Ridgepost Capital Aktie

Thank you. Good morning and welcome to Ridge Post Capital's second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. My name is Lateef and I will be coordinating your call today. [Operator Instructions] 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 Cousins, EVP, Chief Financial Officer. After our prepared remarks, Arjay Jensen, EVP, Head of M&A and Strategy, and Sarita Jairath, EVP, Global Head of Client Solutions, 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 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'll 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. Before I turn it over to Luke, I want to spend a minute sharing my perspective on why I'm so excited to be at Ridge Post Capital.

I spent 12-plus years in sell-side equity research covering financials, specifically the alternative asset managers and BDCs. So I've interacted with a number of different companies and management teams across the industry. So what stood out to me? First, the people, culture, and collaboration. Second, the durability of the model. Ridge Post Capital is one of the only pure-play, capital-light, management fee-based alternative asset managers in the public markets. And third, which I think is most important, the firm continues to deliver impressive investment performance. I'm thrilled to be here. I look forward to working with the team as we continue to tell and educate the market on the Ridge Post Capital story. And I'm excited to interact with all of our stakeholders in the coming months and quarters. With that, I'll turn the call over to Luke.

Thank you, Brian. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. I'd like to start by welcoming Brian to Ridge Post Capital. Brian recently joined Ridge Post Capital to lead our investor relations efforts. Brian comes from Citizens JMP, where he was a senior equity research analyst covering the alternative asset management and BDC sectors. His deep knowledge of our industry and strong relationships within the investment community make him an excellent addition to our team as we continue to prioritize transparency, accessibility, and proactive engagement with our shareholders. Many of you will have the opportunity to connect with Brian in the coming weeks and months, and we look forward to further strengthening our dialogue with the investment community. On an unrelated note, I did want to share some very sad news relating to the Ridge Post Capital family.

One of our long-serving board members, Robert Stewart Jr., unexpectedly passed away recently. On behalf of everyone at Ridge Post Capital, we extend our deepest condolences to Rob's family and loved ones during this very difficult time. Rob was a dedicated supporter of Ridge Post Capital and a valued member of our board whose guidance, insight, and friendship had a meaningful impact on our company and the people who worked alongside him. He will be greatly missed by all of us. Now turning to Q2 earnings, Ridge Post Capital delivered another strong quarter of results as our balanced and durable model continues to perform well amid a fluid operating environment. As a reminder, this was our first full quarter rebranded as Ridge Post Capital, formerly known as P10. We reached two new milestones in the second quarter as AUM surpassed $50 billion at period end, up more than $10 billion, or approximately 25% year-over-year, while fee-paying AUM totaled nearly $35 billion at quarter end, up 19% year-over-year.

Importantly, we continue to experience very strong investment performance across our strategies. In the past, we've aggregated investment performance across our key funds to highlight the underlying strength and differentiated returns we are delivering for all of our stakeholders. We thought it would be helpful to update those numbers and share them with you today. Looking at the net IRRs for funds that are greater than 5 years old, private equity primary funds have averaged 14.1%, while secondary and co-invest funds have averaged 23.1%. Our GP stakes funds at Bonaccord have averaged 18.9%. The flagship funds of the [ FIBA ] have averaged 18.9%. The flagship funds at our venture strategy, TrueBridge, have averaged 18.7%, and our private credit strategies have averaged 10.9%. Now, moving on to fundraising and deployment activity. Second quarter trends remained healthy. We were in the market with about 20 funds, and we raised a meaningful amount of investor commitments across each of our investment verticals.

We raised and deployed $1.1 billion of capital in the quarter, bringing the trailing four-quarter total to nearly $5 billion. And we are still in the market with multiple funds across most of our strategies, including our GP stakes strategy, Bonaccord, our NAV lending strategy, Hark Capital, our venture capital strategy, TrueBridge, our lower middle market private equity strategies, RCP and [ Qualitas ], as well as our project finance strategy, and small business lending strategy, Enhanced Capital. I do want to spend a minute on TrueBridge. We continue to see strong demand for our venture capital offerings as investors are increasingly focused on the growing dispersion in venture returns. This is why manager selection remains so important, and TrueBridge's track record of delivering differentiated performance for investors for nearly two decades continues to resonate in the market. To that point, TrueBridge has raised and deployed approximately $1.5 billion in the first half of this year.

Bottom line, we believe the trajectory of our fundraising and capital deployment speaks directly to the strong demand we continue to see from LPs, the diversification of offerings across our strategies, as well as our ability to deploy capital consistently and prudently. In the first half of 2026, we organically raised and deployed over $3 billion of capital, consistent with our expectations heading into the year, which we had contemplated in our $10 billion fundraising and deployment target for 2026 and 2027. As previously highlighted, underlying growth in firm-wide fee-paying AUM remains strong, as year-over-year growth totaled 19% in the second quarter, giving us comfort and line of sight into achieving our 2029 year-end fee-paying AUM target of $50 billion. To that point, at the time of the Investor Day in September 2024, when we disclosed this target, the implied fee-paying AUM CAGR was approximately 15%. I'm pleased to report that our fee-paying AUM CAGR through the second quarter of 2026 stands at 20%.

I also want to highlight the growing contribution from direct, co-investment, and secondary funds, or assets that are not in fund-of-funds vehicles. Over the past four quarters, these funds have raised and deployed over $2.7 billion of capital, representing over 55% of firm-wide capital raising and deployment activity. Moving on, and we've talked about this at length in prior quarters, but I think it's important to re-highlight the underlying structure of our business. We believe we have one of the most durable business models in the industry, specifically as we operate a capital-light, third-party asset management business, and our composition of earnings is entirely driven by FRE with no direct exposure to realizations. Notably, within FRE, approximately 98% of fee-related revenue was generated from management and advisory fees in the second quarter, so there was very little contribution from fee-related performance fees and other non-fee-related revenue streams, which tend to be more cyclical in nature.

We primarily earn these contractual management fees on committed or deployed AUM that sit within long-dated and capital-committed investment strategies, meaning our fee-related revenue and fee-related earnings have little exposure to movements in NAV, while just less than 2% of our fee-paying AUM is subject to quarterly redemptions. On June 22nd, we completed the Stellus acquisition, and we are incredibly excited to have the Stellus team officially a part of Ridge Post Capital. We've spent a reasonable amount of time on our previous two calls reviewing the strategic merits and financial profile of the business and the transaction. I want to spend a moment today on our ongoing integration efforts and what we are doing to bring that strategic vision to life. You'll remember that we've talked about the opportunity to increase Stellus' origination funnel given the strong fit within our GP sponsor ecosystem focused on the middle and lower middle market. So, what are we doing to facilitate that? Well, Stellus' senior originators recently spent time in person with senior professionals at RCP as these teams begin collaborating and identifying ways to do exactly that.

Regarding the longer-term origination opportunity with Stellus and RCP, if over time, Stellus can capture 10% to 20% of the demand from the equity capital deployed annually within RCP's network of private equity GPs, it could produce an additional $500 million to $1 billion of incremental annual commitments across Stellus. I would also highlight that the Stellus leadership team recently presented to the entire Ridge Post Capital platform, including all of our investment strategies, to educate teams on their business and strategy and where there might be incremental opportunities to work together. In terms of the business, before considering any impact from the RCP origination opportunity, Stellus' origination pipeline is robust and has picked up meaningfully over the last 30 days. In fact, across all of our private credit businesses, origination pipelines are strong.

A related point worth highlighting that also indicates we're beginning to see an increase in the velocity of capital returns in the middle and lower middle market. Contributions at RCP funds and therefore exit activity have shown a meaningful pickup year-to-date. Specifically, through July 24th, distributions from RCP funds have more than doubled year-over-year and are up more than 25% relative to the comparable period in 2024. This clearly has positive implications for distributions to fund investors, but it also has positive implications for future fundraising and deployment activity at both RCP as well as our private credit businesses, most notably Stellus, which is consistent with the pipeline activity we previously highlighted. Before turning it over to Amanda, I want to highlight that RCP is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. In our industry, track record and incumbency are critical. Over the past two and a half decades, RCP has built a highly differentiated franchise supported by longstanding relationships, 25 years of investment data and insights, and a proven ability to deliver attractive returns across market cycles. It's been a terrific 25 years for RCP and we're excited about the opportunities ahead as we look toward the next 25 years. With that, I'll turn it over to Amanda.

Thanks, Luke. As highlighted earlier in the call, we delivered strong results again in the second quarter. We generated $0.24 per share of adjusted net income in the period, compared to $0.23 per share in the second quarter of 2025. Fee-related earnings totaled $39 million, up 10% year-over-year, while the FRE margin came in at 48%. Fee-related revenue totaled $81 million in the quarter, up 11% year-over-year. Management and advisory fees represented nearly all of fee-related revenue in Q2, totaling $80 million. We believe this revenue mix results in a highly durable and stable earnings profile for Ridge Post Capital. In terms of the fee rate, the average core fee rate, excluding direct and secondary catch-up fees, totaled 100 basis points in the second quarter, up 3 basis points from the first quarter.

As a reminder, the core fee rate is typically seasonally lower in the first half of the year, seasonally higher in the back half of the year, particularly in the fourth quarter, primarily due to our tax credit business. In terms of the core fee rate for full year 2026, we continue to expect this will total 103 basis points. And we also expect direct and secondary catch-up fees will total between $6 million and $8 million in 2026, unchanged from our prior expectations. With respect to the outlook for the margin, we continue to expect the FRE margin for full year 2026 will be in the mid-40s. As a reminder on cash interest, we fully utilized our credit revolver to fund the Stellus acquisition at our borrowing rate of 260 plus SOFR. I would point out that in June, we expanded our revolving credit facility by $20 million to $195 million, enhancing our financial flexibility. And on cash taxes, we still expect to fully utilize our NOLs by the end of this year.

As we've discussed in the past, we expect our cash tax rate to be in the high single-digit to low double-digit range for 2026 and in the mid-teens for 2027. In terms of changes to our share count, we issued 11.8 million shares of partnership units and shares in connection with the Stellus acquisition. As a result of this, at the end of the second quarter, including partnership units exchangeable for shares, we had approximately 130 million fully diluted shares outstanding. Regarding capital management, our capital allocation priorities remain balanced, including supporting our ongoing quarterly dividend of $0.04 per share, offsetting the dilution from annual employee stock issuance, managing our leverage, and returning excess capital through share repurchases when valuations are attractive. Given the recent acquisition of Stellus, some of the near-term focus will be around deleveraging, which coupled with natural growth and cash earnings in the back half of the year, should bring our leverage ratio back in line with our longer-term target in the mid-2 times EBITDA by the end of this year versus approximately 2.8 times at the end of the second quarter pro forma for Stellus.

And I would point out that we have already paid down $20 million of debt thus far in the third quarter. As is always the case, we will balance other capital uses with share repurchases, as we view this as an efficient and accretive way to return excess capital to shareholders, particularly if the stock continues to trade at what we view to be dislocated valuations. One final topic I want to discuss before turning it back to Luke for closing remarks. In close collaboration with our Chief Information Officer, Mike Goodwin, we're spending a meaningful amount of our time on AI and technology. We're exploring how Ridge Post Capital and all of our teams can leverage AI and technology in order to create operational efficiencies, as well as to drive more informed decision-making, which we think will ultimately drive even better outcomes for all of our stakeholders. We see three key opportunities emerging as it relates to technology, AI, and Ridge Post Capital, while we balance internal and external costs, including token usage across the company: operations and automation, enhanced investment capabilities, and collaboration.

I won't go into all the specifics for each of these buckets on the call today, but I do want to share a couple of tangible examples of the early progress we're seeing. The first area is reviewing NDAs. We've reduced the time it takes to review an NDA from roughly 60 minutes to about 5 to 10. For some perspective, we review at least a few thousand NDAs a year, implying that we'll save roughly several thousand hours per year on just NDAs alone. That's quite meaningful in thinking about the time and resources needed to review these documents previously. Second, at our private equity fund of funds business, RCP, the firm is leveraging AI and technology to significantly streamline the production of tear sheets and GP Scout profiles. This process was previously done by human beings and would take about 1 to 2 days to complete. By leveraging technology and AI, this process now only takes roughly 1 hour, and importantly, this human capital has been redeployed across other areas of the business.

Third, collaboration across all of our strategies has never been higher, and we think our AI and technology initiatives have been a key driver of this. We recently started hosting firm-wide weekly AI drop-in open hours so our employees can ask questions, get help with AI prompts, and it's also a great way for all of our teams to collaborate and share ideas. These are only three examples of where we're experiencing real benefits and efficiencies across the business, but there's a long list of others currently underway. There's certainly been real-time cost savings associated with these early initiatives, and the incremental margin potential longer term is meaningful. So, we plan to invest some of this near-term savings back into other initiatives to make sure we're staying ahead of the curve longer term. Many of our strategies have decades' worth of data, which is valuable in and of itself, but we also have the view that the real value and longer-term benefits will come from prudently leveraging these datasets across the entire organization. Bottom line, we think we're only in the top of the second inning for AI and related adoption, and we look forward to sharing more with you on our progress in the coming quarters. With that, I'll turn it back to Luke for a few closing comments before we open it up for Q&A.

