degree of risk. You should consider carefully the risks and uncertainties described below, together with all of the other information contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, including the consolidated financial statements and the related notes and Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations, before making investment decisions related to our Class A common stock. If any of the following risks are realized, our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects could be materially and adversely affected. In that event, the market price of our Class A common stock could decline and you could lose part or all of your investment.

Risks Related to Our Business and Industry

If we fail to maintain and grow our client base and spend through our platform, our revenue and business may be negatively impacted.

To sustain or increase our revenue, we must regularly add new clients and encourage existing clients to maintain or increase the amount of advertising inventory purchased through our platform and adopt new features and functionalities that we make available. If competitors introduce lower cost or differentiated offerings that compete with or are perceived to compete with our offerings, our ability to sell our services to new or existing clients could be impaired. We have spent significant effort in cultivating our relationships with advertising agencies, which has resulted in an increase in the budgets allocated to, and the amount of advertising purchased on, our platform. However, it is possible that we may reach a point of saturation at which we cannot continue to grow our revenue from such agencies because of internal limits that advertisers may place on the allocation of their advertising budgets to digital media to a particular provider or otherwise. While we generally have master services agreements (“MSAs”) in place with our clients, such agreements allow our clients to choose the amount they spend through our platform and terminate our services with limited notice. We at times supplement our MSAs with joint business plans and other incentive programs designed to increase spending from existing clients; however, such increased spending may not materialize in the amounts we expect or at all. We do not typically have exclusive relationships with our clients and there is limited cost and difficulty to moving their media spend to our competitors. As a result, we have limited visibility to our future advertising revenue streams. We cannot assure you that our clients will continue to use our platform to the extent that we expect or at all, or that we will be able to replace, in a timely or effective manner, departing clients with new clients that generate comparable revenue. If a major client representing a significant portion of our business decides to materially reduce its use of our platform or to cease using our platform altogether, it is possible that our revenue or revenue growth rate could be significantly reduced, and our business negatively impacted.

The loss of advertising agencies as clients could significantly harm our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Our client base consists primarily of advertising agencies. We do not have exclusive relationships with advertising agencies, and we depend on agencies to work with us to build and maintain advertiser relationships and execute advertising campaigns.

The loss of agencies as clients could significantly harm our business, financial condition and results of operations. If we fail to maintain satisfactory relationships with an advertising agency, we risk losing business from the current and future advertisers represented by that agency.

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Advertisers may change advertising agencies. If an advertiser switches from an agency that utilizes our platform to one that does not, we will lose revenue from that advertiser. In addition, some advertising agencies have their own relationships with suppliers of advertising inventory and can directly connect advertisers with such suppliers. Our business may suffer to the extent that advertising agencies and inventory suppliers purchase and sell advertising inventory directly from one another or through intermediaries other than us.

We had over 1,000 clients, consisting primarily of advertising agencies, as of December 31, 2022. Many of these agencies are owned by holding companies, where decision making is decentralized such that purchasing decisions are made, and relationships with advertisers are located, at the agency, local branch or division level. If all of our individual client contractual relationships were aggregated at the holding company level, Publicis Groupe would have represented more than 10% of our gross billings for 2022.

In most cases, we enter into separate contracts and billing relationships with the individual agencies and account for them as separate clients. However, some holding companies for these agencies may choose to exert control over the individual agencies in the future. If so, any loss of relationships with such holding companies and, consequently, of their agencies, local branches or divisions, as clients could significantly harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

If we fail to innovate or make the right investment decisions in our offerings and platform, we may not attract and retain advertisers and advertising agencies and our revenue and results of operations may decline.

Our industry is subject to rapid and frequent changes in technology and laws governing our activities, evolving client needs and the frequent introduction by our competitors of new and enhanced offerings. We must constantly make investment decisions regarding offerings and technology to meet client demand and evolving industry and legal standards. We may make bad decisions regarding these investments. If new or existing competitors have more attractive offerings, we may lose clients or clients may decrease their use of our platform. New client demands, superior competitive offerings or new industry standards could require us to make unanticipated and costly changes to our platform or business model. In addition, as we develop and introduce new products and services, including those incorporating or utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning and new processing of personal information, including identifiable information, they may raise new, or heighten existing, technological, security, legal and other challenges, may cause unintended consequences and may not function properly or may be misused by our clients. If we fail to adapt to our rapidly changing industry or to evolving client needs, or we provide new products and services that exacerbate technological, security, legal or other challenges, the reputation of and demand for our platform or related offerings could decrease and our business, financial condition and operations may be adversely affected.

The market for programmatic buying for advertising campaigns is relatively new and evolving. If this market develops slower or differently than we expect, our business, growth prospects and financial condition could be adversely affected.

The substantial majority of our revenue has been derived from clients that programmatically purchase advertising inventory through our platform. We expect that spending on programmatic ad buying will continue to be our primary source of revenue for the foreseeable future and that our revenue growth will largely depend on increasing spend through our platform. The market for programmatic ad buying is an emerging market, and our current and potential clients may not shift to programmatic ad buying from other buying methods as quickly as we expect, which would reduce our gro

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None.

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We maintain our principal offices in Ventura, California. We also lease office and data center space in various cities within the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia. We believe that our facilities are adequate to meet our needs for the immediate future and that, should it be needed, we will be able to secure additional space to accommodate expansion of our operations.

From time to time, we are subject to various legal proceedings, litigation and claims, either asserted or unasserted, that arise in the ordinary course of business. Although the outcome of the various legal proceedings, litigation and claims cannot be predicted with certainty, management does not believe that any of these proceedings or other claims will have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations or cash flows. Regardless of the outcome, litigation can have an adverse impact on us because of defense and settlement costs, diversion of management resources and other factors.

On May 27, 2022, a stockholder filed a derivative lawsuit captioned Huizenga v. Green, et al., No. 2022-0461, asserting claims on our behalf against certain members of our board of directors in the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware. On June 27, 2022, a second derivative lawsuit captioned Pfeiffer v. Green, et al., No. 2022-0560, was filed in the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware alleging substantially similar claims. Those lawsuits were consolidated on August 18, 2022, and a lead plaintiff was appointed on October 7, 2022. The two complaints allege generally that the defendants breached their fiduciary duties to us and our stockholders in connection with the negotiation and approval of the CEO Performance Option. The plaintiffs seek a court order rescinding the CEO Performance Option and monetary damages. On November 10, 2022, the plaintiffs filed a consolidated complaint, and on January 12, 2023, the defendants moved to dismiss the consolidated complaint.

