Trinity Capital Inc.

Good afternoon. My name is Ashley and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Trinity Capital's third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Our hosts for today's call are Steve Brown, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Kyle Brown, President and Chief Investment Officer, David Lund, Chief Financial Officer, and Sarah Stanton, General Counsel. Gary Harder, Chief Credit Officer, and Michael Testa, Chief Accounting Officer are also present. Today's call is being recorded and will be made available for replay at 8 p.m. Eastern Time. The replay dial number is 800-839-5685, and no call ID is required for access. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for your questions following the presentation. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If at any point your question has been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing the pound key. If you should require operator assistance, please press star zero. We ask that you please pick up your handset to allow optimal sound quality. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Sarah Stanton. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Ashley, and welcome, everyone, to Trinity Capital's earnings conference call for the third quarter of 2021. Trinity's third quarter 2021 financial results were released just after today's market closed and can be accessed from Trinity's investor relations website at ir.trincapinvestment.com. A replay of the call is available at Trinity's webpage or by using the telephone number provided in today's earnings release. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that certain statements that are not based on historical fact made during this call including any statements relating to financial guidance, may be deemed forward-looking statements under federal securities laws. Because these forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, there are important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. We encourage you to refer to our most recent SEC filings for information on some of these risk factors. Trinity Capital assumes no obligation or responsibility to update any forward-looking statements. Please note that the information reported on this call speaks only as of today, November 4th, 2021. Therefore, you are advised that time-sensitive information may no longer be accurate at the time of any replay listening or transcript reading. With that, allow me to introduce Trinity Capital's Chairman and CEO, Steve Brown.

Thank you, Sarah, and thank you to everyone joining us today. The third quarter of 2021 saw accelerated momentum for Trinity as we continued to execute our plan and delivered on all key financial and operating metrics. These results were highlighted by net investment income of 42 cents per share and growing our NAV by 37 cents from Q2 to $14.70. From an originations perspective, we set a new record with more than 151 million in gross fundings leading to net portfolio growth of $64 million on a cost basis and expanding our investment portfolio to $638.7 million on a cost basis. As Kyle will expand on later in this presentation, Trinity is benefiting from the overall vitality of the thriving VC operating environment. While acknowledging the macro tailwind in our industry, we do want to underscore our successful execution since entering the public markets. In short, we're doing what we said we would do, By building a best-in-class team, we're leveraging relationships and networks with top VCs around the country and beyond to capture market share and benefit from unprecedented VC industry growth. Trinity has emerged as a partner of choice, and we have no plans to slow down. I'd like to touch on just a few highlights from the third quarter. Our growing portfolio contributed to the strong operating performance in Q3, allowing us to declare a dividend of 33 cents per share, an increase over our prior quarter and in line with our goal of increasing our dividend as we grow our platform. We originated $258.2 million in new loan and equity commitments, and more importantly, funded $151.2 million in gross deployments across 25 portfolio companies. Q3 net investment income was $11.1 million, or 42 cents per share. This compares to net investment income of $10.1 million, or 38 cents per share, in Q2 of 2021. Our credit quality in the portfolio remains strong, with 99% of our debt investments performing. As of September 30th, total liquidity, including cash, cash equivalents, and availability under a credit facility was over $206 million. We've been working hard on enhancing our capital structure and leveraging the balance sheet to increase financial flexibility in support of our continued portfolio growth. In August, we issued $125 million in 4.375% bonds, lowering our overall borrowing cost as we raised our leverage levels to 0.8 from 0.6 times at the end of the second quarter. We will continue to manage our overall cost of funding to drive improved returns for our shareholders. Further, on October 27th, we completed a new five-year $300 million credit facility led by KeyBank. Looking to the end of the year and beyond, we are confident about Trinity and our unique venture lending and equipment financing platform's ability to continue to grow and scale. We remain well positioned to continue deploying the capital raised and building a portfolio of senior and subordinated secured loans and equipment financings to emerging growth companies. We have been able to continue growing the portfolio, even with unexpected payoffs, while enjoying the additional income from prepayment fees and accelerated final payment fees. As we mentioned on our last call, we have filed an application with the SEC for exemptive relief to form a registered investment advisor. If approved, we believe the RIA will provide financial flexibility to fund larger transactions that are synergistic to the public BDC. As a reminder, we expect this process to take between nine and 12 months to complete. So to recap, we're performing at record levels. We've strengthened our team to further that performance. and we've enhanced our financial profile to support accelerated portfolio growth. Before I turn it over to Kyle to share more about the encouraging macro backdrop, I want to thank our most valuable asset at Trinity, our team. It is their diligence, their relationships, their experience that have made our record performance possible. We believe that Trinity is unique among both venture lenders and the overall BDC landscape. We have the right team and the right strategy to continue to capitalize on a thriving operating environment, offering capital solutions to growth stage companies across a broad technology sector. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Kyle Brown, our President and Chief Investment Officer, for some further thoughts on our progress and more detail on the market. Kyle? Great. Thanks, Steve, and good afternoon, everyone.