Thanks, Amanda. Before we open it up to questions, I want to share a few closing remarks. Our business is performing exceptionally well, and we have strong momentum heading into the back half of the year. We are pleased to have Stellus formally on board at Ridge Post Capital, and the integration process is well underway, with clear opportunities to collaborate to drive even better outcomes for our stakeholders. As we've talked about in the past, our top priority remains delivering differentiated returns for our LPs, as this is, by far, the most important driver of the flywheel longer term. Building on that, we remain laser-focused on controlling what we can control across the business, including delivering profitable and accretive long-term growth.

In terms of the stock, we believe the valuation today is incredibly dislocated relative to our view of fair value, specifically compared to the underlying fundamentals. Our business has historically compounded in the mid-teens annually, and we view Ridge Post Capital as a pure-play, capital-light, third-party alternative asset manager. Importantly, as previously mentioned, the vast majority of our revenue is driven by long-dated, contractually committed management fees, creating an incredibly stable and durable earning stream. So we see strong downside protection with the potential for significant upside over time. Thank you for your time today. I'll now pass the call over to the operator to begin the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Michael Cyprys of Morgan Stanley. Your line is open, Michael.

Hey, good morning. It's [ Joe Tamelo ] on for Mike Cyprys. I think you guys mentioned, you know, $500 million to $1 billion of incremental commitments across Stellus by capturing roughly 10% to 20% of the equity capital from the GPs you already serve in the marketplace. I'm just wondering if you could talk about the steps you'll need to take to kind of really drive that strategy. What sort of timeframe do you think is really realistic to kind of achieve that? And I guess what's the baseline of where that is today, as I imagine Stellus already serves some of those GPs?

Hey, Joe, it's Luke. Thanks for the question and good morning. I'd say a couple things. So first thing I think it is important to note is that we closed the transaction about 6 weeks ago now, and so while we think there's a big opportunity in front of us and we have spent a lot of time prior to closing the deal getting organized around that, we are very, very early days on this. The second thing I would note is we always highlighted that we thought one of the really compelling attributes of this transaction was the opportunity to really broaden that origination funnel at Stellus. And we thought we were in a unique and differentiated position to do that, given our network of relationships and, in particular, the strength of that GP ecosystem in the middle and lower middle market at RCP. You know, RCP, as I talked about, celebrating 25 years, they have an incredible track record, incredible lineage, and just a deep set of both historical, ongoing, and frankly, prospective relationships that we think we can open up.

The way we kind of came to that is we looked at, that number we used is we looked at some of the historical and recent historical deployment trends over time. And those sponsors within that RCP ecosystem deploy on average in a given year about $5 billion. So if you take 10% to 20% of that, that's how we're getting to the $500 million to $1 billion of incremental origination capacity at Stellus. The other thing I would note is we think there's a lot of benefit to expanding the top of the funnel. And one of those key benefits is the opportunity to have, as I would call it, more shots on goal. The more shots on goal you have, the more opportunities you have, the more selective you can be in capital deployment. And trust me, the Stellus team is already world-class at this and plenty selective, but the more opportunities you have, the better I think that investment profile is going to look over time.

And so we are really, really focused on this. As I mentioned, we've already had the teams together. They're having, you know, weekly, if not daily calls. We're going to create a lot of opportunities for dialogue, for integration. We've really tried to build the bonds human-to-human, person-to-person. We're spending a lot of time acting collectively and thinking about how we can do this. And look, realistically, though, to really get to those full numbers, it's probably going to take a period of years. But that doesn't mean we won't see incremental progress in that interval before that. I think we've already started. There's already been some dialogue around some obvious near-term transaction opportunities that we think we can collectively get after. And as kind of a takeaway, I would say we're super excited around what that can look like in the near, intermediate, and long term.

Great. I guess real quick as a follow-up, I completely hear you. The focus is on deleveraging and opportunistic share repurchases, but we kind of think about capital allocation a few years out here. I'm just kind of thinking in terms of the M&A environment. Where are some things that could be potentially interesting or maybe worded differently is where do you see potential opportunities that are added to the RPC platform in terms of different kind of products or strategies?

It's a great question. I'm going to let RJ, who's here, take that question. So RJ, over to you.

Yes, great. Thank you, Luke. Thank you for the question. Look, I think it's similar to what you've heard from us in the past. We continue to focus on geographic expansion where we have strategies. So thinking about Europe further, if you think about private credit in Europe, we think that could be kind of the analog of Stellus in the U.S. If you think about more regular-way kind of U.S.-oriented strategies in private credit, I'd say we're very focused on asset-backed platforms. And then we talk a lot about real assets as well, both infrastructure and real estate. So I think we're spending time in all areas. I would say, you know, while activity was a little bit slower in terms of new process launches the first half of the year, that feels like it's really increased. And I think you're going to see more activity, more announcements as we get into the second half of the year.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Benjamin Budish of Barclays. Please go ahead, Benjamin.

Hi, good morning. Maybe first another follow-up on Stellus. Curious, Luke, you kind of reiterated your $10 billion fundraising and deployment expectation for '26, '27. What does Stellus do to that number? What's kind of been the historical fundraising cadence, and how do we think about the ongoing contribution? And then just in the P&L, I think you had maybe a week or two of Stellus in the quarter, and so you reiterated your full year FRE margin guidance. Are there any like little modeling tidbits maybe for Amanda you can help with just for the back half? What does the comp ratio look like? How else would be calibrating expectations with that now, you know, fully into the business?

Great question. I'll start with the fundraising question and that dynamic, and then I'll turn it to Amanda to kind of give a few tidbits, as you said, on the margin guidance. And you're right, by the way, we closed it on June 22nd. So we had basically 1 week of Stellus in the quarter here, all things considered. So on the fundraising, look, we have real long-term optimism in terms of the Stellus platform, in terms of what we can do collectively, and what Stellus can continue to do individually. Though the one thing that I would generally remind folks is obviously we continue to raise a lot of our capital, not all of our capital, but a lot of our capital in committed closed-end vehicles. And so when those vehicles are in the market, obviously the opportunity to then have a step function increase in that capital. But those vehicles are not always in the market.

I would just recall that Stellus itself has recently just completed and they announced publicly a fundraising cycle where they announced the closure of their Stellus Capital Fund 4, plus a bunch of SMAs and related accounts, and the aggregate amount, as they said publicly, that they raised through that cycle was $1.5 billion in aggregate. And so they've now raised that capital, and I would say right now, the good news is they've got a lot of dry powder, and their focus is really on deployment and deployment against accretive, well-designed, well-structured, well-tenured investment opportunities. And so they're going to focus primarily on that. And so I think as that capital gets deployed, presumably we'll see some, what I would call, modest benefit from that. But I think, you know, as long as they are in the current cycle, it's going to be relatively modest in the overall scheme of what we're doing, and we'll report out more on that as we go.

And then, you know, if we can increase that origination funnel, as we've said we can, they'll have the opportunity and we'll have the opportunity collectively to be back in the market for another fundraising cycle, again, which they can then gainfully deploy. And that, obviously, when we get there, will create the opportunity to continue to grow Stellus' fee-paying AUM and AUM, but given that they just raised capital and closed on it in the last, you know, kind of call it 3 to 6 months, the focus here is really going to be primarily on deployment in the near and immediate term. Amanda, I'll turn it to you on the margin.

Thank you, Ben, for the question. I'll make a couple of comments on margin. There were a few factors that increased our margin from last quarter, including an increase in our fee rate. We have steady cash comp costs with lower professional fees in the quarter. Professional fees have been historically higher during the first quarter. We are still expecting a mid-40s margin for the year, given anticipated placement agent costs and fundraising-related hires in the back half of the year. And generally speaking, Stellus as far as profile is similar to ours.

Okay, thank you both. That was all for me.

Our next question comes from the line of Chris Kotowski of Oppenheimer. Your line is open.

Good morning. You mentioned that you currently had 20 funds in the market, and just kind of looking at the fund tables in the slide deck, it looked like it was pretty well spread out across a lot of '22, '24, '25 vintage funds. And I was wondering, are you planning flagship fund launches between now and year-end or is that mainly a 2027 event?

Well, it's a great question, Chris. So we're in the market, as we've said, at any point in time with probably between 15 and 20 funds. I think at the end of the quarter, during the quarter, we were in with about 20 funds, a couple of those closed. I think we're now high teens. There probably will be some more launches as we go. But I would say at any point in time, there are likely to be multiple flagship funds in the market. And so, you know, just kind of in terms of where we are right now, in terms of which funds are in the market, Bonaccord is in the market with their flagship Fund 3, BCP 3, that launched at the beginning of the year and the fundraising period will go into 2027. Similarly, Hark is in the market with their flagship Fund 5. That launched again at the beginning of the year, and that will also go into 2027.

At TrueBridge, as I mentioned, we're seeing a lot of uptake. They are and continue to be in the market with their flagship fund, as well as some other funds. But if you're focusing on flagship, they're in the market with their flagship fund, and they continue to be. I think as you are well aware, having long been a student of Ridge Post Capital, at RCP, they raise a flagship fund annually, and so they literally just closed at the end of the quarter their flagship Fund 20, and then they immediately launched their flagship Fund 21, RCP 21, and so they are back in the market with flagship Fund 21. At Enhanced, they've converted largely into an evergreen format, and so that will now be a perpetually offered fund, and so they're going to continue to be in the market with that, and I would think about that from an Enhanced perspective as their flagship offering.

So even as we speak, I think that was probably 4 or 5 things I just mentioned that we're in the market with. We do think we'll see more fund launches in the back half of the year and then even more as we get into '27. And so I would say the general expectation ought to be, you know, we're in that 15 to 20 range of things in the market. Maybe even it could tick above 20 at different times. But I would think of that as kind of a perpetual number at some level if things come off, other things will be raised and so on and so forth. Then obviously, with the Stellus acquisition, we're always going to be in the market in a sense with the various BDC vehicles in Stellus.

Yes, and just as a follow-up, you mentioned that the Stellus Fund 4 closed with $1.5 billion in capital commitments and in sidecars, I guess. In the fund table, we see $448 million. So will that just increase as the fund deploys?

Yes. So remember, most of our strategies historically have charged on committed capital, but credit strategies as a general matter charge on deployed capital, right? For us, historically, that was really only Hark that charged on deployed capital. Virtually everything else charged on committed capital. Stellus will now go into that category of things that charge on deployed capital. And as we see those deployment trends go up, the amount of capital deployed will go up, to your point, Chris.

Okay, great. That's it for me. Thank you.

Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference back to Luke Sarsfield for closing remarks.

Thank you all for your time today and your continued support. Ridge Post Capital remains extremely well positioned in the current environment given our committed fee-paying AUM base and our earning stream that's almost entirely driven by management fees. Please reach out to our team with any additional follow-up questions, and we look very much forward to updating you on our third quarter results in early November. Thank you for joining us today, and have a great day.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

So let's get started here. I think this is our final session for today. So you're in the way of cocktail.

On the way of cocktail and air conditioning.

Exactly. Well, thanks, everyone, for staying with us. I'm Mike Cyprys, Equity Analyst covering brokers, asset managers and exchanges from Morgan Stanley Research.

And I'm excited to welcome Luke Sarsfield, Chairman and CEO of Ridgepost Capital, also formerly known as P10, just for a little hope there for folks. Ridgepost Capital is a multi-asset class private market solution provider in the alternative asset management industry with over $30 billion of fee-paying assets under management.

So Luke, thanks so much for joining us here today.

It's great to be here. We always love your conference. So thank you.

Great. So Ridgepost describes itself as a private market solution provider, which is a little bit different from the standard large-scale GP providers that we see across the marketplace, the KKRs, the Blackstones. So maybe just unpack what it means in practice to be a solution provider and where you sit in the broader alternative ecosystem.

Well, look, great question. And as you mentioned, we have $30-plus billion of fee-paying AUM. We operate in many of the most attractive segments of the private markets, including a swath of alternatives in private equity, a swath of alternatives in private credit and venture capital as well. And when we think about the franchise, we're really, really focused on the middle and lower middle market. That is our raison d'etre. So unlike some of the peers you mentioned who focus on the upper part of the market, we really focus on the middle and lower middle market.

And I think what's important to understand about that part of the market is there's a lot less capital, but it's very opaque and it's often very hard to navigate if you're not really a deep expert in that. And we've been capturing data. We've done analytics. We have 20 years of data in that part of the market. We've literally been operating many of these businesses for multiple decades. And so that gives us a real unique and differentiated perspective to be able to drive insight on behalf of LP clients. And so when we talk about a solution provider, it's a client or a prospective client who says, look, I really think that there is alpha. I really think there is, as we sometimes call it, riches in the niches in that middle and lower middle market.

