StepStone Group Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the first quarter fiscal year 2027 Step Stone Group Earnings Conference call. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you would need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message of five and your hand is raised. and to withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would like now to turn the conference over to Seth Weiss, head of industrial relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. 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 Stepstone's periodic filings. These forward-looking statements are made only as of today and except 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 filing with the SEC. Turning to our financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2027. Beginning with slide three, we reported a GAAP net loss attributable to Stepstone Group Inc. of $116 million. or $1.41 per share. and StepStone will enter into the call period in the third quarter of calendar 2027. Moving to slide five, we generated fee-related earnings of $106 million, up 30% from the prior year quarter, and we generated an FRE margin of 39%. The quarter reflected retroactive fees primarily from our infrastructure secondaries fund. Retroactive fees contributed $1.1 million to revenue, which compares to retroactive fees of $2.9 million in the first quarter of the prior fiscal year. When excluding the impact of retroactive fees, core fee-related earnings were $105 million, up 33% relative to the prior year quarter, and our core FRE margin remains at 39%. We earned $60 million in adjusted net income for the quarter, or 48 cents per share. This is up from $49 million, or 40 cents per share, in the first quarter of the last fiscal year, driven primarily by higher fee-related earnings. I'll now hand the call over to Scott.

Thank you, Seth, and good evening. We kicked off our fiscal 2027 year with outstanding financial results, robust and balanced fundraising, and a healthy pipeline that gives us visibility for continued earnings growth. Beginning with results, We are comfortably generating run rate management and advisory fees of over $1 billion per year and generating run rate fee-related earnings of well over $400 million per year. These are numbers that we frankly could not have imagined just six short years ago as we were preparing for our IPO. As a reflect on our progress, I am proud of both the magnitude of our results and the path we took to get here. Thank you for joining us. as well as expansion and expansion opportunities across our advisory, managed account, and commingled fund investors. Second, we are investing in long-term growth initiatives, including data and technology and solutions for the U.S. defined contribution retirement market, where we see potential to replicate the success we are achieving in private wealth. And third, we may continue to pursue opportunistic M&A with our current focus on acquiring our non-controlling interests at a material discount to our public valuation. We now own 65% of our infrastructure, private debt, and real estate asset classes, and we plan to buy in the private wealth profits interest as soon as we are contractually able. The private wealth buying will materially increase adjusted net income by enabling StepStone to capture the full economics of one of our highest growth businesses at a significant discount for our prevailing multiple. We expect this will provide material earnings per share accretion that should only compound into the future. Shifting to fundraising, We generated another double-digit quarter with $10 billion of gross inflows split between managed accounts and commingled funds. Our private wealth platform generated another record quarter with $2.8 billion of subscriptions, while total private wealth assets surpassed $21 billion, more than doubling the net asset value over the last year. We continue to see a high persistency of investors within our funds, with total platform redemptions under 2% for the quarter. Spring, our Venture and Growth Equity Fund, continues to be a standout. Spring has tapped into the excitement of the innovation economy, investing in native artificial intelligence companies, AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, energy, aerospace and defense, and yet even space exploration. We believe the $1.7 billion of Spring subscriptions this quarter include an elevated level of inflows, While the pace of subscriptions may normalize, we expect spring will continue to generate a healthy rate of ongoing subscriptions and that our overall private wealth platform will generate a strong level of annual inflows consistent with the pace we highlighted at the beginning of this year. I'll now turn the call over to Mike to speak about fundraising, asset growth, and shareholder distributions.