Ridgepost Capital, Inc.

Hello and welcome to Ridge Post-Capitol's fourth quarter and full year 2025 conference call. My name is Kevin and I'll be coordinating your call today. Currently, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. I will now pass the call over to your host, Mark Hood, EVP and Chief Administrative Officer. Mark, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and thank you all for joining us. On today's call, we'll be joined by Luke Sarsfield, chairman and chief executive officer, and Amanda Cousins, EVP and chief financial officer. After our prepared remarks, RJ Jensen, EVP, head of strategy and M&A, and Sarita Jareth, EVP, global head of client solutions, will join us for our Q&A session. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that this conference call, as well as the presentation slides, may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements reflect management's current plans, estimates, and expectations and are inherently uncertain. Actual results for future periods may differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements due to a number of risks and uncertainties that are described in greater detail in our earnings release and in our periodic reports filed from time to time with the SEC. The forward-looking statements included are made only as of the date hereof. We undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements as a result of new information or future events except as otherwise required by law. During the call, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP measures that we believe can be useful in evaluating the company's performance. A reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure is available in our earnings release and our filings with the SEC. I will now turn the call over to Luke.

Thank you, Mark. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call, which also marks our inaugural call as Rich Post Capital. Our name and brand usher in an exciting new chapter for our company. The Ridge Post Capital name and branding represent the work we've done to expand our platform, more fully integrate our strategies, and reinforce our enduring commitment to delivering durable alpha for clients. Before I discuss our financial results, I'd like to provide some background on our new company identity, which aims to capture our growth trajectory as a cohesive, integrated enterprise. Over the past two years, our broad leadership team has embarked on a significant strategic transformation that continues to drive meaningful improvements across our platform. During this time, we doubled down on our strengths and further evolved into a world-class firm with more than 43 billion in assets under management. Over the past two years, our fee-paying assets under management have increased by 27%. Importantly, our robust growth is not attributable to a single asset class. Rather, it reflects a cohesive synergy across our private equity, private credit, and venture capital strategies resulting in robust and consistent year-over-year expansion. As we've executed on the strategic growth initiatives outlined at our 2024 Investor Day, we felt it appropriate and timely to adopt a new name that better informs who we are today and where we are headed in the future. For your awareness, A ridge post is a marker on higher ground, symbolizing stability, perspective, and protection. From this vantage point, Ridge Post Capital sees opportunities that others miss, reflecting our distinct positioning at the nexus of the middle and lower middle market, an underserved segment that presents abundant opportunities and secular tailwinds. For our employees, the new identity reflects the progress we've made integrating our strategies into one collaborative platform with a shared purpose and direction. For limited partners, it reinforces our commitment to always putting clients at the center of everything we do while delivering consistent access to differentiated strategies across a scaled global network. And for our general partners, Ridge Post Capital offers a world-class complementary partnership with a robust set of capabilities across the capital stack. Next, I would like to discuss the Stellis acquisition we announced last week. Stellis is a leading direct lending platform providing senior secured loans to sponsor backed lower middle market companies in the United States. They have approximately 3.8 billion in assets under management, including 2.6 billion in fee paying assets under management. You've heard us talk about our organic growth strategy and where we are focused. We've discussed wanting to do transactions that extend our capabilities, where there is a shared culture and vision, and that are value additive from a shareholder perspective. In terms of asset classes, you've heard us talk about our goal of adding broader direct lending capabilities and particular interest in places where we think we can help drive transaction sourcing given our middle and lower middle market sponsor ecosystem across our platform. We think this transaction hits all those areas and is a fantastic addition to our platform. The Stellis team has invested more than $10.3 billion of capital across more than 375 companies over its 20-plus year history. They have grown fee-paying AUM at a 17% CAGR since 2020 and have a proven track record of launching new vehicles. They started with a publicly traded BDC, the Stellis Capital Investment Corporation, and have subsequently launched multiple private funds as well as a private BDC. In materials available on our website, we show the very natural fit of Stelis' sponsor relationships with our other strategies. In particular, the profile of RCP's sponsor relationships maps very well with Stelis'. The median last fund size of sponsor relationships at both is about $600 million. We think this has the potential to help open greater sourcing opportunities for Stellis. We've also talked about the significant benefits of the middle and lower middle market, in particular, how supply-demand imbalances help drive attractive risk-adjusted returns. And we see that in Stellis's profile, where their disciplined underwriting process combines with structurally lower financial leverage in the lower middle market to drive low historical default and loss rates. From a financial profile perspective, we think the transaction is compelling for our shareholders with modest ANI per share and FRE margin accretion in the first year. Both measures do not consider revenue or cost synergies, including the potential sourcing opportunities