But it's really hard for me to access that. And I need a partner who is broad-based, who can act across asset classes, who can act across strategies on my behalf to help me get that access, but also help me find kind of where the real opportunity sets are, because it's complicated, it's diffuse, it's opaque. It's not something you read about in the Wall Street Journal every day. And so you really need an expert who can help guide and deliver a solution and a result for you.

And so our raison d'etre is to be that partner, whether you're a family office, whether you're a pension, whether you're a sovereign wealth fund to say, what's it -- what's your portfolio use case? How are you thinking about the middle market as part of that portfolio use case? And then we can be your partner to help craft a solution to address that use case. And so when we talk about ourselves as a solution provider, that's what we mean by the terminology.

And why would you say that matters more today than, say, a decade ago?

Yes. So I think what happened, right? I think there has really been -- as markets have gotten, I would say, more professionalized and more scaled. I think one of the things that happened was in the earlier days, 10 years ago of private markets, there was a real desire on behalf of many allocators to try to say, I want to find that unique niche solution provider, whether it's the leading manager in Southeast Asian private credit or the leading manager in the Seattle small-cap private equity market or whatever may be your area of expertise and try to build a portfolio and build expertise that way.

And then I think what happened was a lot of these large allocators looked at their roster of managers. And it was pages and pages long of folks who were acting for them in this particular thing or that particular thing and they said, we just don't have time to manage all these counterparty relationships. This can't stand at some level. And so what we need to find is people that bring that depth of investment excellence, that consistent persistent alpha generation, but also kind of have an institutional scale to them, right? And so once I assess the platform and decide it's scaled, I don't have to worry about reunderwriting it, right? I don't have to worry about the kind of existential stability of that platform.

And I think that's the raison d'etre for somebody like us, because when you look at it, we have world-class investment expertise, consistent persistent alpha generation in every one of the unique strategies that we execute on, on behalf of our clients. But we can package it and deliver it at an industrial scale and at a scale that's appropriate for a larger allocator of capital who might want to write a larger check as opposed to saying, well, look, we're raising a very small fund, and so we can only take a very small percentage in it. And so with that, I think, that shift in allocator psychology is something that I think has really sort of accrued to our benefit in many ways, and we exist to serve.

Now 5 years ago, I think many investors would have described Ridgepost as a collection of specialist boutiques, whereas today, you're increasingly presenting it as a unified solutions platform. So what's changed?

Well, I think that is -- I think what has changed is exactly that at some level. The foundational story of Ridgepost was that it was sort of an M&A rollup, right, or P10 at the time. To your point was that it was an M&A roll-up. And the beauty is they acquired generally best-in-class managers in whatever the asset class or whatever the area of investing focus was. And so obviously, I like to make a kind of glib one liner. I say that if you want to be a great asset manager, it really helps to be great at managing the assets. And it turns out that in all the different sort of areas that we serve, we have consistent persistent track records of alpha generation.

In many cases, our earlier strategies founded in 1980. We have strategies that were founded in the early 2000s. So they've been doing this across cycles, across market environments, across all sorts of economic conditions, and they've been able to deliver that on a consistent persistent basis. But I would say just putting that together, it's a necessary but not sufficient condition. What do I mean by that? Well, Part of the power we're trying to harness is the power of the platform, the power of the combined, what we can bring to clients, what we can bring to each of our strategies, how we can engage more broadly and more comprehensively around what we do. How do we bring all the incredible data together that we have across all the various sundry strategies and really leverage that to make us even better investors to bring even better insight on behalf of clients.

And so we embarked when I got here on sort of a very dedicated strategy of basically saying the thing that has always made our investing teams great is they're investing autonomy. And we want them to preserve that for all time. We never want to impair or impinge on that investing autonomy. But on most other things, right, whether it's distribution, whether it's human capital management, whether it's data and technology and cybersecurity, whether it's legal and compliance, whether it's vendor management, there's a lot of benefit to acting collectively, to leveraging economies of scale, to sharing best practices. And so how do we integrate all of that without upsetting that kind of app la carte, which is the core of it, which is this great investing autonomy that yields the great results.

And so we've built out all these functions. The rebrand to your point, from P10 to Ridgepost was an important component of that as we just thought about how we talk about ourselves. And so take our largest strategy is our RCP advisers. And for many, many years, RCP advisers went to market as surprisingly, RCP advisers, right? Now if you were at their latest AGM, which was a few weeks ago, you would see the branding is RCP Advisors, a RidgePost Capital strategy. And so in everything we do, we're now talking about the power of the collective. We're talking about that in terms of how we brand ourselves, how we hold ourselves out to clients, but most importantly, how we operate many of these core shared service functions every day. And I would say probably most important for us are the data and technology function and the distribution function.

On that latter point around adding by Ridgepost Capital sort of a by line, would you envision adding that across the other...

I was using that as a for instance, it will be everywhere, right? So it will be across all of our strategies in the reasonable near term.

Okay. Pivoting here to the macro. Headlines this year are focused on software disruption, private credit concerns. I saw some of the wealth channel volatility, geopolitical, it goes on and on. How exposed is Ridgepost to these themes? And where do you think the market is getting the start wrong?

Well, look, here's the really good news. Let's take some of those in turn. The answer is little to none in terms of our exposure to most of those themes, right? And so take them in turn and some of the volatility, right? People talk about, to your point, private credit was a thing and continues to be an area of concern and disruption, right? And so first of all, I start with our private credit portfolio, right? And it's only about 25% of our overall assets, even pro forma for the Stellus transaction that we're hoping to close here soon.

But I think importantly is how we go to market. And the vast majority of those strategies, we're going to market in traditional delayed draw closed-end vehicles. right? So this whole concern about what is going on with redemptions and where goes the retail investor relative to others, it just doesn't have a lot of impact on us. And then I'll just give you another anecdote. In the one place that we do or that we will shortly, which is in Stellus, they have relatively small evergreen vehicle. We've all seen these rumored redemption rates of low double digits that many others are talking about. In the last 2 quarters, their redemption requests were 2.9% and 3.0%, right? And so we just have not seen that manifest itself in our portfolio in the same way.

You mentioned software. Obviously, that's a concern for a lot when we look at our portfolio. And remember, we do have a venture portfolio, and that venture portfolio is leaning very, very heavily into AI and next-gen technologies. But when you take that aside and you look at the rest of our portfolio, our software exposure is less than 10%. Stellus is private credit software exposure is less than 8%. But then the other thing I would say is, remember the middle market. When we're talking about our software exposure, this is not the large enterprise software and solution sort of SaaS thing that everybody else is worried about. These are very niche applications for regular way sort of middle market operating businesses.

You talked about -- you mentioned kind of the geopolitics and the upset with geopolitics. Obviously, it's a concern. It's something we're monitoring closely. But when we look at our portfolio, given our middle market focus, we just don't have broad-based exposure to things that generally will be disruptive. Energy inputs are not a massive driver of any of our portfolio performance. And then even your point on retail, right, I know in certain pockets, there have been concerns around retail. About 1/3 -- a little more than 1/3 of our LP base is what you would call ultra-high net worth. But it generally has an institutional bent, because it tends to be either very ultra-high net worth investing in traditional closed-end vehicles, so more of an institutional bent or high net worth coming in through some sort of aggregator vehicle that really has kind of more of an institutional flavor to it.

And so in every way, we feel great about our portfolio. If you look at our results, by the way, in the first quarter, I think they bear that out. And you hope over time, again, I can't perfectly predict where markets will go, but you hope over time that investors understand that.

And in your conversations with institutional clients, how would you describe the mood today? And are allocations simply just more constrained? Are they simply becoming more selective the LPs in terms of who they back? And how much of the current environment is an allocation issue versus more of a liquidity issue?

Yes. We're not seeing what you would call an allocation issue in the traditional sense. One of the benefits we have, I think, and any other large diversified manager will have is we have multiple products that are kind of in the market at any given time, right? At any point in time, we have 15 to 20 or more products in the market, right? And so you hope that with a diversified product base, you will find products that are resonating with clients, and we find that to be the case.

I mentioned our venture solution business before, it's called TrueBridge. Within TrueBridge, they're out raising a number of different funds. They have a secondaries offering. They have a direct offering. They have their main flagship fund. And you can imagine, in light of what's going on in the world, there is a lot of receptivity to venture right now, right? And so that has seen massive uptake, and it was one of the big drivers in our strong first quarter kind of distribution results. Similarly, we're out in the market with some credit products. NAV lending is one that seems to have a lot of resonance.

We have a number of secondaries products. Secondaries have a lot of resonance right now in that sort of vein of liquidity that you mentioned. And GP stakes. We're out with our GP stakes product, Vintage III, and that has a lot of resonance. And so I think, certainly, if you're in a, what I would call a core private equity business, right, which we are not in generally. But if you were in a core private equity business, I would imagine that was your flagship product and you went out to try to raise a fund right now and you had sort of the average track record of DPI success that seems to sort of be prevalent right now, it might be a little harder to raise that fund, I would imagine. But that's not our experience because that's not our product portfolio.

On fundraising more broadly, I think you've said it's not going to be linear, but the recent pace has been quite robust.

Knock on what?

And I think you've provided some near-term guide of $10 billion growth in fee-paying AUM.

Over the next 2 years.

Over the next 2 years, '26 and '27, aspirations for $50 billion of fee-paying by the end of

'29. That was from your Investor Day number a year ago.

Can we stand by that? I will reiterate again here today.

Already said. Making news. So to what extent might there be upside to those targets given the strong growth we've seen in the first quarter? And where would you say are some of the biggest drivers of capital formation that you're seeing across the platform?

Yes. So look, I would say we hope -- we work hard every day to execute, right? And that's to execute on behalf of clients, but that's also to execute on behalf of our shareholders, right? And so we want to do right by our clients, and we feel like if we do that, good things will happen for our stakeholders and in particular, for our shareholders. And I think we've seen that in the last period of time. I would say, right, we have when we go to market, we have expectations for how large funds will be. Some of our recent experience, if you look last year, we actually got passed the stated cover number and we have the hard caps. If we're so fortunate to be able to continue to do that, I think that could well yield upside for us.

Secondly is we're always trying to think about new product opportunities. A great example of that. We bought Qualitas, which is a private equity business in Europe, which is kind of the analog to RCP advisors, which I mentioned. And it turned out there was demand for a Qualitas distributed and wrapped product in Europe, but with RCP mixology inside it. And so we launched that product and the early client feedback is very good. And my guess is there are multiple other kind of client intersections and things we can do that will be client enhancing, but will also help us potentially achieve upside.

And then I think the big one and something we've talked a lot about is how can we do more with existing clients and how can we broaden our client base. And so we talked about at Investor Day, you'll remember this, that less than 5% of our clients, of our 5,000 clients were clients across multiple strategies. The good news is we've already made a lot of progress on that. One of the thing we talked about in the last earnings call is more than 10%, close to 15% of the capital we've raised since Investor Day has been from a client of one strategy investing into another strategy. But I still think there's a big growth opportunity for us. And if we execute on it right, I think it creates upside.

And then the last one is doing more with some new clients. And we talked last year, we had achieved one really big SMA with a large sovereign wealth fund. This year, we talked about within our TrueBridge Venture strategy in the first quarter, they had some success with some SMAs. And so I think to the extent we can bring that SMA expertise to more clients who are looking for the investment acumen that we bring to the table, that's another real driver of upside.

I want to dig in on the cross-sell, and that's quite encouraging that statistic you just shared there that near 15% since Investor Day on the capital raise. I guess what have you learned about client behavior as you're cross-selling additional strategies? And what are some of the hurdles that you may need to overcome as you try and take that cross-sell even higher?

I wish I could tell you the impediment to it was client driven. It was actually not. The impediment to it was how we had captured data, how we had organized ourselves and some of this branding conversation we had, how we approach the client. And so first thing was when I got there and I hired somebody to come in as our Head of Global Client Solutions, we discovered that across the different strategies, it was -- we could figure out who the common clients were, but it was a very intensive exercise, because we had 7 different at the time, CRM systems that each coded the clients differently.

So you literally had to take it all download it into Excel and literally do like a lookup to figure out who the clients are. We went back. We retrofit, used AI, used a lot of technology, great new CTO team. We retrofit all the technology, so that now we have a single Ridgepost-wide data lake, codes all the clients, looks across strategies. We know who our clients are now, step 1.

Step 2 was then how do we think about getting things in front of them that are most relevant, right? So it doesn't feel like we're just product pushers, but we're really being thoughtful and creative about what they're trying to accomplish. So again, we can use data. We're really good with data. So what we did was we looked at all of our clients with one strategy, which of the competitors of another one of our strategies had they become a client of? And then we understood, okay, you're a client of ours in Strategy X, but instead of investing in our strategy Y, you're investing in somebody else's analog to strategy Y. So maybe we ought to talk to you about our strategy why, right?

And so then we had that list. It was a targeted list. So it wasn't like, hey, we're throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks. We're really doing it in a customized way that reflects our understanding of your business and of your investing needs. And that was really important.