Litigation is inherently uncertain and there can be no assurance regarding the likelihood that the motions to dismiss or defense of the various actions will be successful.

Not applicable.

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PART II

Our Class A common stock began trading on the Nasdaq Global Market on September 21, 2016 under the symbol “TTD.” Prior to this date, there was no public trading market for our Class A common stock. There is no public trading market for our Class B common stock.

On June 16, 2021, we effected a ten-for-one stock split (the “Stock Split”) of our common stock in the form of a stock dividend. Each stockholder of record on June 9, 2021 received nine additional shares of common stock for each then-held share. Trading began on a stock split-adjusted basis on June 17, 2021. The number of shares subject to outstanding equity awards and the exercise prices of the outstanding stock option awards were also adjusted to reflect the effect of the Stock Split. All share and per share amounts presented herein have been retroactively adjusted to reflect the impact of the Stock Split.

Refer to Note 9—Capitalization to our consolidated financial statements for more information regarding capitalization.

Holders of Record

As of January 31, 2023, there were approximately 20 holders of record of our Class A common stock and 14 holders of record of our Class B common stock. The actual number of stockholders is greater than this number of record holders and includes stockholders who are beneficial owners but whose shares are held in street name by brokers and other nominees. This number of holders also does not include stockholders whose shares may be held in trust by other entities.

Dividend Policy

We have never declared or paid any dividends on our Class A or Class B common stock, and we do not anticipate paying any cash dividends in the foreseeable future. We currently intend to retain any earnings to finance the operation and expansion of our business. Any future determination to pay dividends will be at the discretion of our board of directors and will be dependent upon then-existing conditions, including our earnings, capital requirements, results of operations, financial condition, business prospects and other factors that our board of directors considers relevant. Refer to “Item 7. Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” for additional information regarding our financial condition. In addition, our Credit Facility (as defined below) contains restrictions on our ability to pay dividends.

Securities Authorized for Issuance Under Equity Compensation Plans

The information required by this item will be included in our proxy statement relating to our 2023 annual meeting of stockholders to be filed by us with the SEC no later than 120 days after the close of our fiscal year ended December 31, 2022 (the “Proxy Statement”) and is incorporated herein by reference.

Recent Sales of Unregistered Securities

None.

Stock Performance Graph

This performance graph shall not be deemed “soliciting material” or to be “filed” with the SEC for purposes of Section 18 of the Exchange Act, or otherwise subject to the liabilities under that Section, and shall not be deemed to be incorporated by reference into any filing of ours under the Securities Act, except as shall be expressly set forth by specific reference in such filing.

The following graph compares the cumulative total stockholder return on an initial investment of $100 in our Class A common stock between December 31, 2017, and December 31, 2022, with the comparative cumulative total returns of the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 Index, Nasdaq 100 Index and Russell 3000 Index over the same period. We have not paid any cash dividends: therefore, the cumulative total return calculation for us is based solely upon stock price appreciation and not the reinvestment of cash dividends. However, the data for the S&P 500 Index, Nasdaq 100 Index and

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Russell 3000 Index assumes reinvestment of dividends. The graph assumes the closing market price on December 31, 2017, of $4.57 per share as the initial value of our Class A common stock after retroactive adjustment for the Stock Split. The returns shown are based on historical results and are not indicative of, nor intended to forecast, future stock price performance.

The following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations should be read in conjunction with the consolidated financial statements and the related notes to those statements included in “Item 8. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data” to this Annual Report on Form 10-K. In addition to historical financial information, the following discussion contains forward-looking statements that reflect our plans, estimates, beliefs and expectations and involve risks and uncertainties. Factors that could cause or contribute to these differences include those discussed below and elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, particularly in the section titled “Item 1A. Risk Factors” and the “Special Note About Forward-Looking Statements.”

Overview

We offer a self-service, cloud-based ad-buying platform that empowers our clients to plan, manage, optimize and measure more expressive data-driven digital advertising campaigns. Our platform allows clients to execute integrated campaigns across ad formats and channels, including video (which includes CTV), display, audio, digital-out-of-home, native and social, on a multitude of devices, such as computers, mobile devices, televisions and streaming devices. Our platform’s integrations with major inventory, publisher and data partners provide ad buyers reach and decisioning capabilities, and our enterprise APIs enable our clients to customize and expand platform functionality.

Our clients are advertising agencies, brands and other service providers for advertisers, with whom we enter into ongoing MSAs. We generate revenue by charging our clients a platform fee based on a percentage of a client’s total spend on advertising. We also generate revenue from providing data and other value-added services and platform features.

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Executive Summary

Highlights

Trends, Opportunities and Challenges

The growing digitization of media and fragmentation of audiences has increased the complexity of advertising, and thereby increased the need for automation in ad buying, which we provide on our platform. In order to grow, we will need to continue to develop our platform’s programmatic capabilities and expand our advertising inventory and data offerings. We believe that key opportunities include our ongoing global expansion, continuing development of our video (including CTV), audio and native ad inventory and continuing development and adoption of the data usage, measurement and targeting capabilities provided by our platform.

We believe that growth of the programmatic advertising market is important for our ability to grow our business. Adoption of programmatic advertising by advertisers allows us to acquire new clients and grow revenue from existing clients. Although our clients include some of the largest advertising agencies in the world, we believe there is significant room for us to expand further within these clients and gain a larger amount of their advertising spend through our platform. We also believe that the industry trends noted above will lead to advertisers adopting programmatic advertising through platforms such as ours.

Similarly, the adoption of programmatic advertising by inventory owners and content providers allows us to expand the volume and type of advertising inventory we present to our clients. For example, we have expanded our CTV, native and audio advertising offerings through our integrations with supply-side partners.

We invest for long-term growth. We anticipate that our operating expenses will continue to increase significantly in the foreseeable future as we invest in platform operations and technology and development to enhance our product features, including programmatic buying of CTV ad inventory, and in sales and marketing to acquire new clients and reinforce our relationships with existing clients. In addition, we expect to continue making investments in our infrastructure, including our information technology, financial and administrative systems and controls, to support our growing operations.

We believe the markets outside of the United States, and in particular across China, India and Indonesia, offer opportunities for growth. However, such markets may also pose challenges related to compliance with local laws and regulations, restrictions on foreign ownership or investment, uncertainty related to trade relations and a variety of additional risks. We intend to make additional investments in sales and marketing and product development to expand in international markets where we are making significant investments in our platform and growing our team.

