StepStone Group Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to StepStone Group's fiscal fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. If your question has been answered and you'd like to remove yourself from the queue, simply press star 1-1 again. As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. And now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, 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, contains 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 the steps on 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 for 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 fourth quarter of fiscal 2025. Beginning with slide three, we reported a GAAP net loss attributable to Stepstone Group Incorporated of $18.5 million, or 24 cents per share. Moving to slide five, we generated fee-related earnings of $94.1 million, up 85% from the prior year quarter, and we generated an FRE margin of 44%. The quarter reflected retroactive fees primarily from our special situations real estate secondaries fund and our multi-strategy growth equity fund. Retroactive fees contributed $15.7 million to fee revenues, which compares to retroactive fees of $5.4 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024. We earned $80.6 million in adjusted net income for the quarter, or 68 cents per share. This is up from $37.7 million, or 33 cents per share, in the fourth quarter of last fiscal year, driven by higher fee-related earnings and higher performance-related earnings. Finally, we declared a base quarterly dividend of 24 cents, as well as a supplemental dividend of 40 cents, both of which will be payable on June 30th. The full dividend payout related to this fiscal year is $1.36, up from last year's total of $0.99. I'll now hand the call over to Scott.

Thanks, Seth. We generated record earnings this quarter, a capstone for a record fiscal year. Our fee-related earnings, FRE margin, and adjusted net income per share were all at our highest levels ever for both our quarterly and annual results. For the full year, we raised over $31 billion of assets under management, and generated $27.5 billion of growth in our fee-earning AUM, both record year results for StepStone. This translates to fee-earning asset growth of over 29% in fiscal 2025, which is our best organic growth rate for any 12-month period since we became a public company. Our increasing scale continues to be a tailwind for growth. Our managed account re-up rate remains above 90%, and on average, those re-upped accounts have grown at approximately 30%. Fiscal 2025 was also an excellent year for managed account expansion, with over $8.5 billion of SMA inflows, or over 40% of total SMA inflows, sourced from new accounts or expanded relationships. This plants the seeds for continued growth from re-ups and upsizing. Our commingled funds are also growing. Prior to this year, our largest commingled fund was $2.6 billion. Over the last 12 months, we've closed on three commingled funds of over $3 billion. which contributed to our remarkable year. Our growing scale and scope have afforded us new opportunities. Earlier this fiscal year, we closed on our debut infrastructure co-investment fund of over $1 billion, a great result for a first-time fund. With the raising of this fund, we now have commingled funds across all four asset classes. Our second infrastructure commingled fund, focused on secondaries, has been well-received and we are seeing strong demand. We had outstanding growth in our private wealth platform. which increased from $3.4 billion of assets at the end of fiscal 2024 to over $8 billion as of the end of this past fiscal year. The success in private wealth is driven by new products, expansion of distribution, growing momentum of existing products with existing distribution partners, cross-selling of funds, and continued utilization of the tickers. Over the past fiscal year, we added CredEx to our private wealth suite. We now offer evergreen funds across credit, infrastructure, venture and growth equity, and, of course, our all-private markets S-Prime Fund. We expanded our distribution partners from roughly 300 unique platforms a year ago to almost 500 platforms today, and we continue to expand our offerings outside the U.S. And the ability to purchase S-Prime, CredX, and Struct via the ticker continues to be a point of value for our partners, with nearly 80% of all eligible sales being executed with those tickers. This has led to consistent growth each quarter since the inception of Stepstone Private Wealth in 2019. Moving to our highlights in the quarter, total gross inflows were $9.9 billion, our second highest quarter on record, trailing only the first fiscal quarter of this past year. We generated a healthy balance across managed accounts, commingled drawdown funds, and private wealth evergreen funds. Included in this number is $1.2 billion of evergreen subscriptions, our best private wealth quarter ever. strong fundraising combined with deployment of our undeployed fee-earning capital drove our fee-earning assets under management to over $121 billion, up $7.2 billion over last quarter. We generated fee-related earnings of $94 million and an FRE margin of 44%, both of which are our best measures ever. If you were to exclude the impact of retroactive fees, Our FRE margin was 40% for the quarter and was 37% for the trailing 12 months, our highest quarterly and 12-month core margin levels on record. We generated our strongest ever adjusted net income per share of 68 cents, driven by records in fee-related earnings and in performance-related earnings. As we have mentioned on recent calls, we have seen an improving capital market backdrop over the last 12 months, which led to increases in announced deal activity toward the end of 2024, resulting in very strong realizations and distributions in the first calendar quarter of 2025. The backdrop obviously shifted in April, and it seemingly shifted back in May, with rapidly evolving global trade policy driving volatility in the public markets and creating widening bid-ask spreads in the private markets. While we are cautiously optimistic based on recent progress made on trade policy, we expect that we will continue to operate in an environment characterized by uncertainty. As a result, much of our focus will continue to be on scenario planning to quickly and dynamically assess the impact by asset class, strategy, region, and sector. Our scale across global private markets allows us to balance opportunity versus risk in deploying capital in the best and most appropriate investments for our clients. we believe our information advantage and insight into private markets allow us to capitalize on market dislocations. Private markets have a consistent track record of outperforming their public equivalents. A meaningful portion of the industry's investment outperformance comes from limiting the downside during drawdowns while capturing all of the upside in the subsequent recoveries. That is what we saw play out in the dot-com bubble burst, the global financial crisis, and the market sell-off after the outbreak of COVID. However, for a private market investor to capitalize, It must take a long-term, disciplined approach by remaining invested through cycles and avoiding poor investments, whether directly in deals or in funds. This is much easier said than done. StepStone's experience, expertise, and scale enables us to consistently and tactically invest in the private markets through cycles for our clients. We have proven to be among the fastest-growing private market asset managers by being able to guide LPs across market cycles. While we are not immune to macroeconomic downturns, it is during periods of uncertainty when we have consistently proven our mettle and widened the gap from our peers. With that, I'll turn the call over to Mike to speak to our fundraising and asset growth in more detail. As we did at the end of last fiscal year, Mike will provide an update on our performance relative to our Investor Day goals from June of 2023. Thanks, Scott.