TriplePoint Venture Growth BDC Corp.

Good afternoon and welcome to the TriplePoint Venture Growth fourth quarter 2018 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Andrew Olson, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and thank you everyone for joining us today. We are pleased to share with you our results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2018. Here with me are Jim Labe, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board, and Sajal Srivastava, President and Chief Investment Officer. Before I turn the call over to Jim, I would like to direct your attention to the customary safe harbor disclosure in our press release regarding forward-looking statements and remind you that during this call we may make certain statements that relate to future events or the company's future performance or financial condition which may be considered forward-looking statements under federal securities law. We ask that you refer to the most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission for important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements. We do not undertake any obligation to update our forward-looking statements or projections unless required by law. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements made during the call, which reflect management's opinions only as of today. To obtain copies of our latest SEC filings, please visit the company's website at tpbg.com. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Jim.

Thanks, Andrew, and good afternoon and welcome everybody. Today marks a really special day for us. Today is the fifth anniversary of our IPO and the day that we launched TPVG. On this anniversary, I'm not only pleased to share our outstanding performance of the past quarter, but also what was a record-setting 2018 and five years of outstanding growth, achievements, and results for our shareholders behind that. Before getting to the quarter and what was truly a stellar year, let's talk about the past five and some of the highlights that we achieved since our IPO through this past December. We made cumulative commitments of more than 1.6 billion. We made cumulative investment fundings of more than a billion dollars. We increased our investment portfolio three and a half times since the IPO. and we paid out $7.08 per share in distributions as of this past December, which provided a cash on cash aggregate return of 47.2% based on our original $15 per share IPO price. We're also proud to state that in the period since the IPO, we have covered our dividend and that includes paying two special dividends as well in the period. and we believe we are the only venture lending BDC to do so over that period. These are just some of the highlights during the first five years with this past year 2018 being a year where we finished with several all-time performance records for the business representing our very best year yet as we set the following company records. A record in an annual investment income. A record in our annual net investment income. a record in customer fundings, a record in portfolio growth and size, a record in dividends that we pay to our shareholders, and a record in earnings per share. Well, it's great to share these performance records. There's also a list of other achievements in 2018, including having a third portfolio company now to be acquired by Amazon and another portfolio company which debuted as one of the biggest tech IPOs of the year. We also increased our available borrowings under our credit facility. We obtained shareholder approval for increased leverage and received our exempted relief from the FCC to permit co-investment across the TriplePoint platform. It was a remarkable year. Let me wrap up these opening remarks by sharing some of the amazing fourth quarter results. As I know, Sajal and Andrew will be providing much greater detail because what I'd really like to talk and focus about is 2019. The fourth quarter, once again, to use the most repeated word here in my remarks, is one of records awesome. This included new records in quarterly debt and equity investment commitments, new quarterly records in net investment income, earnings, customer fundings and portfolio growth, and a record quarter in dividends that we paid out to our shareholders. We also ended the quarter with an all-time high in the Venture Growth Originations Pipeline, which could translate nicely into new business here in 2019. But the plans are not to rest on these laurels or all these long lists of records, but actually to look at the past five years, and this past record-setting year is only the beginning of what we plan to accomplish in the years ahead. As a reminder, Although TPVG is only five years old today, we're not newcomers at all to venture lending. The senior members of our management team, in fact, each have decades of experience and were among the first to develop the investment class now known as venture lending. The venture growth segment that TPVG targets is only one portion of the overall business of our sponsor, Triple Point Capital, LLC. TriplePoint Capital was founded almost 15 years ago by our senior team and we're a leading global financing provider to venture capital-backed companies across all stages of their development. In fact, for the year ended December 31st, I should also point out that the TriplePoint platform at the sponsor level signed up more than 1.6 billion of term sheets last year and based on the publicly available information, This made TriplePoint one of the largest non-bank venture lenders globally last year. Believe me, we really know the venture lending business and all of our business is also what we call 100% direct. All of our business is directly originated. We're an originations machine with many referrals from our select venture capital investors. We don't work with brokers or agents. There aren't any loan participations. We don't do loan purchases. We don't have club or syndication partners in our loans. We are in control. We don't make secondary purchases of stock in companies that we don't have relationships with either. We don't lend to distressed public companies and we don't lend to middle market companies. We believe these direct originations provides us with a true edge in the marketplace. While we're proud of TPVG's performance over the past five years, again, we think of it as only the beginning. We're excited to build upon this past success in the years to come, and as I mentioned, we're entering 2019 at TPVG with the largest originations pipeline in history. That's important because our portfolio is driven by originations pipeline, among other factors, which in turn helps drive earnings growth. While this market demand is strong and the deal flow continues to increase, I also want to emphasize that we're not compromising our underwriting standards or pricing our investment strategies. We plan to capitalize on this demand while continuing to maintain our time-tasted and careful investment approach. We will selectively invest in companies with innovative technologies and services backed by these select venture capital investors. So let me wrap up. We see great growth opportunities here in 2019, both in the venture capital equity and the venture lending markets. We plan to continue to capitalize on these opportunities in a significant way, given the strength and reputation of the TriplePoint global platform and the quality of the venture growth stage companies we're seeing in the pipeline. We'll continue to work with our select leading group of venture capital investors, and these are firms that have sponsored some of the biggest tech and life science successes during the past few decades and drive the high quality of our portfolio companies. While we're moving forward into 2019 with this abundance of investment opportunities and strong outlook, Rest assured, as I always say, we will continue to focus on what we call the four R's that have always been the foundation of our business. Reputation, relationships, references, and returns. I'll now turn the call over to Sajal.