We believe that these investments will contribute to our long-term growth, although they may negatively impact profitability in the near term.

Our business model has allowed us to grow significantly, and we believe that our operating leverage enables us to support future growth profitably.

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COVID-19 and Other Macroeconomic Factors

The worldwide spread of COVID-19, including the emergence of variants and subvariants, as well as rising interest rates, inflation, changes in foreign currency exchange rates and geopolitical developments have resulted, and may continue to result, in a global slowdown of economic activity, which may decrease demand for a broad variety of goods and services, including those provided by our clients, while also disrupting supply channels, sales channels and advertising and marketing activities for an unknown period of time until economic activity normalizes. As a result of the current uncertainty in economic activity, we are unable to predict the size and duration of the impact on our revenue and our results of operations. The extent of the impact of these macroeconomic factors on our operational and financial performance will depend on a variety of factors, including the duration and spread of COVID-19 and its variants and the duration and the extent of geopolitical disruption and their respective impacts on our clients, partners, industry, and employees, all of which are uncertain at this time and cannot be accurately predicted. See “Item 1A. Risk Factors” in Part I of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for further discussion of the adverse impacts of macroeconomic factors on our business.

During the year ended December 31, 2022, many of our employees adopted a hybrid work schedule consisting of both in-person work and working from home. Additionally, we resumed travel and in-person events in accordance with applicable regional guidance. These changes primarily began during the latter half of 2022. Our costs and expenses may increase as we continue to increase office activity globally, further increase travel, participate in and hold more in-person meetings and events and increase capital expenditures for additional office space. We continue to monitor the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and take steps deemed appropriate to limit the impact on our business.

Factors Affecting Our Performance

Growth in and Retention of Client Spend

Our recent growth has been driven by expanding our share of spend by our existing clients and adding new clients. Our clients include some of the largest advertising agencies in the world, and we believe there is significant room for us to expand further within these clients. As a result, future revenue growth depends upon our ability to retain our existing clients and to gain a larger amount of their advertising spend through our platform.

In order to analyze gross spend contributions and growth from existing clients, we measure annual gross spend for the set of clients, or cohort, that commenced spending on our platform in a specific year relative to subsequent periods. The gross spend from each of our cohorts has increased over subsequent periods. However, over time, we will likely lose clients from each cohort, clients may spend less on our platform and the growth rate of gross spend may change. Any such change could have a significant negative impact on gross spend and operating results.

Ability to Expand our Omnichannel Reach, Including CTV

We enable the purchase of advertising inventory in a wide variety of ad formats and channels, including video (which includes CTV), display, audio, digital-out-of-home, native and social, on a multitude of devices, such as computers, mobile devices, televisions and streaming devices. Our future growth will depend on our ability to maintain and grow the inventory and spend across these channels, in addition to continued growth in CTV. We believe that our ability to integrate and offer CTV and digital radio advertising inventory for purchase through our platform and, in particular, our ability to manage the increased costs that will accompany these purchases, will impact the future growth of our business.

Growth of the Programmatic Advertising Market

Our operating results and prospects will be impacted by the overall adoption of programmatic advertising by inventory owners and content providers, as well as advertisers and the agencies and service providers that represent them. Programmatic advertising has grown rapidly in recent years, and any acceleration or slowing of this growth may affect our operating and financial performance. In addition, even if the programmatic advertising market continues to grow at its current rate, our ability to position ourselves within the market will impact the future growth of our business.

Development of International Markets

We have been increasing our focus on markets outside the United States to serve the global needs of our clients. As the middle class grows abroad, we believe that the global opportunity for programmatic advertising is significant and should continue to expand as publishers and advertisers outside the United States seek to adopt the benefits that programmatic advertising provides. To capitalize on this opportunity, we intend to continue investing in our presence

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internationally. Our growth and the success of our initiatives in newer markets will depend on the continued adoption of our platform by our existing clients, as well as new clients, in these markets. Information about geographic gross billings is set forth in Note 12—Segment and Geographic Information.

Seasonality

In the advertising industry, companies commonly experience seasonal fluctuations in revenue. For example, many advertisers allocate the largest portion of their budgets to the fourth quarter of the calendar year in order to coincide with increased holiday purchasing. Historically, the fourth quarter of the year reflects our highest level of advertising activity and the first quarter reflects the lowest level of such activity. We expect our revenue to continue to fluctuate based on seasonal factors that affect the advertising industry as a whole.

Components of Our Results of Operations

We have one primary business activity and operate in one reportable and operating segment.

Revenue

We generate revenue from clients who enter into agreements with us to use our platform to purchase advertising inventory, data and other add-on features. We charge our clients a platform fee, which is generally a percentage of the clients’ purchases through the platform. In addition, we invoice our clients for the cost of advertising inventory purchased, plus data and any add-on features purchased through the platform. Generally, we report revenue on a net basis, which represents gross billings net of amounts we pay suppliers for the cost of advertising inventory, data and add-on features.

Accounts receivable is recorded at the amount of gross billings to clients, net of allowances, for the amounts we are responsible to collect; and our accounts payable are recorded at the amount payable to suppliers. Accordingly, both accounts receivable and accounts payable appear large in relation to revenue reported on a net basis.

Revenue as a percentage of gross spend may fluctuate due to the types of services and features selected by our clients through our platform and certain volume discounts. We expect that our revenue as a percentage of gross spend will fluctuate in the future, especially as we introduce new platform features that are adopted by our clients, expand our omnichannel capabilities, extend our reach to more CTV inventory and add additional clients whose businesses may have different underlying business models.

Refer to “Critical Accounting Policies and Estimates—Revenue Recognition” below for a description of our revenue recognition policies.

Operating Expenses

We classify our operating expenses into the following four categories and allocate overhead such as information technology infrastructure, rent and occupancy charges based on headcount for these categories:

Platform Operations. Platform operations expense consists of expenses related to hosting our platform, which includes “internet traffic” associated with the viewing of available impressions or queries per second (“QPS”), purchasing data used to inform and improve the platform and providing support to our clients. Platform operations expense includes hosting costs, data-related costs, personnel costs and amortization of acquired technology and capitalized software costs for the development of our platform. Personnel costs include salaries, bonuses, stock-based compensation and employee benefit costs for personnel who support our platform and provide our clients with platform support. We capitalize certain costs associated with the development of our platform, which are amortized in platform operations over their estimated useful lives.

We expect platform operations expenses to increase in absolute dollars in future periods as we continue to experience increased volumes of QPS through our platform and hire additional personnel to support our clients.