I mentioned. We are truly thrilled to welcome Rob, Josh, Dean, Todd, and their team to the Ridge Post family. They've built a fantastic business. We think they are a tremendous fit and that their addition to our platform will help grow our franchise in a strategic, culturally aligned, and financially accretive way. Now, I want to turn to our 2025 financial performance and platform-wide accomplishments. In 2025, we continue to make meaningful progress across our strategic growth initiatives. Over the course of the year, we raised and deployed a record $5.1 billion in organic gross new fee-paying assets under management, finishing the year at $29.4 billion in fee-paying AUM. We exceeded our initial annual organic fundraising guidance by over $1 billion. For the full year 2025, fee-paying AUM increased by 15%, fee-related revenues, excluding direct and secondary catch-up fees, increased by 13%, and FRE margins came in a bit better than expected at 47%. This robust asset growth demonstrates strong demand for our primary, direct, and secondary funds, of which we had 24 total in the market over the course of the year and around 20 in the market as of December 31, 2025. There is another important 2025 achievement I want to highlight. One of the topics we discussed at our Investor Day in September 2024 was the ability to leverage our cross-marketing capabilities across our global client base. Since then, we've made meaningful progress expanding our data integration capabilities across the strategies, augmenting our cross-selling efforts. We saw existing clients invest incrementally across Ridge Post Capital into other strategies at an accelerating pace, and over 10% of our capital raised since Investor Day were successful cross-sales. As we continue to hire high-quality fundraising professionals and strengthen the global client solutions team, we are confident in our ability to broaden our reach across all strategies and deepen our client relationships to attract even more capital from existing LPs. Further, we believe the key to continuing this consistent growth is strong fund performance, coupled with ongoing product innovation across geographies and asset classes. Ridgepost expanded its product set in 2025 to better meet investor demand for increased exposure to private markets while preserving transparency, alignment, and downside protection. To that end, we created our first evergreen product, landed a significant SMA, and launched our first fund that is directed exclusively at European investors who want to invest in the North American middle and lower middle markets. Also noteworthy in 2025 was the completion of the acquisition of Qualitas Funds this past April. Qualitas Funds is a Madrid-based private equity fund-to-funds manager, and its addition to Ridgepost Capital established our presence outside the U.S., which we have since augmented with the opening of our new Dubai office. As we continue to expand globally, we will look to partner with exceptional firms like Qualitas Funds to give us structural advantages in key markets. In addition to our financial and operational successes, we have made meaningful enhancements to our governance profile and broadened the reach of our brand. In April, we appointed two new independent directors to our board. Steven Blewett, an accomplished private markets investment professional, joined the compensation committee, and Jennifer Glassman, a private markets seasoned professional in CPA, is now our audit committee chair. Further, in August, we announced our dual listing on the NYSE Texas as one of the exchange's founding members. Finally, we continued our commitment to returning capital to shareholders in 2025. Since the beginning of 2024, we repurchased nearly 11 million shares at a weighted average price of $9.69, representing over $105 million in aggregate. Looking ahead, the future for Rich Post Capital is very bright. During our Investor Day presentation in September 2024, we said that we intended to more than double fee-paying AUM to $50 billion by the end of 2029, with the vast majority coming from organic growth. We are committed to executing on value-creating M&A, and we guided organic FRE margins, excluding M&A, to the mid-40s in the near-to-intermediate term, to closer to 50 in the out years. It is clear to us, as we report 2025 results, that we are well on our way to meeting or exceeding our long-term guidance. With respect to fundraising, specifically over calendar years 2026 and 2027, we expect to organically raise and deploy at least $10 billion of gross fee-paying assets under management. This target is consistent with the fundraising profile we have established since my appointment as CEO with Capital Formation expected to be distributed roughly evenly across both years. Importantly, this target excludes the positive impact of Stellis and other potential acquisitions. In a moment, Amanda will provide additional detail around our financial guidance. In closing, we're off to a fast start in 2026. We've successfully executed on our rebrand, announced the strategic acquisition of Stellis, and opened our new office in Dubai strengthening our presence in the Middle East. Another noteworthy announcement is our new collaboration with CASE, a leading alternative investment platform for independent financial advisors. As a result, Bon Accord, our GP stake strategy, will join the CASE platform, which serves over 2,000 wealth management firms and 62,000 financial advisors. This collaboration comes amid surging demand for alternative investments among financial advisors. A recent Case Mercer survey revealed that 9 in 10 financial advisors are currently allocating to alternatives, and 88% of advisors plan to increase their allocations to alternatives over the next two years. Our case relationship represents an important step in expanding Bonacourt's footprint across the wealth management ecosystem. Together, these milestones reflect a firm that is scaling with intention and positioning itself for durable, long-term growth And we're doing this in what we believe is the best part of the market, the middle and lower middle market. We think of ourselves as the growth engine for America's small businesses, and we're proud of the positive impact we are having on our nation's economic growth. We believe this momentum, combined with our differentiated focus and expanding global footprint, positions Ridge Post Capital well for the year ahead. With that, I'll turn the call over to Amanda. provide a deeper look at our financial results and guidance for the year ahead.