TriplePoint Venture Growth BDC Corp.

Good day, and welcome to the Triple Point Venture Growth First Quarter 2019 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 telephone keypad. 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 Christopher Gastelou, Interim Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Sean, and thank you everyone for joining us today. We are pleased to share with you our results for the first quarter of 2019. Here with me are Jim LeBay, 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 will 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 our most recent filings 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 tpvg.com. Now, I'll turn it over to Jim.

Thanks, Chris, and good afternoon, everybody. It's been less than two months since our last earnings call, which was a special day as it marked the fifth anniversary since our IPO, and a period of outstanding growth, achievements, and results for our shareholders. These included all-time performance records last year, setting records for investment income, net investment income, investment fundings, portfolio growth, earnings per share, and a record dividend payout to shareholders. Picking up where we left off last quarter, I'm pleased to report that the strong finish of 2018 has carried over and continues here into 2019, and we're off on one great start to this year. Not only did we have a strong first quarter of originations, fundings, and portfolio growth that translated once again into another strong quarter of earnings, but the quarter also positioned us well for the remainder of 2019. We had several notable achievements last quarter. Our portfolio reached the highest level since our IPO. We had a 71% increase in the dollar amount of new signed term sheets at venture growth stage companies during the first quarter of 2019, compared with the first quarter of 2018, an all-time high. We also had a 66% increase in new debt and equity financing commitments over the comparable period. We continue to diversify our portfolio and to generate attractive portfolio yields during the quarter. Our top five investments now represent 37% of our portfolio and our weighted average portfolio yield on our debt investments for the first quarter was 16.5%. So as you can see from our yield, we are not sacrificing price as we increase our volumes. We also continue to have positive events in our portfolio with a number of companies raising new rounds of capital or being acquired. Sajal will provide more specifics on those events. As we look ahead at our market, the demand for venture lending at venture growth stage companies continues to be brisk. This is evidenced by just looking at our pipeline. Our ability to generate and source deal flow continues at an unabated pace. This is reinforced with 2018 being another strong year for VC fundraising, with almost $54 billion in capital raised, and $132 billion invested in nearly 9,500 companies. Our select VCs are also getting larger, having raised almost $80 billion alone since 2010 and actively investing this capital. On top of that, it also seems M&A and IPO activity at venture-backed companies is on the rise and picking up. I'd like to take a short pause and answer some questions which periodically come up. So how do you deliver these attractive returns? What makes this such a special story? How are you differentiated as a venture lending firm? And what are the ingredients for your success? Simply put, we have a unique model. This includes an underlying emphasis and belief on something that I usually save for the end of my prepared remarks. but I'd like to cover those now. It's what we call the four Rs. The first three are reputation, references, and relationships. And as we say, if you're doing those first three right, then you get the fourth, which is returns. I can't overemphasize reputation and its importance in the venture capital community and venture ecosystem. It's at the very heart of our business. Relationship is another important one, particularly with our group of select leading venture capital investors. In some cases, these relationships go back almost 30 years. Another major differentiator is what I call selectivity. We are highly selective in terms of the stage of company to which we provide loans. We target only venture growth stage companies which are in the advanced stages of growth and oftentimes are planning a liquidity event such as an IPO or an acquisition often in the one to three year timeframe. We work only with companies backed by our select group of leading venture capital investors. We focus only on select industry sectors, technology, life sciences, and other high growth industries, and we don't lend to companies that are already public or in middle market buyouts. We believe this selectivity makes all the difference between TPVG and other lenders. Another way we are differentiated is all our business, as I am always saying, is 100% direct. We're an originations machine with many referrals from our select venture capital investors. We don't work with brokers or agents. There are no loan participations, no loan purchases, and no club or syndication partners on our loans. We are in control. We do not believe that anyone can replicate this TriplePoint platform. The track record, the team, the experience, the relationships in, in a word, the brand. The senior members of our management team, and I won't say which ones have relationships going back to the 30 years, have decades of experience and are among the first to develop the investment class known as venture lending. The venture growth segment that our company targets is only one portion of the overall business of our sponsor, TriplePoint Capital. TriplePoint was founded almost 15 years ago by our senior team and is a leading global financing provider to venture capital-backed companies across all stages of their development. Last year, in fact, TriplePoint signed up more than $1.6 billion of term sheets, and based on publicly available information, This made TriplePoint one of the largest non-bank venture lenders globally. While the market demand is strong and deal flow in 2019 continues to increase, it's also important to emphasize that we are not compromising our underwriting standards, our pricing, or investment strategy. We plan to capitalize on this demand while continuing to maintain our time-tested and careful investment approach. and selectively invest in companies with innovative technologies and services. In closing, our performance, in particular, our industry leading yield profile, our strong credit quality, the quality of the venture growth stage companies in our pipeline, the activity and progress among our portfolio companies and our forecast for this year of once again achieving earnings in excess of our dividend speaks for itself. I'll now turn the call over to Sajal.