Sales and Marketing. Sales and marketing expense consists primarily of personnel costs, including salaries, bonuses, stock-based compensation, employee benefits costs and commission costs, for our sales and marketing personnel. Sales and marketing expense also includes costs for market development programs, marketing events, advertising and promotional and other marketing activities. Commissions costs are expensed as incurred.

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Our sales organization focuses on marketing our platform to increase its adoption by existing and new clients. We are also focused on expanding our international business by growing our sales teams in countries in which we currently operate, as well as establishing a presence in additional countries. As a result, we expect sales and marketing expenses to increase in absolute dollars in future periods. Sales and marketing expense as a percentage of revenue may fluctuate from period to period based on revenue levels and the timing of our investments in our sales and marketing functions as these investments may vary in scope and scale over periods and are impacted by the revenue seasonality in our industry and business.

Technology and Development. Our technology and development expense consists primarily of personnel costs, including salaries, bonuses, stock-based compensation and employee benefits costs, third-party consultant costs associated with the ongoing development of our platform and integrations with our advertising and data inventory suppliers and amortization of capitalized third-party software used in the development of our platform. Technology and development costs are expensed as incurred, except to the extent that such costs are associated with software development that qualifies for capitalization. We record capitalized software development costs related to platform development in other assets, non-current in our consolidated balance sheets, and we amortize those costs in platform operations expense.

We believe that continued investment in our platform is critical to attaining our strategic objectives and long-term growth. Therefore, we expect technology and development expense to increase as we continue to invest in the development of our platform to support additional features and functions, increase the number of advertising and data inventory suppliers and ramp up the volume of advertising spend on our platform. Our development efforts also include additional platform functionality to support our international expansion. We also intend to invest in technology to further automate our business processes.

General and Administrative. Our general and administrative expense consists primarily of personnel costs, including salaries, bonuses, stock-based compensation and employee benefits costs associated with our executive, finance, legal, human resources, compliance and other administrative personnel, as well as accounting and legal professional services fees and credit loss expense. General and administrative expenses also include stock-based compensation expense related to the CEO Performance Option, as defined below.

We expect to continue to invest in corporate infrastructure to support growth. Excluding the impact of the CEO Performance Option, we expect general and administrative expenses to increase in absolute dollars in future periods.

Other Expense (Income), Net

Interest Expense. Interest expense is mainly related to our debt, which carries a variable interest rate.

Interest Income. Interest income is mainly related to our cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments, which carry variable interest rates.

Foreign Currency Exchange Loss (Gain), Net. Foreign currency exchange loss (gain), net consists primarily of gains and losses on foreign currency transactions. We have foreign currency exposure related to our accounts receivable and, to a much lesser extent, accounts payable that are denominated in currencies other than the U.S. Dollar, principally the Euro, British Pound, Australian Dollar, Canadian Dollar, Japanese Yen, Indonesian Rupiah and Singapore Dollar.

Provision for (benefit from) Income Taxes

The provision for (benefit from) income taxes consists primarily of U.S. federal, state and foreign income taxes. Our income tax provision (benefit) may be significantly affected by changes to our estimates for tax in jurisdictions in which we operate, and other estimates utilized in determining the global effective tax rate. Actual results may also differ from our estimates based on changes in economic conditions. Such changes could have a substantial impact on the income tax provision. We evaluate the judgments surrounding our estimates and make adjustments, as appropriate, each reporting period. Our income tax provision (benefit) may also be affected by the timing of vesting and/or exercise of our stock-based awards. The extent of the impact may be subject to volatility resulting from changes in our stock price and volume of transactions by employees.

Our effective tax rate differs from the U.S. federal statutory tax rate of 21% primarily due to nondeductible stock-based compensation, tax benefits associated with employee exercises of stock options and vesting of restricted stock units, research and development tax credits, foreign tax rate differences and state taxes.

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Realization of our deferred tax assets is dependent primarily on the generation of future taxable income. In considering the need for a valuation allowance, we consider our historical, as well as future, projected taxable income along with other objectively verifiable evidence. Objectively verifiable evidence includes our realization of tax attributes, assessment of tax credits and utilization of net operating loss carryforwards during the year.

Results of Operations for the Year Ended December 31, 2022 Compared with the Year Ended December 31, 2021

The following discusses the results of our operations for the year ended December 31, 2022 compared with the year ended December 31, 2021. For a discussion of the results of our operations for the year ended December 31, 2021 compared with the year ended December 31, 2020, see “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2021, filed with SEC on February 16, 2022. References to “Notes” are notes to our consolidated financial statements in “Item 8. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data.”

The following table sets forth our consolidated results of operations for the periods presented.

Note: Percentages may not sum due to rounding.

Revenue

Revenue increased by $381 million, or 32%, for the year ended December 31, 2022 as compared to the year ended December 31, 2021. The increase was primarily due to an increase in gross spend on our platform, which was primarily driven by more advertisers and more campaigns executed by existing clients.

Revenue as a percentage of gross spend in the aggregate may fluctuate from period to period based on our client mix and the extent to which clients utilize our platform’s features.

Platform Operations

Platform operations expense increased by $60 million, or 27%, for the year ended December 31, 2022, as compared to the year ended December 31, 2021. The increase was primarily due to increases of $21 million in personnel costs, which includes $2 million in stock-based compensation; $20 million in hosting costs; and $13 million in data-related costs. The increase in personnel costs was due to an increase in headcount, as well as employee engagement costs, including in-person events that did not occur in the prior year. The increase in hosting costs was primarily attributable to support related to the increased use of our platform by our clients as well as investment in new data centers to support our platform. The increase in data-related costs was primarily attributable to investments in new data providers.

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We expect platform operations expenses to increase in absolute dollars in future periods as we continue to experience increased volumes of media impressions through our platform and hire additional personnel to support our clients.

Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing increased by $89 million, or 36%, for the year ended December 31, 2022, as compared to the year ended December 31, 2021. The increase was primarily due to increases of $69 million in personnel costs, which includes $14 million of stock-based compensation; $13 million in advertising and marketing costs; and $7 million in allocated facilities costs. The increase in personnel costs was primarily due to an increase in headcount to support our sales efforts and continue to develop and maintain relationships with our clients; an increase in incentive compensation; and return-to-office, travel and in-person event costs that did not occur in the prior year. The increase in advertising and marketing costs was primarily due to an increase in marketing campaigns, events, sponsorships and client engagement. The increase in allocated facilities costs was primarily driven by new leases for additional office space to support our future growth.