The third thing was we needed to create kind of this culture of coordination and collaboration. And so we revamped sort of how we talked about it. We talk about a one Ridgepost Capital approach. We've augmented incentive systems to reward collaboration, to reward sort of acting in concert and acting for the great of the whole. But then -- and this was this branding discussion we were talking about before. When we actually started approaching clients, it was interesting. You're concerned that the piece of feedback you're going to get is, oh, yes, we thought about that, but we decided to go with your competitor instead for the following reasons.

The feedback we actually got is we didn't even know that, that strategy was part of the same enterprise as that's really interesting. That's a new fact. And so tell us more. And so on the one hand, frustrating. On the other hand, heartening in many ways, right? And so part of the thrust of the rebrand is to do exactly that, right, as we start talking about the fact that we're all strategies of Ridgepost Capital that will build client knowledge, client awareness, client affiliation and will able to -- it will enable us to accelerate this deepening and broadening of the client relationships.

And so that's what we're up to. I feel very optimistic about our ability to do this. We've also, by the way, continued to, in a targeted but appropriate way, invest in our sort of core distribution client-facing function, and we've got some great folks out there who -- this is what they do all day. I feel very good about our ability to execute on this.

Now ultimately, these clients are coming in for performance, and that's what's going to drive.

We always do exact.

And I like your comment earlier around the riches in the ...

Riches in the niches.

I love that. So question is, what is the excess return that these investors are looking for? What's needed from the private markets to drive investors to come in, particularly given the DPI limited liquidity experience over recent years? And to what extent has that impacted that excess return expectation?

Yes. Look, and to your point, right, the reason you take illiquidity is that you think you're going to generate a superior risk-adjusted return. Otherwise, why would you do that? And to your point, probably unsaid point, it's gotten harder in a world where public markets, at least sort of the headline, maybe not under the surface, but at the headline, probably driven a lot by tech and Mag 7 and some other things have really ripped higher, right? And so that's been something.

So look, I think it's really important to have conversations and understand what clients' returns expectations are, right? Some of them think about it much more in a relative fashion. Some of them think about it much more in an absolute fashion, right? Like I have to pay my pensioners X and to achieve X, this is the return I need, right? And so I'm threshold driven at some level. The one interesting thing we look at when you think about excess returns is why people should be in the middle market relative to the upper part of the market. And if you look across time, and obviously, there's a distribution. And so great -- there are going to be great managers who outperform and there are going to be many who underperform.

But at the midpoint, when you look at the middle market relative to the upper market over the last number of decades, at the median, the middle market has outperformed by about 200 basis points on average, the upper part of the market in terms of returns, right, meaningful outperformance. And so I think that is one of the reasons why -- and by the way, we aspire to do better than just the average return. But if you just were to be wildly average, you would do better, all things equal, being in the middle market relative to the upper part of the market and then if you can add real manager selection alpha on top of that, obviously, you continue to do better still.

And the other interesting phenomenon is if you look at the distribution returns in the middle market, there's a much higher probability of sort of finding those first quartile returns in the middle market. It tends to skew a little bit if you can find those best-in-breed managers. And so when you think about that, I actually think that's why allocators are increasingly coming to us and saying, okay, like I sort of started -- I started with whatever it was 80-20 or 75-25 public versus private. But now I'm really thinking about what are the components of that 20 or 25. And how do I think about that, not just at the macro level, but at a more targeted level.

And so yes, I should have some private equity. I should have some private credit. I should have some real assets. But I think increasingly, you're seeing people think on other metrics like geography and like things size. And so I think that's a real benefit, because unlike in the upper part of the market where we can point to a number of great institutions who can probably execute on your behalf if you're an LP. I think that number is much smaller if you want sort of a diversified, scaled professionalized manager in the middle market, and we can be that solution provider.

And as you look out from here, how do you think about the durability of that excess return, whether it's the middle market relative to the larger that 200 or relative to public markets? And how do you think the components of that excess return may evolve over the next decade versus the prior couple of decades?

Yes. I mean, look, at the core, the reason it has existed has been like everything else, it's sort of simple economics, supply and demand, right? And so what you've had in the upper part of the market, and we've looked at this, when you look at companies in the upper part of the market, that's about 15% of the companies by count, you define it as companies with greater than $250 million of revenue. But somewhere between 80% and 85% of the private capital deployed goes against that 15% of the opportunities.

So what's the corollary? In the middle and lower middle market, companies between, say, $30 million and $250 million of revenues. By the way, that's about 80% of the companies that exist, and it's about 15% or 20% of the capital that goes against those. Why is that? One, I think it's harder in many ways, right? The upper part of the market, it's very visible. It's very transparent. There's a lot of great data sources you can analyze. The financing packages are public. Everything is well known, right? And so if you want to educate yourself in that part of the market, you can do so in a pretty comprehensive way.

In our part of the market, you're generally buying something that's private. You're generally buying it from the founder. You're generally buying it at some very reasonable multiple. By the way, entry multiples in our part of the market tend to be high single digits versus low mid-double digits at the upper part of the market. Leverage packages are much more moderate in our part of the market. 3, 4, 5x versus 6, 7, 8x in the upper part of the market. Their deals generally much less intermediated, right? You generally don't have the Morgan Stanleys of the world retained to sell in the middle market. They're focused on the upper part of the market, and they do a really good job extracting that value. Here, it's either direct or maybe it's a business broker.

And so less competition, lower value, you're buying from the founder, so the opportunity to professionalize is there, and you're using less leverage. So you're not winding the capital structure is tight. So when you put that all together, that advantage exists. So then the question is what might erode that advantage? Well, obviously, more capital and new entrants would be the thing that would erode that advantage. But the benefit we have and we will continue to have, as I talked about, is we've been collecting data in this part of the market for the last 20 years.

So we can tell you -- if you want to look at health care services buyouts in the Southeast in 2008, we can tell you who did them. We can tell you what multiples were paid. We can tell you who was the lead partner on the deal, what was the leverage level, what was the growth, what was the margin. That's just invaluable to be able to drive that, right? And so in 10 or 20 years, could somebody else create that? Conceivably, they're willing to make the investment. But we have -- and by the way, we're still augmenting our data set and accelerating our data set. And so we have not just like a head start, we have a multi-decade head start in this part of the market. And I think that's why we view it as so defensible.

That's a great segue to my next question on data and also AI. I guess you mentioned data. It's helping drive sourcing, underwriting, client development. You've mentioned that in the past. What would you say is your most valuable data set today? And how might you quantify the sort of tangible impact that it's having on improving outcomes?

I would bifurcate our data because I'll answer your question, but I would bifurcate it. I think there is what I would call client and LP data and then there is investing data, right? And I think you have to think of them as 2 different things. And I'm not going to say one is more valuable than the other. If you're trying to sort of partner with a client, that LP data is pretty valuable and the investing data, maybe a little less so in the first instance. But if you're trying to generate consistent persistent alpha, that investing data is pretty darn important because that's the secret sauce.

And as I said, we have hundreds of thousands of data points going back 20 years. We have it in the U.S. also now through the acquisition of Qualitas, we have about 10 years' worth in Europe. They had a very similar data-centric philosophy to RCP in the U.S. and to our other strategies in the U.S. And so what does it do? Number one, it makes us better investors because we can do pattern recognition, right? I mean when people talk about AI and all these models and doing it, we use all those to power and inform us. But ultimately, the human judgment, right? We've had professionals who have been doing this 20, 30, 40 years. Those professionals informed by that data are the category killer combination, right? And so that's the first thing we think a lot about.

The second thing we think a lot about is it actually makes us -- what's interesting is we often have GPs we work with invest alongside come to us and say, "Hey, we're looking at this deal". Here are the parameters of the deal. Can you actually put the deal through your algorithm with all your data and tell us how will the deal do in this kind of macro environment. And we've -- that makes us a really attractive partner, but it also helps us drive better investment performance in our underlying managers, and that's really compelling.

Where I would say it really helps you, it's not necessarily going to help you decide this is a fifth percentile deal versus a seventh percentile deal. It's really going to help you avoid the 65th, the 75th, the 85th percentile deals, right? We can really derisk that tail, and we know what's going to work. And so I think that, that data and that ability to use the data in that way is really central to what we do. Because to your point, you've got to be a great investor. You've got to generate alpha. And the only way you do that consistently and persistently over a period of decades, you have to have that insight edge, and we have that insight edge to the data.

Let's turn to Stellus. The acquisition is expected to close this year.

Midyear.

Midyear.

Hopefully soon.

What made that business fit strategically for Ridgepost? And does it change the calculus, the types of firms you might consider to acquire going forward?

So I'll answer the second question first. No, it does not change the calculus. When we did our Investor Day, we laid out a road map of the kind of things we would look at from an M&A perspective, and we identified 3 areas. And by the way, our first 2 deals that we've done and have both been very much in line with what we laid out. Number one, we said we would look for international analogs of our U.S. strategies. So that was Qualitas was right on strategy, because that's an international analog of our U.S. private equity strategy.

The second thing we said is we think there's a real opportunity in middle market private credit, and we would look for different parts of that spectrum. We talked about direct lending. We talked about asset-based lending. We talked about distressed and opportunistic. So Stellus, middle market, private credit, direct lending, exactly on the road map that we laid out. And the third thing we talked about that we haven't done anything in yet is real assets, middle market focused, again, real estate infrastructure.

But so far, our M&A deals have been exactly on the road map that we talked about. So -- but then your obvious question will be why? Why did you design the road map that way? And so one of the things we thought a lot about in middle market private credit is the opportunity to leverage the existing strategies and the existing set of relationships we have on our platform to be able to make whoever the private credit provider was better, increase their sourcing flow, top of the funnel, expanded expansion and also obviously allow us to go deeper with clients. And so when you look at sort of how we approached the private equity business, right, we started as a fund of funds. And so we got to know all the great middle market private equity firms.

And then the first thing that happened was because we got to know them and we were one of the key investors, they would show us deal flow. And they would always show us or try to show us 3 kinds of deal flow. The first kind was co-investments, right, the most obvious. They would do a deal, they would say, would you like to look at it? We started, we used to put that in the core fund, and then we said we're seeing some of this flow. We actually need to raise -- we need to raise a co-investment strategy. We've done that very successfully. Last year, we raised our fifth co-investment fund. It was $1 billion.

The second thing we saw, secondaries flow, right, because people want to be in the business with people they know and trust. And so they wanted to show us their secondary flow. Again, it got to the point where we were seeing so much secondary flow that we started raising the family. We call it SOF to invest in that. Last year, we raised SOF V, again, $1 billion in a quarter, very successful.

The third thing that all of the GPs in our ecosystem would always try to bring to us was whenever a portfolio company was acquired, they would say, "Hey, we just did this deal, would you like to look at the credit? We would say, because we were coming at it through an equity lens historically, thanks, but no thanks, right? But there's a lot of great folks in the world. But we always knew that our ability to turn that dial to really source a ton of stuff would be really profound if we could find the right team and the right platform to do it behind. So we spent a lot of time thinking about who was the best at this, who is just an absolute world-class team. And we kicked a lot of hires.

And ultimately, we spent more than a year getting to know the team at Stellus. And we just got a tremendous amount of conviction based on their track record, like all of our track records is extraordinary in terms of what they've done. So they're great investors. They've been at it a long time. These guys were investing together at D.E. Shaw and then they've been doing this together for 29 and 20 years. And then we saw the cultural simpatico, right? They had the shared vision. They thought about the world we did. They had this singular focus on the middle market, as we did. So culturally and strategically, we were fully aligned.

And then we thought about this opportunity to really unlock this massive sourcing opportunity given the centrality we have in this middle market GP stakes ecosystem. And when we put that all together, we just thought the deal was incredibly strategic, and we're really, really excited about what we're going to do together.

So we're just about up on time. So final question here in the last 30, 60 seconds. We look out over the next 5 years, which parts of Ridgepost have the greatest chance to scale disproportionately from here? And what will surprise investors most about Ridgepost in 5 years?

Look, I think a lot of our businesses have opportunity to scale in a big way. I talked about sort of what's going on in the venture ecosystem. I talked about what's going on in terms of secondaries. And I think we can do much. I think that is a nascent market that is very fast growing. I know, I'm not the first to observe that. But we have, again, this privileged real estate in middle market secondaries. And I think as that market grows, we're going to be a massive beneficiary of it. I think about so many of the businesses that I would say in one way or another are providing GP solutions, right? So maybe you need an investor, we can do that, come invest in your fund. Maybe you need an equity capital provider. We can do that through our GP stakes business. Maybe you need some credit, we can do that through NAV lending or through other lines.

I could imagine a whole kind of GP financing solutions business. And that's just with our existing businesses, right? And then you think about that M&A road map that I laid out and all that still exists. We talked about analogs of our U.S. strategies internationally. We did one deal in one part in one place, right? There's a lot of -- the world is a pretty big place. There's a lot of opportunities, a lot of white space in Europe, a lot of white space in Asia. We participate in none of it. So I think that global expansion opportunity to leverage what we do, but broaden it geographically to clients is huge. I'm excited about that. And by the way, all the dynamics we talked about in the U.S. middle and lower middle market, they're the same or even more amplified in the European and Asian middle and lower middle market as we've looked at it. So that's a really big opportunity.

