StepStone Group Inc.

We're now in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during a session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Seth Weiss, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good evening. Joining me on today's call are Scott Hart, Chief Executive Officer, Jason Ment, President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Mike McCabe, Head of Strategy, and David Park, Chief Financial Officer. During our prepared remarks, we will be referring to a presentation which is available on our investor relations website at shareholders.stepstonegroup.com. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that this conference call as well as the presentation contain certain forward-looking statements regarding the company's expected operating and financial performance for future periods. Forward-looking statements reflect management's current plans, estimates, and expectations and are inherently uncertain and are subject to various risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. Actual results for future periods may differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements due to changes in circumstances or a number of risks or other factors that are described in the risk factor section of Stepstone's periodic filings. These forward-looking statements are made only as of today and accept as required. We undertake no obligation to update or revise any of them. Today's presentation contains references to non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are included in our earnings release, our presentation, and our filings with the SEC. Turning to our financial results for the third quarter of fiscal 2025. Beginning with slide three, we reported a GAAP net loss of $287 million. The GAAP net loss attributable to StepStone Group Incorporated was $192 million, or $2.61 per share. GAAP earnings were impacted by the change in fair value related to our potential future buy-in of the StepStone private wealth profits interests. David will speak to the GAAP accounting dynamics in more detail in his section. Moving to slide five, we generated fee-related earnings of $74.1 million, up 46% from the prior year quarter. And we generated an FRE margin of 39%. The quarter reflected retroactive fees primarily from our special situations real estate secondaries fund, our infrastructure co-investment fund, and our multi-strategy growth equity fund. Retroactive fees contributed $9.7 million to revenue which compares to retroactive fees of $8.6 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2024. Finally, we earned $52.7 million in adjusted net income for the quarter, or 44 cents per share. This is up from $42.1 million, or 37 cents per share, in the third quarter of last fiscal year, driven by higher fee-related earnings and higher net realized performance fees. I'll now hand the call over to Scott.

Thank you, Seth, and good evening. This was a standout quarter for both fee-related earnings and fee-related asset growth. We generated fee-related earnings of $74 million, our highest level ever, and increased our fee-earning assets under management by nearly $10 billion, which is the strongest quarter of organic growth in StepStone's history. We now manage over $114 billion of fee-earning AUM, up 28% from a year ago. We are very proud of this result, which in large part is a function of our strong fundraising over the last year. As you are aware, a portion of our fundraising over the past 12 months has been building in our undeployed fee-earning capital, or UFIC, and we were able to deploy and activate a significant portion this quarter. We took advantage of attractive investment opportunities in the market, deploying over $2 billion of capital and activating over $6.5 billion of capital from our UFIC balance this quarter. We tend to look at our growth over a longer period than just one or two quarters in order to reflect cumulative efforts of fundraising, investing, and relationship building that span cycles. Measuring our progress since the fall of 2021, or just after we closed on the Greenspring acquisition, we've increased our fee-earning AUM by 70%, or a compounded annual rate of 18%, with all this growth generated organically. This success came during a period where many private market managers experienced fundraising pressure as private capital commitments across the industry fell each year from 2021 through 2024. Our results for both the quarter and the last several years are a validation of our strategy and business model, which we deliberately constructed to be flexible by commercial structure and strategy, broad in geographic reach, and diversified across the asset class. While certain investment approaches may be in or out of fashion in any given period, the diversification of our offerings provides a complete array of solutions for our clients and provides a ballast for consistent growth for our shareholders. Highlighting a couple specific milestones from our fiscal third quarter. First, we closed on our inaugural infrastructure co-investment fund with a total fund size of approximately $1.2 billion. This is a tremendous result for a first-time fund as a testament to the strength of the team and demand for real assets. Infrastructure is quickly becoming an integral component of LP's portfolios due to its benefits of diversification, inflation protection, and income generation. While commingled funds may be a new offering from our infrastructure platform, Stepstone is a very experienced team, an extensive tracker built through managed accounts. We have over $100 billion of total capital responsibility in infrastructure, including $36 billion of AUM, making us one of, if not the, largest infrastructure solutions providers in the world. Second, we grew our private wealth platform to over $6 billion and raised over $1 billion of new subscriptions. This is our best private wealth growth quarter ever, and our first quarter raising more than $1 billion of private wealth subscriptions. Encouragingly, even as we layered on new products such as Strux, our infrastructure fund, and Credex, our private credit fund, we continued to grow subscriptions in S Prime, our all-private markets fund, and Spring, our venture capital and growth equity fund. Both S Prime and Spring had their strongest subscription quarters to date. As of the end of January, we have increased the private wealth platform to over $7 billion, which included a more than $600 million secondary transaction by Credex of a high-quality private credit portfolio, which occurred at the beginning of the year. The purchase was executed through issuance of Credex shares to the sellers. We believe this investment by Credex should enhance the returns of the fund, offer greater loan diversification, lower expenses for investors through scale economies, and amplify the fund's marketability to additional platforms. Shifting to our financial results, we generated $192 million in management and advisory fees and $74 million in fee-related earnings, which are up 26% and 46% year-over-year, respectively. This is our strongest fee-related revenue and fee-related earnings period on record, even as retroactive fees have moderated over the last couple quarters. Excluding the impact of retroactive fees, our fee-related revenue and fee-related earnings increased 27% and 53% year-on-year, respectively. driven by robust growth in our fearing AUM across structures. Our FRE margin was 39% for the quarter. If you were to exclude the impact of retroactive fees, our FRE margin was 36% for the quarter and 35% for the trailing 12 months, our best quarterly and 12-month core margin levels on record. I'll now turn the call over to Mike to speak to fundraising and asset growth in more detail. Thanks, Scott.