We expect sales and marketing expenses to increase in absolute dollars in future periods, as we focus on increasing the adoption of our platform with existing and new clients and expanding our international business.

Technology and Development

Technology and development expense increased by $94 million, or 41%, for the year ended December 31, 2022, as compared to the year ended December 31, 2021. The increase was primarily due to increases of $87 million in personnel costs, which includes $37 million of stock-based compensation and $6 million in allocated facilities costs. The increase in personnel costs was primarily attributable to increased headcount to maintain and support further development of our platform, as well as return-to-office, travel and in-person event costs that did not occur in the prior year. The increase in allocated facilities costs was primarily driven by new leases for additional office space to support our future growth.

We expect technology and development expense to increase in absolute dollars as we continue to invest in the development of our platform to support additional features and functions, increase the number of advertising and data inventory suppliers and support the increase in volume of advertising spending by our clients on our platform. We also intend to invest in technology to further automate our business processes.

General and Administrative

General and administrative expense increased by $151 million, or 40%, for the year ended December 31, 2022, as compared to the year ended December 31, 2021. The increase was primarily due to increases of $138 million in personnel costs and $5 million in allocated facilities costs. The increase in personnel costs was primarily driven by a $104 million increase in stock-based compensation cost related to the CEO Performance Option, which was granted in the fourth quarter of 2021; and payroll related costs of $28 million due to hiring to support our growth, as well as return-to-office, travel and in-person event costs that did not occur in the prior year. The increase in allocated facilities costs was primarily driven by new leases for additional office space to support our future growth.

Excluding the impact of the CEO Performance Option, we expect general and administrative expenses to increase primarily due to continued investment in corporate infrastructure to support growth. For additional information regarding the CEO Performance Option, refer to Note 10— Stock-Based Compensation.

Other Expense (Income), Net

Total other income, net increased by $16 million for the year ended December 31, 2022, as compared to the year ended December 31, 2021. The increase was primarily due to higher interest income on our short-term investments driven by increased purchases and rising interest rates, partially offset by credit loss expense on available-for-sale securities.

Provision for (Benefit From) Income Taxes

The difference between the effective tax rate in 2022 of 58% and the U.S. federal statutory income tax rate of 21% was primarily due to nondeductible stock-based compensation and the impact of taxes in foreign jurisdictions, partially offset by the impact of tax benefits associated with stock-based awards and research and development tax credits. For 2022,

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the provision for income taxes included $48 million of benefits associated with stock-based awards and $15 million of research and development tax credits.

The difference between the effective tax rate in 2021 of (13)% and the U.S. federal statutory income tax rate of 21% was primarily due to the impact of tax benefits associated with stock-based awards and research and development tax credits, partially offset by nondeductible stock-based compensation and the impact of taxes in foreign jurisdictions. For 2021, the benefit from income taxes included $104 million of benefits associated with stock-based awards and $19 million of research and development tax credits.

Liquidity and Capital Resources

As of December 31, 2022, we had cash and cash equivalents of $1,031 million, including $93 million held by our international subsidiaries, short-term investments in marketable securities of $416 million, working capital of $1,816 million and $445 million of availability under our Credit Facility (refer to the “Credit Facility” section below). For the year ended December 31, 2022, we generated $549 million of cash flows from operating activities.

We believe our existing cash and cash equivalents, cash flow from operations and our undrawn available balance under our Credit Facility will be sufficient to meet our working capital requirements for at least the next 12 months. Further, we have a shelf registration statement on Form S-3 on file with the SEC (the “Shelf Registration”), which permits us to issue equity securities and equity-linked securities from time to time, subject to certain limitations. The Shelf Registration is intended to provide us with additional flexibility to access capital markets for general corporate purposes, subject to market conditions and our capital needs. Our future capital requirements and the adequacy of available funds will depend on many factors, including those set forth in “Item 1A. Risk Factors” in Part I of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

In the future, we may attempt to raise additional capital through the sale of equity securities or through equity-linked or debt-financing arrangements. If we raise additional funds by issuing equity or equity-linked securities, the ownership of our existing stockholders will be diluted. If we raise additional financing by the incurrence of additional indebtedness, we may be subject to increased fixed payment obligations and could also be subject to additional restrictive covenants, such as limitations on our ability to incur additional debt, and other operating restrictions that could adversely impact our ability to conduct our business. Any future indebtedness we incur may result in terms that could be unfavorable to equity investors.

There can be no assurances that we will be able to raise additional capital. The inability to raise capital would adversely affect our ability to achieve our business objectives. In addition, if our operating performance during the next 12 months is below our expectations, our liquidity and ability to operate our business could be adversely affected. We are closely monitoring the effect that current macroeconomic factors may have on our working capital requirements.

Credit Facility

On June 15, 2021, we and a syndicate of banks, led by JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., as agent, entered into a Loan and Security Agreement (the “Credit Facility”). This Credit Facility replaced our prior credit facility, which was scheduled to terminate in May 2022. The Credit Facility consists of a $450 million revolving loan facility, with a $20 million sublimit for swingline borrowings and a $15 million sublimit for the issuance of letters of credit. Under certain circumstances, we have the right to increase the Credit Facility by an amount not to exceed $300 million.

On December 17, 2021, we amended the Credit Facility to expand the process for issuing letters of credit and the related invoicing, particularly with respect to letters of credit not denominated in U.S. Dollars.

As of December 31, 2022, we did not have an outstanding debt balance under the Credit Facility. Availability under the Credit Facility was $445 million as of December 31, 2022, which is net of outstanding letters of credit of $5 million. The Credit Facility matures, and all outstanding amounts become due and payable, on June 15, 2026. As of December 31, 2022, we were in compliance with all covenants.

Subsequent to December 31, 2022, we amended our Credit Facility to transition from a variable interest rate based on LIBOR to a variable interest rate based on the secured overnight financing rate (“SOFR”).

For additional information regarding the Credit Facility, refer to Note 7—Debt.

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Cash Flows

The following table summarizes our cash flows for the periods presented (in thousands):

Operating Activities

Our cash flows from operating activities are primarily influenced by growth in our operations, increases or decreases in collections from our clients and related payments to our suppliers for advertising inventory and data. We typically pay suppliers in advance of collections from our clients. Our collection and payment cycles can vary from period to period. In addition, we expect seasonality to impact cash flows from operating activities on a sequential quarterly basis during the year.

