Trinity Capital Inc.

Good afternoon. My name is Catherine, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Trinity Capital's first quarter 2022 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, Michael Testa, Chief Accounting Officer, and Sarah Stanton, General Counsel. Jerry Harder, Chief Operating Officer, and Ron Kundich, Chief Credit 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 800-938-0997 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, Catherine, and welcome everyone to Trinity Capital's earnings conference call for the first quarter of 2022. Trinity's first quarter 2022 financial results were released today after market close and can be accessed from Trinity's investor relations website at ir.trinitycap.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, May 9th, 2022. 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. As you saw in our earnings release this afternoon, we continue to build on the momentum we established in 2021 with another record quarter for fundings in this first quarter of 2022. While we drove exceptional portfolio growth and remain committed to executing against our long-term growth initiatives, we are fully aware of the changing economic environment and will continue investing with the same stewardship we have demonstrated since we first began investing in 2008. We've continued to improve our operations, scale our business, and further broaden our extensive network in both the VC and equipment financing industries, thereby allowing us to deliver returns for our shareholders with strong net investment income performance and significant realized gains. We continue to strengthen our balance sheet after quarter end with a $57.5 million common stock offering in April that was accretive to NAV and an expansion of our credit facility. Public market volatility, rising interest rates, inflation, and geopolitical uncertainty has so far set the backdrop for 2022, but we still see immense opportunity. Deal flow is moving steadily, and Trinity continues to generate strong originations. Our business remains strong, and our rigorous and consistent underwriting process ensures that our portfolio is built for any cycle. Trinity is well positioned to capitalize on opportunities in the emerging growth venture debt market, as an industry leader and partner of choice for management teams. While the team will go into greater detail on the first quarter results, I wanted to share just a few of the key performance highlights. Our growing portfolio contributed to strong operating performance in Q1, allowing us to declare a quarterly dividend of $0.40 per share, an increase of 11% above the prior quarter. This is the fifth quarter in a row that we have increased our dividends. In March, we also announced a special distribution of 15 cents per share, distributing spillover income from 2021. As we have previously stated, our board has indicated its intent to declare equal special dividends in each of the subsequent quarters of 2022 for a total of 60 cents per share in special dividends for 2022, subject to further board approval. We recognized 52.6 million of realized gains during the quarter, primarily from the sale of our equity positions in Lucid and Matterport. We delivered a strong quarter in both commitments and deployments, originating 305.6 million in new commitments and funding 222.5 million in gross deployments across 31 portfolio companies. Q1 net investment income was $15.6 million, or $0.57 per basic share, exceeding our declared regular quarterly dividend by $0.17 per share. Our credit quality in the portfolio remained strong, with 98% of our debt investments at cost performing. Subsequent to quarter end, we strengthened our liquidity position by selling $57.5 million of our common stock, and we upsized our key bank credit facility by $100 million, to a total capacity of 400 million. Collectively, these moves increased our capacity to fuel our growth. Additionally, we announced the promotions of two senior executives as well as a key hire in our new life sciences vertical, demonstrating our commitment to investing in our team and supporting the continued growth of our industry-leading lending platforms. Trinity's innovative, energetic, and collaborative culture continues to be a differentiator in attracting and retaining top talent in our industry. Kyle will provide more color on this in a moment. With regards to the RIA progress, we have stated previously in Q3 of 2021, we filed an application with the SEC for exemptive relief to form a registered investment advisor. If approved, we believe the RIA will provide flexibility for synergistic investment opportunities and create additive earnings for our internally managed BDC. The review process is still within our expected timeline, and we continue to work with the SEC on their review of our application. Despite the long predicted shift in the public markets and the IPO window essentially shut, The VC operating market remained healthy, with VCs adding $70 billion to the existing $230 billion of dry powder, according to PitchBook, which may help lessen the impact of the general market downturn. In spite of the current market conditions, Trinity continues to perform at record levels. Our business, our team, and our portfolio companies are growing at a stable yet healthy rate. I have confidence in our unique venture lending and equipment financing platform's ability to generate meaningful growth in any economic cycle. We've strengthened our team to further that performance and will maintain a deliberate and disciplined approach to offering capital solutions to the growth stage companies across industries. With that, I will 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?