And then I think the other thing that's really important is we've put the team in place to execute, and we've driven this culture, as I said, of one Ridgepost. So I think what hopefully people will take away is that -- we're no longer just a collection of sort of boutique managers who are really great at what they do. We are an integrated comprehensive category killer platform in the middle and lower middle market, and we have the opportunity to execute against that. And I think we're decades ahead of anybody else who might try to challenge that.

I'm very exciting. I'm afraid -- very excited.

Thanks so much Luke.

Thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

Hello, and welcome to Ridgepost Capital's First Quarter 2026 Conference Call. My name is Latif, and I will be coordinating your call today.[Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. I will now pass the call 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 will be joined by Luke Sarsfield, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Amanda Coussens, EVP and Chief Financial Officer; and Arjay Jensen, EVP, Head of M&A and Strategy. After our prepared remarks,Sarita Jairath, EVP, Global Head of Client Solutions, will also join our 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. 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 included in the presentation slides posted on our website 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 us today. I'll first recap Ridgepost Capital's first quarter 2026 financial and operational highlights and then spend a few minutes reflecting on the attractive and durable nature of our LP base. Arjay will provide an update on our acquisition of Stellus Capital Management. Amanda will dive deeper into our financial performance, and then I will provide some closing thoughts.

Ridgepost Capital had an extremely strong start to the year, hitting several key milestones. Importantly, our fee-paying assets under management crossed $30 billion for the first time, and we experienced a record quarter in terms of fundraising and deployment. Additionally, we continue to observe strong investment performance across our strategies. In particular, this quarter, I would highlight increases to the already strong results for the flagship funds at TrueBridge, our venture capital strategy, most of which have achieved 3 to nearly 6x net ROIC as of December 31, 2025. Our fee-paying assets under management increased to approximately $31 billion, representing 18% year-over-year growth. Since June of 2024, the as-of date we used at our Investor Day, fee-paying AUM has grown at a 16% compound annual growth rate, keeping us on track to achieve our long-term target of $50 billion by the end of 2029. Turning to our fundraising activity. We delivered a record quarter with gross fundraising and deployment totaling approximately $2 billion. This level of fundraising was in line with our expectations and included in our 2-year guidance discussed on the fourth quarter 2025 earnings call. We had a total of 19 funds in the market this quarter. We are extremely proud of this fundraising performance, which we think reflects the growing LP demand for the solutions we offer our clients. It also reflects a number of favorable elements coming together at once in the quarter, in particular, at our venture capital strategy, TrueBridge, which Amanda will cover in greater detail. I would also point out that fundraising will not always follow a linear path, and we, of course, expect some variability between quarters. Turning now to a few points I wanted to make about our business, which I think are important to highlight. The first few months of this year were eventful for the firm.

On our fourth quarter earnings call, we covered our 2025 year-end results, our announced acquisition of Stellus Capital Management and our rebranding as Ridgepost Capital. There has also been a good deal of news flow regarding the alternative asset management space, including around software and AI disruption concerns around private credit, driving a general focus on credit quality and related high levels of redemption requests. This has directly and negatively impacted public market valuations. Importantly, Ridgepost has very little exposure to these trends, and we wanted to take the opportunity to double-click on a few areas, in particular, aspects of our business that we believe are truly differentiating and demonstrate that the franchise is progressing on both the organic and inorganic initiatives we outlined at our Investor Day in 2024. Next, I want to touch on the durability of our LP investor base. Our products and vehicles are predominantly structured as commingled funds or SMAs with long-dated, locked-up capital. The majority of our fee-paying assets under management use committed capital as a fee base, providing a stable locked-in source of revenue that typically lasts for 10-plus years. This product and investor profile provides us with highly durable future revenue, reflected in a weighted average remaining duration of approximately 7 years across all of our strategies and vehicles. The corollary to this is that semi-liquid products for retail investors have not been at all meaningful to our historical growth. As a consequence, we have not been directly impacted by the news around redemption requests and debate around the merits of alternatives for retail investors. Now this may seem counterintuitive, considering that over 1/3 of our LP investor base has been sourced through the wealth management channel. However, our high net worth investor base has more of an institutional orientation with several high net worth aggregators making up the majority of this channel for us, providing a drastically different LP profile compared to the typical retail-oriented products that have been the subject of many of the recent headlines. So, I've touched on the durability of our LP base as well as how our high net worth channel differs from others. I would also point out that nearly 3/4 of our LP base falls under our 3 largest categories: one, wealth and high net worth; two, pensions; and three, endowments and foundations. We're particularly proud of this breakdown and are continuously working to expand the level of investor overlap across our strategies. And we are clearly seeing that work pay off. We flagged on our fourth quarter call that over 10% of our capital raise since Investor Day stems from successful cross-marketing efforts. To put a finer point on that, approximately $1.2 billion of the capital we've raised since our Investor Day reference date of June 2024 is a result of clients investing in the strategy beyond their initial Ridgepost Capital investment. This progress represents roughly 300 basis points of our 15% fee-paying AUM compound annual growth rate through the end of 2025. And this is just the beginning as we continue to accelerate capital formation, collaborate on new business development opportunities and leverage our proprietary data capabilities across the broader platform. Finally, I would also like to remind you that our differentiated investment strategies are focused on the middle and lower middle markets where we see considerable advantages. We believe this space presents far more opportunities than the larger sponsor segment with lower valuations, less competition for assets and more disciplined use of leverage. When you combine these dynamics with our team, culture, and data advantage, we think it uniquely positions us to generate strong returns for clients as we grow our franchise. I'll now turn it to Arjay to provide an update on Stellus .

Thank you, Luke. In February, we announced our agreement to acquire Stellus Capital Management, a leading direct lending business that provides senior secured loans to lower middle market sponsor-backed companies in the U.S.

On our fourth quarter earnings call, we discussed Stellus' exceptional history, its 20-plus year track record and its complementary fit with our other strategies, given its focus on the lower middle market. Stellus represents a fantastic fit for our entry into the direct lending space, and we are excited to build with them as a Ridgepost Capital strategy. To expand on Luke's commentary, I'll provide additional context on Stellus' financial profile and the expected financial impact of the transaction.

As of December 31, 2025, Stellus had $3.8 billion in assets under management and $2.6 billion in fee-paying AUM. From a fee rate perspective, Stellus' weighted average management fee rate was approximately 120 basis points of average fee-paying AUM in 2025. So had Stellus been a part of Ridgepost Capital for all of 2025, our core fee rate would have increased from 104 to 105 basis points. We noted in February that the announcement valuation of $250 million of upfront consideration represented approximately 12x Stellus' 2025 estimated FRE. In addition, as Stellus' FRE margin is in the mid- to high 50s, we would expect modest accretion in our FRE margin.

From an earnings impact perspective, I would note that we anticipate approximately $2 million in annual tax savings as a result of the additional amortization from goodwill and intangibles from the $125 million in cash consideration, which Amanda will cover in greater detail shortly. As you'll recall, with respect to the stock consideration in the transaction, the number of units issued was fixed at signing with the units issued priced at $10.62. These metrics we provided will allow you to validate the impact guidance we provided at announcement, modestly accretive to ANI per share in the first full year post closing and modestly accretive to FRE margin, both relative to Street estimates at the time and with no synergies included.

Now I'd like to highlight some recent developments in Stellus' business. First, Stellus closed its fourth vintage private fund at approximately $775 million that will pay fees as deployed, inclusive of commingled fund commitments and SMAs, slightly ahead of the $750 million cover we had communicated in our initial announcement. Including the impact of Fund IV's final close, dry powder sits at approximately $450 million. This represents the sum of uncalled capital as well as related leverage for the private BDC, both additive to the fee base once the capital is deployed. As a reminder, Stellus' private BDC has approximately $400 million in gross assets or approximately 15% of fee-paying AUM. It was launched in 2021 with institutional seed investors who comprise approximately 75% of the capital. Quarterly redemptions averaged 1.0% in 2025 were 2.9% in the first quarter and just 3.0% in the second quarter. Redemption rates that stand in stark contrast to what we're seeing at the upper part of the market, and we think reflect Stellus' very strong investor support, its differentiated focus on the lower middle market and its disciplined approach to underwriting and strong historical credit performance. As we've previously discussed, we believe Stellus' unique focus on the lower middle market contributes to its strong credit portfolio with a lower leverage profile than is typical for the upper part of the market. This structurally lower leverage, coupled with Stellus' disciplined investment and underwriting process has driven a 1.1% annualized default rate and a 14 basis point annualized loss rate since inception through year-end 2025 across all loans. Stellus' lower middle market focus and portfolio granularity also help insulate it against some of the recent volatility and headlines surrounding SaaS and software. To reiterate, no single Stellus position represents more than 2% of the overall portfolio and its total exposure to SaaS and software is less than 8%. Importantly, this exposure is not to the large-scale software sector, but rather to companies better described as industry-specific tech-enabled solutions providers. These businesses leverage AI to enhance their services while maintaining proprietary data advantages. Another important point I want to make about the Stellus transaction is that their decision to combine with Ridgepost demonstrates that both our value proposition and our business model are resonating.

At our Investor Day, we outlined what we offer to potential new strategies and Stellus' choice reinforces that vision. Stellus brings a robust brand and excellent market reputation and had other alternatives as its team considered its strategic options and next steps for the business. They chose to join Ridgepost based on our shared vision and focus on the lower middle market, their ability to retain investment autonomy and day-to-day operational control and the opportunity to enhance both their loan origination funnel and our combined fundraising capabilities. Equally important, we each identified a strong cultural alignment between our teams. In terms of timing, we continue to be on track for a midyear 2026 closing of the transaction. With that, I will turn it over to Amanda.

Thanks, Arjay. I'll now cover our financial results in greater detail. As Luke mentioned, we had a strong start to 2026 in the first quarter, crossing $30 billion in fee-paying AUM for the first time and hitting a quarterly record of approximately $2 billion in fundraising and deployment. We also continue to deliver strong operating results with core fee rate and FRE margin in line with the guidance we provided on our last earnings call.

I'll start by giving a bit more detail on fundraising in the quarter. As Luke discussed, our record fundraising in Q1 was driven by a number of elements coming together at once, most clearly at our venture capital strategy, TrueBridge, which accounted for approximately $1 billion of the fundraising and deployment level this quarter. This was the result of multiple funds being in the market concurrently with that $1 billion driven by both the latest vintage of the flagship fund, the second vintage of the venture secondaries fund and incremental fee-paying AUM from two large strategic SMAs. Additionally, we raised approximately $872 million across our private equity strategies, largely driven by the activation of fees for the next vintage of our GP stakes flagship fund at Bonaccord. This record fundraising quarter brought our fee-paying AUM at the end of the quarter to approximately $31 billion, an almost 18% increase on a year-over-year basis. The average core fee rate, excluding direct and secondary catch-up fees was 97 basis points in the first quarter and 103 basis points on an LTM basis. As a reminder, we anticipate the core fee rate to expand in the second half of the year due to the seasonality of our tax credit business. We continue to anticipate 103 basis points in core fee rate for the full year 2026, excluding the impact of Stellus acquisition. Our total fee-related revenue of approximately $75 million in the quarter represented approximately 11% growth from a year ago. Our FRE margin in the quarter was approximately 44% and consistent with the guidance we provided last quarter. As a reminder, FRE margins are expected to grow throughout 2026 as we begin to see additional operating leverage for an overall mid-40s margin for 2026 and continual margin expansion from mid-40s to near 50% over the next few years, excluding the impact from acquisitions.

Moving down the income statement. Our Q1 cash tax rate was 2.5%. Our cash tax rate will be higher in Q2, resulting from two cash tax payments being made in the quarter as has been our historical practice. As we discussed in 2025, we continue to expect to fully utilize the NOL and become a federal taxpayer in 2026. In addition, as Arjay mentioned, we anticipate $2 million in annual tax savings resulting from the $125 million in upfront cash consideration for Stellus. As a reminder, the equity consideration of the deal is in the form of about 11.8 million units that represented $125 million in value at the time of the deal signing. The equity consideration will be additive to our tax shield when the units are converted into common shares of Ridgepost Capital, Inc. We are also pleased to announce that our Board of Directors has approved an increase in the quarterly cash dividend with a cash dividend this quarter of $0.04 per share payable on June 18, 2026, to shareholders of record as of the close of business on May 29, 2026. Additionally, we repurchased 701,000 shares in the quarter at an average price of $8.55 for a total repurchase of $6 million, leaving $15 million available on our share repurchase program. Following the closing of Stellus, we anticipate allocating capital to a combination of debt paydown and share repurchase. I'll now turn it back to Luke for a few closing comments before we open it up to Q&A.

Thanks, Amanda. Before I open it up to questions, I wanted to summarize some key takeaways from today's call. First, Ridgepost has built a differentiated private markets platform with a unique focus on the middle and lower middle markets and a diverse and extremely durable LP investor base.