In 2022, cash provided by operating activities of $549 million resulted primarily from net income adjusted for noncash items of $643 million and a net decrease in our operating assets and liabilities of $94 million. The net decrease was primarily due to increase in accounts receivable of $292 million and a $48 million decrease in operating lease liabilities, partially offset by a $187 million increase in accounts payable and a $51 million decrease in prepaid expenses and other assets. The increase in accounts receivable resulted primarily from the growth of our business and the timing of cash receipts from clients. The decrease in operating lease liabilities was due primarily to rent payments. The increase in accounts payable was due to the growth of our business and the timing of payments to suppliers for the cost of advertising inventory, data and add-on features. The decrease in prepaid expenses and other assets was primarily due to a decrease in the income tax receivable, including the receipt of an income tax refund, partially offset by current year estimated income tax payments.

In 2021, cash provided by operating activities of $379 million resulted primarily from net income adjusted for noncash items of $548 million and a net decrease in our operating assets and liabilities of $170 million. The net decrease was primarily due to increase in accounts receivable of $444 million and a $44 million decrease in operating lease liabilities, partially offset by a $309 million increase in accounts payable. The increase in accounts receivable resulted primarily from the growth of our business and the timing of cash receipts from clients. The decrease in operating lease liabilities was due primarily to rent payments. The increase in accounts payable was due to the growth of our business and the timing of payments to suppliers for the cost of advertising inventory, data and add-on features.

Investing Activities

Our primary investing activities consist of investing in short-term investments in marketable securities, purchases of property and equipment to support of our growth and capital expenditures to develop our software to enhance our technology platform. As our business grows, we expect our capital expenditures and our investment activity to continue to increase.

In 2022, we used $304 million of cash in investing activities, consisting of $212 million of net purchases of short-term investments, $84 million to purchase property and equipment and $8 million of investments in capitalized software.

In 2021, we used $94 million of cash in investing activities, consisting of $55 million to purchase property and equipment, $20 million of net purchases of short-term investments, $13 million for certain assets accounted for as a business acquisition and $5 million of investments in capitalized software.

Financing Activities

Our financing activities consisted primarily of borrowings and repayments of our debt, proceeds from our equity compensation plans and taxes paid to net settle restricted stock awards.

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In 2022, cash provided by financing activities of $32 million was primarily due to $48 million of proceeds from stock option exercises and $33 million of proceeds from the employee stock purchase plan, partially offset by $49 million of taxes paid for restricted stock award settlements.

In 2021, cash provided by financing activities of $32 million was primarily due to $61 million of proceeds from stock option exercises and $29 million of proceeds from the employee stock purchase plan, partially offset by $57 million of taxes paid for restricted stock award settlements and $2 million paid for debt financing costs.

Contractual Obligations and Known Future Cash Requirements

Our principal commitments consist of non-cancelable operating leases for our various office facilities, and other contractual commitments consisting of obligations to our hosting services providers, marketing contracts and providers of software as a service. In certain cases, the terms of the lease agreements provide for rental payments on a graduated basis.

The following table summarizes our non-cancellable contractual obligations at December 31, 2022 (in thousands):

As of December 31, 2022, our total amount of gross unrecognized tax benefits was $91 million before netting with deferred tax assets for tax credit carryforwards and is considered a long-term obligation. Due to their nature, there is a high degree of uncertainty regarding the time of future cash outflows and other events that extinguish these liabilities.

In the ordinary course of business, we enter into agreements in which we may agree to indemnify clients, suppliers, vendors, lessors, business partners, lenders, stockholders and other parties with respect to certain matters, including losses resulting from claims of intellectual property infringement, damages to property or persons, business losses, or other liabilities. Generally, these indemnity and defense obligations relate to our own business operations, obligations and acts or omissions. However, under some circumstances, we agree to indemnify and defend contract counterparties against losses resulting from their own business operations, obligations and acts or omissions, or the business operations, obligations and acts or omissions of third parties. These indemnity provisions generally survive termination or expiration of the agreements in which they appear. In addition, we have entered into indemnification agreements with our directors, executive officers and other officers that will require us to indemnify them against liabilities that may arise by reason of their status or service as directors, officers or employees. In the ordinary course of business, demands have been made upon us to provide indemnification under such agreements, but we are not aware of any claims that could have a material effect on our consolidated financial statements. Accordingly, no amounts for any obligation have been recorded at December 31, 2022.

Critical Accounting Policies and Estimates

Our consolidated financial statements are prepared in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America (“GAAP”). The preparation of these consolidated financial statements requires us to make estimates and assumptions that affect the reported amounts of assets, liabilities, revenue, expenses and related disclosures. We evaluate our estimates and assumptions on an ongoing basis. Our estimates are based on historical experience and various other assumptions that we believe to be reasonable under the circumstances. Actual results could differ from these estimates.

We believe that the assumptions and estimates associated with the evaluation of revenue recognition criteria, including the determination of revenue recognition as net versus gross in our revenue arrangements, stock-based compensation expense and income taxes have the greatest potential impact on our consolidated financial statements. Therefore, we consider these to be our critical accounting policies and estimates.

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Revenue Recognition

We generate revenue from clients who enter into agreements with us to use our platform to purchase advertising inventory, data and other add-on features. We charge our clients a platform fee, which is generally a percentage of the client’s purchases through the platform. In addition, we invoice our clients for the cost of advertising inventory purchased, plus data and any add-on features purchased through the platform.

Generally, we report revenue net of amounts we pay suppliers for the cost of advertising inventory, third-party data and other add-on features (collectively, “Supplier Features”). Judgment is required to determine whether we are the principal and report revenue on a gross basis for Supplier Features or the agent and report revenue on a net basis for the amount of platform fees charged to the client. In this assessment, we consider if we obtain control of the specified service before it is transferred to the client, as well as other indicators such as the party primarily responsible for fulfillment, inventory risk and discretion in establishing price.

From time to time, we may enter into agreements with data suppliers where the purchased data is used to inform and improve our platform, generally at no additional charge to our customers outside of our standard fees. Costs associated with this data (“data-related costs”) are recorded in platform operations expense.

For additional information regarding revenue and the assumptions used for determining our revenue recognition refer to Note 2—Basis of Presentation and Summary of Significant Accounting Policies.

Stock-Based Compensation

Stock-based compensation expense related to stock options, restricted stock awards and units (collectively, “restricted stock”), and awards granted under our employee stock purchase plan (“ESPP”) is measured and recognized in our consolidated financial statements based on the fair value of the awards granted. In October 2021, we granted a market-based performance award to our Chief Executive Officer (the “CEO Performance Option”) under the 2016 Incentive Award Plan. The fair values of our ESPP and stock option awards are estimated on the grant date using the Black-Scholes option-pricing model, except for the CEO Performance Option that was estimated using the Monte Carlo valuation model. The fair value of restricted stock is calculated using the closing market price of our common stock on the date of grant.

