Ridgepost Capital, Inc. Class A

Good morning and welcome to Ridge Post Capital's third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. My name is Lateef and I will be coordinating your call today. Currently, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. I will now pass the call to your host, Brian McKenna, Vice President, Investor Relations. Brian, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and thank you all for joining our call this morning. With us today, we have Luke Sarsfield, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Amanda Coussens, EVP, Chief Financial Officer. We also have other members of our executive team here that will be available for the Q&A session. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that this conference call, as well as the presentation slides, may include 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 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. Please note that nothing on this call constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase any interest in any fund sponsored by affiliates of Ridge Post Capital. During this call, we'll reference 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 measures is available in the presentation slides posted on our website and in our filings with the SEC. In addition, we will provide certain historical performance metrics for our funds, and further details can be found in the presentation slides. Of course, past performance does not guarantee future results. With that, I'll turn the call over to Luke.

Thank you, Brian. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. It was another very strong quarter for Ridge Post Capital, characterized by our stability and consistency against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving and highly dynamic macro environment. Adjusted net income per share totaled 25 cents, while fee-paying AUM entered the quarter at $35.2 billion, up 2.4% sequentially and 21% year-over-year, or 11% year-over-year, excluding the impact of Stellis. The growth in fee-paying AUM during the period was primarily driven by $1.3 billion of gross fundraising and deployment, including $475 million in venture capital, $450 million in private equity, and $385 million in private credit. Importantly, fundraising activity remains broad-based as we were in the market raising capital for more than 15 funds. Across the first nine months of 2026, Gross fundraising and deployment totaled nearly $4.5 billion in fee-paying AUM, representing a year-to-date record for rich post capital. Within that, $2 billion came from venture capital, $1.7 billion from private equity, and approximately $700 million from private credit. As we look forward to the fourth quarter in 2027, capital raising and deployment pipelines are strong, including ongoing fundraising for, one, Our G.P. Stakes Strategy, Bon Accord 2. Our Venture Capital Strategy, TrueBridge 3. Our NAV Lending Strategy, Park Capital 4. Our Middle Market Private Equity Strategies, RCP and Qualitas We are also preparing to launch our next vintage at Stellis early next year as we expand our lower middle market direct lending fundraising efforts while our project finance and tax credit strategy enhanced will continue to be in the market. Bottom line, we are well on our way to achieving our aggregate $10 billion gross fundraising and deployment target for 2026 and 2027, as well as our 2029 year end fee paying AUM target of $50 billion. Now, I would like to spend a moment discussing the drivers of the consistency and stability in our results. We believe we benefit from three key factors. One is the underlying structure of our business. Two is the complementary nature of our platform which is built to optimize our strategies both individually and collectively. And three are the positively differentiated investment performance across our middle and lower middle market strategies as well as our venture funds. Said another way, the contractual nature of our model, our complementary platform, and differentiated investment performance work synergistically to drive the consistency and strength of our results. In terms of the underlying structure of our business, the majority of our fee-paying AUM sits within traditional drawdown funds, where management fees are earned on committed capital basis, meaning we generally do not earn management fees on net asset values. Importantly, drawdown fund structures are not subject to investor-initiated redemptions and, in fact, the weighted average remaining duration of our fee-paying AUM We operate a capital-like business model. and the conversion of our adjusted net income to operating cash flow is high. Through the first nine months of this year, we have generated $86 million of adjusted net income and $75 million of GAAP operating cash flow with modest ongoing CapEx needs across the business. Moving on, the clearest example of how our complimentary platform optimizes our strategies is the meaningful increase in cross-selling activity. As a reminder, At the time of our September 2024 Investor Day, less than 5% of our LPs had invested across multiple strategies. Over the last two years, we have diligently worked to increase our cross-marketing capabilities and enhance our client data integration across our strategies. These synergies have positively contributed to our fundraising efforts, and we're pleased to report that aggregate firm-wide cross-sells since June 2024 total approximately $1.7 billion, or roughly 15% of firm-wide fundraising. This cross-sell activity has been driven primarily by the flagship funds across our strategies. For example, we've seen clients from our private equity business invest in our venture capital strategy across several investor channels, including wealth management and pension funds. We also have had insurance LPs who historically invested in our private credit strategies commit to funds within our private equity strategies as these investors expand their private equity allocations. Furthermore, given our broad network of investors across distribution channels, we're also excited about the capital raising opportunities at Stellis, our lower middle market direct lending platform, and across our private credit businesses more generally. Cross-selling is just one example of how our strategies benefit from the One Rich Post platform. But when combined with differentiated investment performance, we believe these platform benefits create a powerful foundation for organic growth. Given that we're seeing significant momentum across a number of fronts in our venture capital strategy, I also want to spend a few minutes on Truebridge, who has been a leader investing in this part of the market since 2007. Investment performance remains a standout. TrueBridge's primary funds that are more than five years old have generated an average net IRR of 19.8%, while Secondaries 1 and Direct Fund 3 at TrueBridge have generated net IRRs of 43% and 23%, respectively. On the back of this differentiated performance, fee-paying AUM at TrueBridge has organically increased 17% annually since the third quarter of 2020. and recent trends suggest that momentum has accelerated as related fee-paying AUM ended the third quarter at $8.7 billion, up 32% year-on-year. Equally important, it's clear that the velocity of capital being raised and deployed in the venture ecosystem continues to be robust, and TrueBridge remains at the very center of this. In September, TrueBridge announced the final closing of Secondaries II, raising more than $500 million of capital. Notably, this was more than double the size of Secondaries I, and Secondaries II was raised in roughly one year, highlighting the demand that exists from LPs for secondaries in the venture ecosystem, not to mention the growing opportunity set from a deployment perspective. We're also seeing strong demand for TrueBridge's flagship primary funds. The latest vintage continues to be in the market, raising $851 million of capital through the end of September with continued momentum into year-end. We expect to launch the next vintage in early 2027. One other observation from Truebridge's fund table on page 24 in our earnings deck. Looking at fund sizes from Fund 4, a 2015 vintage, through Fund 8, a 2023 vintage, flagship successor funds have increased in size by more than 20% on average. from Vintage to Vintage. Given that virtually all of our fee-related revenue is driven by management fees, the vast majority of which are earned on a committed basis, not on net asset value, increasing fund sizes are an important driver of rich post capital growth longer term. This growth in fund sizes, coupled with ongoing product innovation, creates a straightforward growth formula across our business. We're seeing this play out real time at TrueBridge, as I just highlighted. while the same dynamic is also occurring at many of our other strategies. With that, I'll turn it over to Amanda.