Second, our middle and lower middle market focus results in a meaningful opportunity set that has insulated us from many of the market dynamics that have owned the headlines thus far in 2026. The middle and lower middle markets have more than 5x the number of GPs compared to the upper segment of the market, and more than 10x the number of companies. This represents immense opportunity for our platform as both these sponsors and LP investors, generally, are looking for strategic solutions that our platform can provide across private equity and private credit.

Finally, we've established Ridgepost as a destination of choice for like-minded investment firms that are seeking to grow their franchises while also continuing to drive investment decisions as evidenced by our Stellus acquisition, as Arjay discussed. To close, I wanted to spend a minute on capital allocation and state strongly that while we continue conversations in the market regarding potential new strategies, in line with the proactive M&A effort Arjay and I have talked about since joining, Ridgepost will not be issuing our stock at recent levels in new M&A transactions. Simply put, our recent trading levels are not reflective of the progress we've made on the business since I took over. What we are focused on is building our platform, driving returns for our LP investors and seeking additional ways to provide our client base more investment opportunities across our strategies.

As I mentioned, we think the franchise is working on both our organic and inorganic initiatives, and we look forward to the opportunities in front of us as we continue to execute on our strategy. Thank you for your time today. I'll now pass the call over to the operator to begin the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions]

Our first question comes from the line of Kenneth Worthington of JPMorgan.

This is Alex Bernstein on for Ken. You spoke about some of the differences in your business, the exposures. It sounds like as we expected, you avoided some of the evergreen issues, also not really exposed to software. Another theme we've seen this quarter from some of your larger cap GP peers has been softer performance in private equity to start the year and as of late in general. I wanted to check on how performance is holding up for you and if there's also a potential differentiation there.

Well, thank you. It's a great question, and it actually is reflective of what we're seeing. And I don't want to speak on our peers. I will just speak on our own experience and what we're seeing in the business. But when you look across our private equity strategies, our performance continues to be incredibly strong and incredibly resilient. I'd point to a number of factors for that. Factor one, as we talked about, is the fact that we play in the part of the market, the middle and lower middle market. And that part of the market has continued to see a robust opportunity set, and we've been able to deploy against that opportunity set. And it is both differentiated and protected for all the reasons we talked about. It's a broader opportunity set than the upper part of the market. It is less intermediated. We have the ability to be more selective. We're generally buying these businesses not from -- in a primary -- in a secondary or tertiary transaction, sorry, but in a primary transaction from a founder owner. And as a result, we have the opportunity to drive meaningful value creation in that portfolio. We're buying them at lower levels of kind of overall purchase price, and we're using less leverage in the transactions. And all of those things accrete to our benefit and the benefit of the GP sponsors that we're backing to do that. The second thing I would point to that I think is truly differentiating is when you look at kind of the disposition and makeup of our private equity business. I think for many of the folks you're referring to, they're really investing in what I would call a direct private equity business. And as a result, they're obviously seeing a tremendous sort of some volatility that goes with that. Remember, we are selecting best-of-breed managers that we're investing behind. And so I think our opportunity to be more selective and targeted is differentiated. And the second thing is when you look at the disposition of our portfolio, the direct investments we're making are in places like co-investments, like secondaries. And that, I think, provides some real insulation and protection given the skew of our portfolio in private equity relative to some others. And then obviously, we have a great GP stakes business focused in the middle and lower middle market. And the opportunity in that space, I would say, is very attractive and emerging quickly. And so we really like our portfolio. And when you look at the performance results and you can see them, they're in -- we proudly publish them every quarter. The performance continues to be very resilient and very strong, and we're very opportunistic in the environment that we see and continue to see on the forward. So that's what I would say on your question, Alex.

Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Luke Sarsfield for closing remarks. Sir?

Well, thank you so much. Thank you for the thoughtful questions and for your continued support. We look very much forward to updating you on our second quarter results in August. Thanks for joining us, and have a great day.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

Hello, and welcome to Ridgepost Capital's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Conference Call. My name is Kevin, and I'll be coordinating your call today. [Operator Instructions] 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 Coussens, EVP and Chief Financial Officer. After our prepared remarks, Arjay Jensen, EVP, Head of Strategy and M&A; and Sarita Jairath, 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 Ridgepost Capital. Our name and brand usher in an exciting new chapter for our company. The Ridgepost 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 2 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 2 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 Ridgepost is a marker on higher ground, symbolizing stability, perspective and protection. From this vantage point, Ridgepost 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, Ridgepost Capital offers a world-class complementary partnership with a robust set of capabilities across the capital stack.

Next, I would like to discuss the Stellus acquisition we announced last week. Stellus 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 Stellus 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, Stellus 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 Stellus' sponsor relationships with our other strategies.

In particular, the profile of RCP's sponsor relationships maps very well with Stellus'. 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 Stellus. 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 Stellus' 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 Ridgepost 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 Ridgepost 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 market. 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 of 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 broaden the reach of our brand. In April, we appointed 2 new independent directors to our Board. Stephen Blewitt, an accomplished private markets investment professional, joined the Compensation Committee; and Jennifer Glassman, a private market 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 Ridgepost 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 Stellus 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 Stellus and opened our new office in Dubai, strengthening our presence in the Middle East. Another noteworthy announcement is our new collaboration with CAIS, a leading alternative investment platform for independent financial advisers.

As a result, Bonaccord, our GP stake strategy, will join the CAIS platform, which serves over 2,000 wealth management firms and 62,000 financial advisers. This collaboration comes amid surging demand for alternative investments among financial advisers. A recent CAIS Mercer survey revealed that 9 in 10 financial advisers are currently allocating to alternatives and 88% of advisers plan to increase their allocations to alternatives over the next 2 years. Our CAIS relationship represents an important step in expanding Bonaccord'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 Ridgepost Capital well for the year ahead. With that, I'll turn the call over to Amanda to provide a deeper look at our financial results and guidance for the year ahead.

Thank you, Luke. At the end of the quarter, fee-paying assets under management were $29.4 billion, a 15% increase on a year-over-year basis. In the fourth quarter, $841 million in organic fundraising and capital deployment was offset by $535 million in step-downs and expirations. As Luke mentioned, we expect strong fundraising from 2025 to carry into 2026 and 2027 as we are targeting $10 billion of gross organic fundraising and deployment over the next 2 years, excluding impact from acquisitions. In 2026, we have multiple funds in the market from each of our 3 core verticals: private equity, private credit and venture capital.

Step-downs and expirations for 2025 exceeded our initial expectation of 5% to 7%. As discussed in our third quarter earnings call, the increase is primarily attributable to 2 factors. First, there were early paydowns in our credit business, which reflects the high-quality nature of our loan portfolio and underwriting. A portion of the credit step-downs consists of recyclable capital, which is actively being redeployed. Next, a large separately managed account expired in 2025, which was replaced by a larger commitment from the same LP in 2025. Although these 2 factors increased our step-downs and expirations for the year, they reflect the strength of our portfolios and demonstrate long-lasting relationships with valuable clients.

Looking forward to 2026, we expect step-downs and expirations in the midrange of 5% to 7% for the full year. AUM, which includes NAV, uncalled capital commitments and capital committed since the NAV record date was over $43 billion across the platform as of December 31, 2025. We continue to view fee-paying AUM as the best proxy for Ridgepost's current economics, but believe AUM helps illustrate the breadth and scale of our multi-asset class platform. FRR in the fourth quarter was $81 million. When excluding the effect of direct and secondary catch-up fees, FRR increased 20% from the fourth quarter of 2024. For 2025, FRR was $297.3 million. When excluding the effect of direct and secondary catch-up fees, given the outsized catch-up fees in 2024, primarily attributable to Bonaccord II's final close, FRR increased 13% from 2024.

The strong growth of our core business highlights the durable nature of our attractive revenue model. The average core fee rate was 109 basis points in the fourth quarter and 104 basis points for 2025. We anticipate the core fee rate to average 103 basis points for 2026. The core fee rate is expected to be lower than 103 basis points in the first half of 2026 and expand in the back half, in line with our historical fee rate dynamic. The core fee rate expands in the back half of the year due to the seasonality of our tax credit business. In addition to revenue from our core fee rate, we expect to earn direct and secondary catch-up fee revenue in the range of $6 million to $8 million during 2026, with the majority of these catch-up fees in the back half of the year as our large direct and secondary products close on additional capital.

In the fourth quarter, we had about 20 commingled funds in the market. Our private equity strategies raised and deployed $325 million. Our venture capital solution raised and deployed $178 million and our private credit strategies added $338 million to fee-paying assets under management. Throughout 2026, we expect to have about 20 funds in the market as well. We will continue to pursue attractive SMA relationships and expect to develop new products in addition to our commingled funds. Operating expenses in the fourth quarter were $55.2 million, a decrease compared to $62.2 million for the prior year's fourth quarter and in 2025 were $231.8 million, a decrease compared to $235.8 million for 2024. Operating expenses decreased in 2025 as we had certain adjustments related to prior acquisitions that included a reversal of a reserve within compensation costs.

GAAP net income in the fourth quarter was $11 million, an increase compared to $5.7 million for the prior year's fourth quarter and in 2025 was $23 million, an increase compared to $19.7 million for 2024. For the fourth quarter, adjusted net income, or ANI, was $30.2 million, representing a decrease of 14% from the fourth quarter of 2024. For the quarter, fully diluted ANI per share was $0.26 compared to $0.30 in the prior year. The decrease in ANI is a result of historically high catch-up fee revenue of $19 million in the fourth quarter of 2024. FRE was $39 million in the fourth quarter, a decrease of 9% year-over-year.

In the fourth quarter, FRE margin was 48%. For 2026, we anticipate FRE margins in the mid-40s for the year, but may be slightly lower than mid-40s during the first quarter of the year due to the additional investments made across our platform in 2025 and early 2026, primarily in fundraising. FRE margins are expected to grow throughout 2026 as we begin to see additional operating leverage for an overall mid-40s margin for 2026 and continual margin expansion from mid-40s to 50% over the next few years. Our Board of Directors approved a quarterly cash dividend of $0.0375 per share payable on March 20, 2026, to stockholders of record as of the close of business on February 27, 2026.

Cash and cash equivalents at the end of the fourth quarter were approximately $28 million. At the end of the quarter, we had an outstanding debt balance of $377 million, $321 million on the term loan and $56 million drawn on the revolver. Our strong balance sheet, free cash flow and ability to draw on the revolver position us to complete the latest acquisition and prepare ourselves for additional inorganic growth. Thank you for your time today. I'll now pass the call over to the operator to begin the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Ken Worthington with JPMorgan.

The topic du jour for private markets managers is AI. Can you talk about, given your venture exposure and direct lending exposure, what your exposures are? And ultimately, what are your thoughts on the AI risk to private markets managers?

Well, thanks, Ken. It's Luke here. And you're right, that certainly does seem to be the topic du jour. I'll say a few things about it. The first is, and I'll separate our portfolio in a couple of ways. The first is, obviously, you mentioned the venture portfolio where we have across venture equity and venture debt. And in that part of the portfolio, we're actually leaning in and actively investing into AI and other economic trends that we think are going to be net long-term positives for the economy, for the global economy and ultimately for our investors. And so it won't surprise you to hear that we have a meaningful exposure through our venture portfolio to AI. But the reality is that design. And I will tell you, those investments have and continue to go exceedingly well as we invest in the future economic drivers.

When you look at what I would call the more regular way parts of our portfolio that are not consciously designed to be oriented in a specific way, we have, I would say, relatively modest exposure across our portfolio to SaaS and software and other places that there have been concerns that will be disintermediated by AI. I would say across our portfolio, generally, we have less than 10% exposure to SaaS and software. We disclosed, I think, as part of the Stellus acquisition that Stellus' exposure was less than 8%, just to put it in context. And the other thing I would just hasten to add is when you think about the SaaS and software exposure we have, these are not the large cap names that you've been kind of reading about or have been kind of promulgated in the popular press.

Ours are really business enablement focused on advancing what I would call traditional industrial and industrial-like businesses in the middle and lower middle market. And so I think we're very comfortable with that. The last thing I would say is we engage regularly in a rigorous review of all of our portfolio, our credit portfolio, our equity portfolio, our venture portfolio, and we feel exceedingly good about how we're positioned right now, Ken.

Okay. Great. And then maybe secondly, I wanted to ask about the private markets wealth strategy build-out. When you and I spoke, I don't know, I want to say, 18 to 24 months ago, it seemed like private markets was not the priority for you and you had focuses other places. And yet you have an enhanced product. Bonaccord is now working with CAIS. So maybe talk about wealth and the priorities that you're seeing there? And to what extent can the Bonaccord CAIS relationship be expanded to other Ridgepost managers over time?