Stock-based compensation expense related to restricted stock and stock options is recognized on a straight-line basis over the requisite service periods of the awards, which is generally four years. Stock-based compensation for the CEO Performance Option, which was granted in 2021, is recognized on a graded-vesting basis over a period of approximately five years but may be accelerated if the vesting criteria is met prior to the estimated performance period. Stock-based compensation expense for ESPP awards is recognized on a graded-vesting attribution basis over the requisite service period of each award.

For additional information regarding stock-based compensation and the assumptions used for determining the fair value of stock options and ESPP awards, refer to Note 2—Basis of Presentation and Summary of Significant Accounting Policies and Note 10—Stock-Based Compensation.

Income Taxes

Our income tax provision may be significantly affected by changes to our estimates for tax in jurisdictions in which we operate and other estimates utilized in determining the global effective tax rate. Actual results may also differ from our estimate based on changes in economic conditions. Such changes could have a substantial impact on the income tax provision and deferred income tax assets and liabilities. We evaluate the judgments surrounding our estimates and make adjustments, as appropriate, each reporting period.

For additional information regarding income taxes and the assumptions used for determining our income tax provision, as well as our related deferred income tax assets and liabilities, refer to Note 2—Basis of Presentation and Summary of Significant Accounting Policies and Note 11—Income Taxes.

Recently Issued Accounting Pronouncements

None.

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We have operations within the United States and internationally, and we are exposed to market risks in the ordinary course of our business. These risks include primarily interest rate and foreign currency exchange risk.

Interest Rate Risk

We are exposed to market risk from changes in interest rates on our Credit Facility, which accrues interest at a variable rate, and our short-term investments. No amount was owed on our Credit Facility as of December 31, 2022. We have not used any derivative financial instruments to manage our interest rate risk exposure. Based upon the short-term investment amount as of December 31, 2022, a hypothetical one percentage point increase or decrease in the interest rate would result in a corresponding increase or decrease in investment income of approximately $4 million annually.

Foreign Currency Exchange Rate Risk

We have foreign currency exchange risk related to transactions denominated in currencies other than the U.S. Dollar, principally the Euro, British Pound, Australian Dollar, Canadian Dollar, Japanese Yen, Indonesian Rupiah and Singapore Dollar. The volatility of exchange rates depends on many factors that we cannot forecast with reliable accuracy. As of December 31, 2022, an immediate 10% adverse change in foreign exchange rates on foreign-denominated accounts would result in a foreign currency loss of approximately $35 million. In the event our non-U.S. Dollar denominated sales and expenses increase, our operating results may be more greatly affected by exchange rate fluctuations.

We enter into forward contracts or other derivative transactions in an attempt to hedge our foreign currency risk. There can be no assurance that such transactions will be effective in hedging some or all of our foreign currency exposures, and under some circumstances, such transactions could generate losses.

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THE TRADE DESK, INC.

INDEX TO CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS

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REPORT OF INDEPENDENT REGISTERED PUBLIC ACCOUNTING FIRM

To the Board of Directors and Stockholders of The Trade Desk, Inc.

Opinions on the Financial Statements and Internal Control over Financial Reporting

We have audited the accompanying consolidated balance sheets of The Trade Desk, Inc. and its subsidiaries (the “Company”) as of December 31, 2022 and 2021, and the related consolidated statements of operations, of stockholders' equity and of cash flows for each of the three years in the period ended December 31, 2022, including the related notes (collectively referred to as the “consolidated financial statements”). We also have audited the Company's internal control over financial reporting as of December 31, 2022, based on criteria established in Internal Control - Integrated Framework (2013) issued by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO).

In our opinion, the consolidated financial statements referred to above present fairly, in all material respects, the financial position of the Company as of December 31, 2022 and 2021, and the results of its operations and its cash flows for each of the three years in the period ended December 31, 2022 in conformity with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America. Also in our opinion, the Company maintained, in all material respects, effective internal control over financial reporting as of December 31, 2022, based on criteria established in Internal Control - Integrated Framework (2013) issued by the COSO.

Basis for Opinions

The Company's management is responsible for these consolidated financial statements, for maintaining effective internal control over financial reporting, and for its assessment of the effectiveness of internal control over financial reporting, included in Management’s Report on Internal Control over Financial Reporting appearing under Item 9A. Our responsibility is to express opinions on the Company’s consolidated financial statements and on the Company's internal control over financial reporting based on our audits. We are a public accounting firm registered with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (United States) (PCAOB) and are required to be independent with respect to the Company in accordance with the U.S. federal securities laws and the applicable rules and regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the PCAOB.

We conducted our audits in accordance with the standards of the PCAOB. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audits to obtain reasonable assurance about whether the consolidated financial statements are free of material misstatement, whether due to error or fraud, and whether effective internal control over financial reporting was maintained in all material respects.

Our audits of the consolidated financial statements included performing procedures to assess the risks of material misstatement of the consolidated financial statements, whether due to error or fraud, and performing procedures that respond to those risks. Such procedures included examining, on a test basis, evidence regarding the amounts and disclosures in the consolidated financial statements. Our audits also included evaluating the accounting principles used and significant estimates made by management, as well as evaluating the overall presentation of the consolidated financial statements. Our audit of internal control over financial reporting included obtaining an understanding of internal control over financial reporting, assessing the risk that a material weakness exists, and testing and evaluating the design and operating effectiveness of internal control based on the assessed risk. Our audits also included performing such other procedures as we considered necessary in the circumstances. We believe that our audits provide a reasonable basis for our opinions.

Definition and Limitations of Internal Control over Financial Reporting

A company’s internal control over financial reporting is a process designed to provide reasonable assurance regarding the reliability of financial reporting and the preparation of financial statements for external purposes in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. A company’s internal control over financial reporting includes those policies and procedures that (i) pertain to the maintenance of records that, in reasonable detail, accurately and fairly reflect the transactions and dispositions of the assets of the company; (ii) provide reasonable assurance that transactions are recorded as necessary to permit preparation of financial statements in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, and that receipts and expenditures of the company are being made only in accordance with authorizations of management and directors of the company; and (iii) provide reasonable assurance regarding prevention or timely detection of unauthorized acquisition, use, or disposition of the company’s assets that could have a material effect on the financial statements.