Again, great question. I'd say a few things. I would say, at the core, maybe I misspoke when I said we weren't focused on private wealth. Recall that something like 36% of our clients are actually private wealth clients in some incarnation, whether ultra-high net worth individuals or otherwise, groupings of ultra-high net worth individuals. What I think I said was we're probably not going to pursue a real aggressive feet-on-the-street approach to the private wealth channel as some of our competitors have into places like the big wires in a comprehensive way, into places like the IBDs in a comprehensive way. But certainly, when we see opportunities, given our product mix, given our portfolio and given our historical client orientation, we're going to take advantage of that and try to maximize that distribution and maximize our throw rate in the channels. And so you're right, we're looking at all features of our product design.

As you mentioned, we did launch the Evergreen product. We think that Evergreen product, by the way, is going to have appeal both in private wealth channels, but also in institutional channels. But we will certainly look at more alternatives around creative and innovative product design where we think there's going to be commercial uptake for it. And then I do think, to your point, one of the ways that we will probably manifest our interest and desire to grow that private wealth channel is through some sort of partnership or collaboration. And so CAIS, I think, is a great example of a collaboration with a platform that has a lot of relationships across private wealth and particularly those advisers in the private wealth channel who are more aggressively allocating to alternatives as a general matter.

And so I think that's a great example of something we would do. I think over time, we would like to do more of it. We think there are other parts of our product offering that we think will have a lot of throw weight and a lot of appeal and appetite for private wealth for both the advisers and for the end clients. And so we'll want to do more of that. And then there -- as well, there are other potential partners or collaborators we think that can help us kind of accelerate and facilitate that entrance into it. And so what I think I would say is, as we approach it, we're unlikely to build a broad-based Ridgepost Capital distribution team solely focused on the wealth channel. That's probably beyond our ken right now. But we want to get access to that wealth channel. We're probably just going to do it in more creative ways and with partners along the way.

Our next question comes from Chris Kotowski with Oppenheimer.

I wonder if we could talk -- give a bit more color on Stellus as we see like $1.4 billion in BDC money. And I assume that the Part 1 incentive fees will be in the base management fees and that should take your blended average fee rate higher. So let me start with that. What would their blended average fee rate be?

So I think what we'd like to do, Chris, if it's okay, we gave some very high-level guidance as it relates to the Stellus acquisition. We talked about that it will be modestly accretive, both to margin and to ANI EPS per share in the first full year. We've obviously done and engaged with them on a very robust and detailed modeling exercise. But I think what we're going to do right now is we're going to hold giving greater guidance on Stellus until we get closer to the closing of the acquisition. There is a closing time line that we have to abide to in terms of obviously getting the Boards, the BDC boards to recommend the transaction and then having a shareholder vote. And so we will come back, trust me, I promise, we will come back with -- as we get close to close, much more robust guidance around how Stellus will impact every part of the P&L from the fee rate on down, but we're going to do that when we get a little closer to closing.

Okay. So that's fine and fair. And then I was just wondering, is there -- in the -- on Page 19, we see a private BDC. Is that kind of -- can you -- if you can say, how is that distributed? And what is their reach into retail distribution? And does that help?

So I'm going to turn it over to Arjay, who is going to talk just very briefly around this. Again, I think at a high level, we will dive into Stellus in a much more detailed way as we get a little closer to closing, but we'll give you a couple of high-level thoughts. So Arjay, over to you.

Yes. So the private BDC does focus on the RIA channel. They've got a distribution team working on that, growing that business. It was started with really 5 seed investors, and that's been the foundation, but they've continued to grow it as a -- with a focus on the RIA channel.

Our next question comes from Michael Cyprys with Morgan Stanley.

Just wanted to ask about Stellus. I was hoping you could elaborate a bit on their sourcing funnel and origination edge. And while on the topic of Stellus, maybe you could also elaborate on some of the steps you're going to be looking to take to accelerate their growth? And what's the scope for this to maybe be a faster-growing part of the P10 family versus the rest?

So great question. And I think this is something that we are laser-focused on. We think there is already an amazing fit between what they do and the sponsor ecosystem they get after between the sponsor ecosystem that we have the ability to access. And we think together, collectively, we can do even more together. So just a reminder, right, they are primarily focused in a middle and lower middle market GP sponsor ecosystem. Most of their sourcing comes through that channel, obviously, very focused on high-quality first lien type credits, but direct lending across that sponsor ecosystem. And they have built, I would say, a very highly functioning sourcing engine with many of the top quality GPs across the U.S. middle and lower middle market. So they start from a real position of strength.

Now I think what we bring to it is the broad-based sponsor ecosystem that we're touching across a number of our strategies, obviously, primarily RCP, given the history, given the track record, given the lineage, but also in many other parts of the ecosystem like Harc, like Five Points, like Bonaccord and then potentially over time internationally, like Qualitas, we think we have the ability to really increase that sourcing funnel in a meaningful way. We've talked about, and I mentioned on the call, the overlap between the types and the sizes of GPs and funds that RCP has historically and continues to target and how that interlaces very nicely with the areas of focus for the Stellus framework.

And so we think one of the things that we can do and we can do reasonably quickly by leveraging the overall Ridgepost Capital presence in that middle and lower middle market sponsor ecosystem is to really, a, get the word out that this is now important and relevant to us. Recall, it wasn't in the past in the same way because we didn't have a broad-based direct lending strategy where we could actually put the investments. Now we do or now we will, I should say. And so the opportunity to do that, I think we can amplify in a very meaningful way. And so we're doing -- we're going to be doing over the next 4 months. And then obviously, once we close the deal and otherwise, a lot of work as we think about how we really drive that, how we create great outcomes, how we leverage our throwaway, our presence, our positioning in that ecosystem to really accelerate that selling and that sourcing at Stellus -- sorry, that's a tongue twister.

And I think putting that together, we do believe that together, we can do more than either one of us could do apart. We haven't modeled that in. We haven't factored that in, in any of the financial analysis we talked to you about, but it's our hope and our expectation that we can execute on that together.

Great. And then just a follow-up question more broadly on capital management. I was hoping you could elaborate a bit how you're thinking about that here in terms of allocating between buybacks, debt paydown, maybe post close and then more broadly on M&A. Just curious how you're thinking about the business today. Any gaps remaining? You've done a whole host of deals over the last number of years. How you're thinking about filling in anything at this point?

I'll turn it to Amanda to take the first part on capital allocation, and then Michael, I'll come back and take the second part on the M&A opportunity set.

Thank you, Michael, for the question. So although we do intend to buy back stock to offset dilution from new issuances, we are also mindful of our debt leverage ratios and really intend to pay down debt after we close on the Stellus acquisition.

And then as it relates to kind of the M&A landscape, I would say at a strategic level, obviously, we view this as a real advancement in terms of what we've done on the portfolio and in the platform. But I would say that the guidepost that we laid out at Investor Day are really unchanged in terms of our areas of strategic focus. So just to go back to those, we talked about, number one, international analogs of U.S. strategies. We think the dynamics in the international lower middle and middle market are very similar to the ones here in the U.S. middle market in terms of why it's such an attractive place to be.

Obviously, Qualitas was a very specific manifestation of that. But if you look across all of our strategies, we think international analog still represents a real opportunity for us, and we'll continue to build in a global fashion where we can. The second thing we did talk about is private credit. And when we talked about private credit, we identified a number of important potential focus areas for us. Direct lending was obviously at the very top of that list. But there are a lot of other really interesting and attractive areas within the private credit landscape.

I would say asset-based lending is one I would particularly point to as something we think that might be very relevant for our portfolio. And so again, if we could find the right partner for that, that would be very interesting to us. And then the third thing we've talked about and did talk about at Investor Day, which would really be the pure white space is something in the real assets ecosystem, whether that's something in the infrastructure world, something in the real estate world, either from an equity or a debt perspective, we have really nothing there, and we do get a lot of client inquiry around those spaces. And so that road map that we laid out at Investor Day is really unchanged, and we continue to, I would say, focus and execute in earnest against that opportunity set. And the good news is I think there's a lot of great franchises out there, and I think that our value proposition is really starting to resonate.

And I'm not showing any further questions at this time. I'd like to turn the call back over to Luke for any further remarks.

Well, I'd just like to close by thanking everybody for the thoughtful questions and for your continued support. We're extremely pleased with the progress we've made to date. We're confident in the durability of our platform, and we're excited at the prospect of uniting under our new Ridgepost Capital name and brand, while we remain laser-focused on executing our strategy as we enter the next phase of our growth. We look forward to updating you on our first quarter results in May, and we thank you for joining us today.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we thank you for your participation in today's call. This does conclude the presentation. You may now disconnect, and have a wonderful day.

Hello, and welcome to the P10 Third Quarter 2025 Conference Call. My name is Latif, and I will be coordinating your call today. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded.

I will now pass the call 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 will be joined by Luke Sarsfield, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Amanda Coussens, EVP and Chief Financial Officer. Sarita Jairath, EVP and Global Head of Client Solutions; and Arjay Jensen, EVP, Head of Strategy and M&A, are also in the room with us today.

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 third quarter 2025 earnings call. Our third quarter demonstrates the strength of our diversified platform and the attractive fundamentals of the market segments that are core to our differentiated investment strategies, namely the middle and lower-middle markets.

Before discussing our quarterly financial results, I want to share a few observations around recent headlines regarding private credit and concerns some have raised about the credit market in general. As it relates to P10, private credit represents less than 20% of our fee-paying AUM today. We view this as an asset class with a meaningful opportunity set where disciplined managers can consistently deliver strong, stable performance, and attractive risk-adjusted returns. We have stated on previous calls that private credit is an area we would like to further expand.

Having said that, in our existing private credit franchise, we continue to see a strong and robust opportunity set in the middle and lower-middle markets, and we are not seeing deterioration in our credit portfolios. Our underlying business remains incredibly strong. We have a time-tested and rigorous underwriting process, and our investment returns reflect this approach.

Now, on to our third quarter results. We raised and deployed $915 million in organic gross new fee-paying assets under management. Investors may recall that we previously mentioned that in the second quarter, we pulled forward approximately $300 million in fundraising from the third quarter. Were it not for these accelerated capital commitments, we would have delivered a third consecutive $1 billion gross fundraising quarter. The fundraising and deployment environment continues to be resilient with compelling opportunities across our diverse franchise.

Our expanding business continues to benefit from secular tailwinds in private markets, supporting global demand for difficult-to-access investment opportunities. We believe the market is moving in our direction as clients seek better returns and more exposure to the middle and lower-middle markets. Our distinct business model is a strong foundation upon which to fuel our organic and inorganic growth aspirations.

We ended the third quarter with $29.1 billion of total fee-paying assets under management, an increase of 17% year-over-year. The momentum in our business is especially noteworthy when comparing fundraising and deployment in the first 3 quarters of 2025 to the same period in 2024. In the first 3 quarters of 2025, we raised and deployed $4.3 billion of organic fee-paying assets under management, an increase of 48% when compared to the capital raised in the same period of 2024. Other KPIs demonstrate progress over the same 9-month period. Our fee-related revenue, or FRR, has grown 5% year-to-date. And additionally, our FRR is up 11% year-to-date when excluding direct and secondary catch-up fees.

We've exceeded our annual organic gross fundraising guidance of $4 billion for 2025. Consequently, we are raising our full year 2025 organic gross fundraising target and expect to finish the year closer to $5 billion. And we are well on our way to achieving the long-term guidance we provided at our Investor Day in September of 2024. All of the materials from our Investor Day are prominently featured on our Investor Relations website, and we invite you to review those materials to get a better sense of how we are thinking about the opportunities in 2026 and beyond.

In the third quarter, we had a number of noteworthy accomplishments that support the ongoing momentum in our business. During the quarter, we had 17 commingled funds in the market. RCP's Secondary Fund V closed at $1.26 billion, exceeding our target of $1 billion. We've seen strong demand for our secondaries products, and this fund was no exception. We closed Secondary Fund V in 13 months.

The predecessor, Secondary Fund IV was $797 million and took 25 months to close. The takeaway is that our commingled fund business continues to thrive and has achieved significant momentum. In addition, we launched 4 funds in the quarter, Bonaccord Fund III, RCP Small and Emerging Manager Fund IV, RCP Multi-Strat III, and Qualitas Funds US I.

We continue to see LPs expanding their allocations across P10's franchise. We recently saw several wealth managers who were invested across our private credit and venture capital strategies commit to RCP's latest secondaries fund for the first time. Additionally, a large multifamily office that has invested in TrueBridge expanded its venture capital allocation by investing in WTI.

Finally, in August, we announced a dual listing on NYSE Texas. Being recognized as a founding member of NYSE Texas provides us with a larger platform upon which to engage with the investment community. The NYSE continues to be an important partner, and we are excited to expand our relationship.

Given our continued fundraising momentum, we want shareholders to understand the factors driving our long-term growth. First, we provide access to a specialized part of the market in the middle and lower-middle markets. This part of the market is difficult to navigate without a trusted partner. We offered a deep dive on the middle and lower-middle market opportunity in our second quarter earnings deck that demonstrates, through data, the structural advantages of our market focus compared to the larger, more crowded segments.