Because of its inherent limitations, internal control over financial reporting may not prevent or detect misstatements. Also, projections of any evaluation of effectiveness to future periods are subject to the risk that controls may become inadequate because of changes in conditions, or that the degree of compliance with the policies or procedures may deteriorate.

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Critical Audit Matters

The critical audit matter communicated below is a matter arising from the current period audit of the consolidated financial statements that was communicated or required to be communicated to the audit committee and that (i) relates to accounts or disclosures that are material to the consolidated financial statements and (ii) involved our especially challenging, subjective, or complex judgments. The communication of critical audit matters does not alter in any way our opinion on the consolidated financial statements, taken as a whole, and we are not, by communicating the critical audit matter below, providing a separate opinion on the critical audit matter or on the accounts or disclosures to which it relates.

Revenue Recognition – Platform Fees

As described in Note 2 to the consolidated financial statements, the Company maintains agreements with each client and supplier in the form of master service agreements, which set out the terms of the relationship and access to the Company’s platform. The Company’s performance obligation is to provide the use of its platform to clients to develop ad campaigns and select the advertising inventory, data and other add-on features. The Company charges

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None.

Evaluation of Disclosure Controls and Procedures

Our management, with the participation of our Chief Executive Officer (“CEO”) and Chief Financial Officer (“CFO”), evaluated the effectiveness of our disclosure controls and procedures as defined in Rules 13a-15(e) and 15d-15(e) under the Exchange Act, as of December 31, 2022. Our disclosure controls and procedures are designed to provide reasonable assurance that information we are required to disclose in the reports we file or submit under the Exchange Act is accumulated and communicated to our management, including our CEO and CFO, as appropriate to allow timely decisions regarding required disclosures, and is recorded, processed, summarized and reported within the time periods specified in the SEC’s rules and forms. Based on this evaluation, our CEO and CFO have concluded that our disclosure controls and procedures were effective at the reasonable assurance level as of December 31, 2022.

Management’s Report on Internal Control over Financial Reporting

Management is responsible for establishing and maintaining adequate internal control over financial reporting, as defined in Rules 13a-15(f) and 15d-15(f) under the Exchange Act. Our internal control over financial reporting is a process designed to provide reasonable assurance regarding the reliability of financial reporting and the preparation of our financial statements for external purposes in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles.

Management assessed the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting as of December 31, 2022 using the criteria set forth by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission in Internal Control—Integrated Framework (2013). Based on its assessment, our management, including our CEO and CFO, has concluded that our internal control over financial reporting was effective as of December 31, 2022.

The effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting as of December 31, 2022 has been audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, our independent registered public accounting firm, as stated in their report, which appears in “Item 8. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data” of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Changes in Internal Control over Financial Reporting

There have been no significant changes in our internal control over financial reporting during the quarter ended December 31, 2022 that have materially affected, or are reasonably likely to materially affect, our internal control over financial reporting.

Inherent Limitations on Effectiveness of Controls

Management recognizes that a control system, no matter how well conceived and operated, can provide only reasonable, not absolute, assurance that the objectives of the control system are met. Further, the design of a control system must reflect the fact that there are resource constraints, and the benefits of controls must be considered relative to their costs. Because of the inherent limitations in all control systems, no evaluation of controls can provide absolute assurance that all control issues and instances of fraud or error, if any, have been detected. These inherent limitations include the

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realities that judgments in decision making can be faulty, and that breakdowns can occur because of a simple error or mistake. Additionally, controls can be circumvented by the individual acts of some persons, by collusion of two or more people, or by management override of the controls. The design of any system of controls also is based in part upon certain assumptions about the likelihood of future events, and there can be no assurance that any design will succeed in achieving its stated goals under all potential future conditions; over time, controls may become inadequate because of changes in conditions, or the degree of compliance with policies or procedures may deteriorate. Because of the inherent limitations in a cost-effective control system, misstatements due to error or fraud may occur and not be detected.

None.

Not applicable.

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PART III

The information required by this item will be included in our proxy statement relating to our 2023 annual meeting of stockholders to be filed by us with the SEC no later than 120 days after the close of our fiscal year ended December 31, 2022 (the “Proxy Statement”) and is incorporated herein by reference.

We have a code of business ethics and conduct that applies to all of our employees, including our Principal Executive Officer, Principal Financial Officer, Principal Accounting Officer and our Board of Directors. A copy of this code, “Code of Business Conduct and Ethics,” is available on our website at http://investors.thetradedesk.com. We intend to satisfy the disclosure requirement under Item 5.05 of Form 8-K regarding amendment to, or waiver from, a provision of our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics by posting such information on our investor relations website under the heading “ Governance” at http://investors.thetradedesk.com.

The information required by this item will be included in the Proxy Statement and is incorporated herein by reference.

The information required by this item will be included in the Proxy Statement and is incorporated herein by reference.

The information required by this item will be included in the Proxy Statement and is incorporated herein by reference.

The information required by this item will be included in the Proxy Statement and is incorporated herein by reference.

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PART IV

(a) We have filed the following documents as part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K:

1. Consolidated Financial Statements

Refer to Index to Consolidated Financial Statements in “Item 8. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data” herein.

2. Financial Statement Schedules

No financial statement schedules are provided because the information called for is not required or is shown in the financial statements of the notes thereto.

3. Exhibits

Exhibits required to be filed as part of this report are:

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None.

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SIGNATURES

Pursuant to the requirements of Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the registrant has duly caused this report to be signed on its behalf by the undersigned, thereunto duly authorized, on the 15th day of February, 2023.

POWER OF ATTORNEY

KNOW ALL PERSONS BY THESE PRESENTS, that each person whose signature appears below constitutes and appoints Jeff T. Green and Blake J. Grayson, jointly and severally, as his or her true and lawful attorneys-in-fact and agents, with full power of substitution and resubstitution, for him or her and in his or her name, place and stead, in any and all capacities, to sign any and all amendments to this Annual Report on Form 10-K, and to file the same, with all exhibits thereto, and other documents in connection therewith, with the Securities and Exchange Commission, granting unto said attorneys-in-fact and agents, and each of them, full power and authority to do and perform each and every act and thing requisite and necessary to be done in connection therewith, as fully to all intents and purposes as he or she might or could do in person, hereby ratifying and confirming that all said attorneys-in-fact and agents, or any of them or their or his or her substitute or substitutes, may lawfully do or cause to be done by virtue hereof.

Pursuant to the requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, this report has been signed below by the following persons on behalf of the registrant and in the capacities and on the dates indicated.