Second, our firm is comprised of renowned investment franchises that have delivered durable alpha over decades through good and bad market environments and economic cycles. Returns continue to be strong as indicated in the slides in our earnings deck. Franchise diversity means we can compete for global mandates and win business in a variety of structures. We expect to drive more non-commingled opportunities over time.

Third, we have a large growing LP base with a distinct selection of products and structures. We expect to have 19 funds in the market for the remainder of 2025. We are also continuing to engage with larger pools of global capital that want customized solutions.

Fourth, our M&A pipeline is active, and we continue to evaluate attractive situations. We are active in our conversations and diligence. We're going to remain disciplined and on strategy as we consider adding new strategies to the platform. These core components drive our optimism in the forward of our franchise.

Before I hand the call off to Amanda, I want to highlight that our share repurchases in the third quarter slowed as we have pulled forward capacity into the second quarter. During the third quarter, we repurchased approximately 110,000 shares at a weighted average price of $11.34 for a total repurchase of $1.25 million.

With that, Amanda will discuss the third quarter financials.

Thank you, Luke. At the end of the quarter, fee-paying assets under management were $29.1 billion, a 17% increase on a year-over-year basis. In the third quarter, $915 million of organic fundraising and capital deployment was offset by $673 million in step-downs and expirations.

We expect step-downs and expirations for full year 2025 to be slightly above our initial expectation of 5% to 7%. Increased step-downs were driven primarily by early paydowns in our credit business, demonstrating the quality of our loan portfolios and underwriting. In addition, a portion of the incremental step-downs consists of recyclable capital from our credit businesses that we expect to redeploy and continue charging fees in future periods.

Another component of the increased step-downs and expirations was a large separately managed account that we expected to expire in the first half of 2026, which instead expired during 2025 and was replaced with a larger commitment from the LP following the expiration. We continue to expect step-downs and expirations to return to our historical average of 5% to 7% during 2026.

FRR in the third quarter was $75.9 million, a 4% increase over the third quarter of 2024 and a 13% increase, excluding direct and secondary catch-up fees. The average core fee rate in the third quarter was 103 basis points due to strength throughout our product offerings. We continue to expect the core fee rate this year to average 103 basis points.

In the third quarter, we had 17 commingled funds in the market. Our private equity strategies raised and deployed $711 million, our venture capital solution raised and deployed $12 million, and our private credit strategies added $192 million to fee-paying assets under management. Fundraising in the third quarter was driven by robust demand for secondary products as well as LP demand for multi-strategy and co-investment products.

Total catch-up fees in the quarter were $370,000. The timing of fund closings drives catch-up fees. And in the third quarter, they were primarily attributable to our primary funds, which only impact our core fee rate. With many of our commingled funds early in their fundraising lives during 2025, we expect to see catch-up fees expand in 2026 and 2027.

Operating expenses in the third quarter were $65.2 million, remaining flat compared to the third quarter of last year. GAAP net income in the third quarter was $3 million, an increase compared to $1.3 million for the prior year's third quarter.

For the third quarter, adjusted net income, or ANI, was $28.6 million, representing a decrease of 7% from the third quarter of 2024. The reduction in ANI is primarily attributable to lower cash interest paid in the third quarter of 2024 compared to the third quarter of 2025, as a result of the debt refinancing in early August 2024, which moved cash interest paid into future quarters as well as additional borrowing costs associated with the recent Qualitas acquisition. For the quarter, fully diluted ANI per share was $0.24 compared to $0.26 in the prior year.

FRE was $36 million, an increase of 3% year-over-year. In addition, our FRE margin was 47% in the third quarter. We continue to exercise cost discipline throughout our business to maintain peer-leading FRE margins in the mid-40s.

Our Board of Directors approved a quarterly cash dividend of $0.0375 per share payable on December 19, 2025, to stockholders of record as of the close of business on November 28, 2025.

Cash and cash equivalents at the end of the third quarter were approximately $40 million. At the end of the quarter, we had an outstanding total debt balance of $398 million, $325 million on the term loan and $73 million drawn on the revolver.

Following the end of the third quarter, we paid $11 million down on the revolver. As of today, we have roughly $113 million available on our credit facilities. Our strong balance sheet and ample borrowing capacity position us to execute disciplined M&A with confidence.

Our AUM, which is calculated similarly to our peers and is the sum of NAV, drawn and undrawn debt, uncalled capital commitments and capital commitments made to the platform since the NAV record date. AUM was $42.5 billion across the platform as of September 30, 2025. We believe AUM shows the breadth and scale of our business as a leading multi-asset class private market solutions provider as we continue to execute on our growth plan.

Thank you for your time today. I'll now pass the call over to the operator to begin the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Ken Worthington of JPMorgan.

This is Alex on for Ken. For the first one, I wanted to double-click on the SMA-driven step down. I understand you mentioned it came earlier in '25 rather than expected in '26, but that was also matched with a larger commitment from the same client. When talking about the commitment, does that already appear in the fee-paying AUM? Or is that capital that needs to be deployed? Or are there other considerations there?

Thanks, Alex. It's a good question. That does already appear in the fee-paying AUM. So we had a discussion with the client around the structure of our relationship. They added some -- they added a new mandate as part of an SMA, and that is included in the fee-paying AUM. And then as part of that, the -- one of the previously existing older mandates stepped down and stepped down just probably 6 months before we had initially expected it to.

And then for the next question, just about your point being more of a global solutions provider, understand Qualitas is helpful there, potentially win the incremental mandates. First part of that question, you mentioned they're launching a U.S. fund. Just want to understand if that's a fund for U.S. investors in their international products or what the deal is there? And then looking at channel mix, I'm seeing insurance company contributions to fee-paying AUM going up over the past handful of quarters. I wanted to check if that's just noise or variability, or if there may be a concerted effort that's flowing through the P&L of targeting the opportunity set as well.

So 2 great questions. So first, on the Qualitas U.S. Fund, it's actually kind of the opposite of how you described it. So effectively what it is, is a fund that will invest primarily in the U.S. and will be marketed primarily -- virtually exclusively, I would say, to European investors. And I think this is a great example actually of synergies across our platform of being able to do things kind of in a pan-strategy way. And here in particular, this involves Qualitas and RCP. So one of the things that happened -- many things happened, but one of the very positive things that happened when we announced the Qualitas RCP deal, and remember, they had -- sorry, the Qualitas P10 deal, and remember, Qualitas and RCP have been working together for a long time, Qualitas got a lot of inbound from many of their existing LPs saying, gosh, we would love to have equivalent lower-middle market and middle market exposure that you afford us in Europe into the U.S. but it needs to be in a wrapper that works from the perspective of retail and ultra-high net worth investors in Europe. And so getting it wrapped in the right format was incredibly important, but obviously, having the right investment mixology was incredibly important.

And so the beauty of this was it's really -- think of it as a joint venture product, though it's marketed as a Qualitas product, where Qualitas is really going to handle the structuring, the wrapping and obviously, primarily the distribution and the investor relations, and RCP is going to handle a lot of the portfolio mixology and the investing into the U.S., obviously, in close coordination and cooperation with Qualitas. And so it's a great example of the synergies that we talk about. So I'm actually really glad you asked the question. And I think we think there's a lot of other things like this we can do across the platform. But I think this is a great example of a synergy that we found, and I'm sure we'll continue to find many more as we continue to work and grow and execute together.

The second question you asked was on insurance and the growth of insurance assets. And I would say we are not focused exclusively on insurance, but we are focused generally on expanding, as we've talked about with Sarita and team and others. We are focused on expanding our footprint and deepening our relationships with large pools of capital and large pools of capital allocators. And clearly, insurance is one of those important pools. I wouldn't say it's exclusive to insurance. It includes pensions. It includes sovereign wealth funds and it includes large endowments and foundations. It will include retail platforms and other retail aggregators. But certainly, insurance is a big part of that.

And we have some funds in the market, I would say, that I think are particularly useful and appealing to insurance companies as they think about things like their return profile and kind of their broader capital allocation and obviously, doing things that are capital friendly from an NAIC perspective. And so I think we've been very lucky and very fortunate as part of this broader push to engage with larger pools of capital to have seen some real success and traction in the insurance channel. We don't think it will be unique and exclusive to the insurance channel, but it's certainly a focus of ours, Alex.

And great to see the cross-sell with Qualitas.

Our next question comes from the line of Michael Cyprys of Morgan Stanley.

I appreciate the commentary on the credit trends. I was hoping you could maybe elaborate a little bit on the steps you guys are taking to support accelerated growth across your credit platform, how you envision that contributing over the next couple of years? Which parts of the market do you view as most interesting for P10? And when you look at the capability set in the platform today, where is there scope to lean in via inorganic initiatives versus more organic builds?

Yes. These are all great questions. Thank you, Michael. Great questions, things we think about every day. So I'll take 3 parts of it. The first is just to underscore our relentless disciplined focus on making sure that we're always doing quality underwriting. And I will tell you, this is not some debt bed conversion we had in the last quarter because of the noise in the broader markets. This is something that we've done in a disciplined and diligent fashion since the very genesis of these platforms.

And obviously, we have had -- you look at the returns, we've seen great returns across the cycles, and that's because we really focus on risk-adjusted return. We do a lot of internal work. We also engage with third parties who assist us in evaluating and marking the portfolio. We consistently go back and re-underwrite. If there are loans that are not even necessarily problematic, but not performing to our expectation or our underwriting case, we are engaged for quarters, if not years, on sort of engaging with the underlying portfolio company and making sure that they're doing all the right things to enhance that credit quality. And so we feel really, really good about our robust disciplined underwriting process. This is not something that we've come to recently. This is something we've been engaged with since the very start of the platform.

I would then say, as it relates to our existing platform, we certainly see opportunities in many cases to grow the platform. And so I'll just give you kind of a few examples of things that we're really excited about. We continue to grow and expand our NAV lending franchise. That's through our Hark subsidiary. We've seen a lot of traction in that space. We obviously have a great, by the way, underwriting history in that space. But we've seen a lot of traction, a lot of uptake. It's clearly becoming a more broadly accepted and mainstream product. We're out marketing our next vintage of the core Hark product. And we just see a lot of engagement generally across NAV lending and what I would call NAV lending adjacent kind of strategies that I think are becoming just a more embedded part of the fund finance ecosystem these days. And so I think we have a lot of optimism around how that strategy plays out.

We also mentioned in Enhanced, which is our impact credit strategy, we're out with an evergreen product. And we see a lot of interest and sort of engagement around that. And I think we're really, really excited for what that looks like.

And then obviously, we have our WTI venture debt strategy that continues, I think, to deliver really attractive risk-adjusted returns in certain investor types, particularly those who are engaged in the venture ecosystem, but maybe want some structural protections really like that venture debt solution.

And then finally, obviously, within our Five Points franchise, we do a lot of SBIC lending, and that certainly has appealed to banks and others who are seeking CRA credit as part of their underwriting and investing mandate.

I would say more generally, and we've talked about this, we think there are ample opportunities within private credit. We've talked about areas like being much broader in direct lending. We've talked about areas like being much broader in asset-based lending. Clearly, there are other places like distressed and opportunistic credit.

One of the real benefits that we think we have in our platform, particularly if you took something like direct lending, and this kind of goes back to that discussion we just had around Qualitas and RCP, what are some of the potential synergies across our platform. One of the real powerful things in our ecosystem is our relationships with many of the middle market sponsors through RCP in the U.S., through Qualitas in Europe. We're generally one of the top LPs in some of the best world-beating middle and lower-middle market financial sponsors. And as those sponsors do deals, and particularly as they do buyouts and those buyouts generate credit opportunities, we think we would have a really unique and differentiated sourcing engine as it relates to those. Obviously, sourcing is both a challenge and an opportunity for many direct lenders. We really have the organic built-in sourcing engine already. And so if we could kind of marry that with the right team that had the right kind of underwriting, risk assessment, disposition, we think that, just as an example, could be a really compelling place to grow the platform.

And then just as a follow-up question, if I could, more bigger picture. When you look at the mid- and lower mid-market focused managers that you're investing capital with, what challenges do you see those GPs facing, whether it's larger GPs just garnering more share of flows or tougher exit route through IPOs for smaller companies or less ability to access private wealth? Just how do you see the sort of broader trends in that part of the market for those GPs? And how do you see the opportunity for P10 to lean in and provide a broader set of solutions to help and support these GPs?

Look, great, great, great question. And we think about this in so many ways, right? But the first is -- look, this is part of the broader -- this part of the market, the lower-middle market is part of the broader private asset ecosystem. And I would say no part of the broader asset ecosystem has been immune to the macro trends. What we did highlight, and I think, hopefully, you saw the slides in our second quarter earnings release, we would say we think we are in a relatively more protected and sheltered part of the market relative to some of the big trends in the upper part of the market. And so for all private equity firms engaged in buyout, whether at the upper part of the market or in the middle part of the market, DPI has been down, low these last few years. But it's been down meaningfully less in the lower-middle market than it's been down in the upper part of the market. And so we think there are some real structural advantages.

You also mentioned, by the way, the prospect of some of these exits and the prospect of exit via IPO. We think that's another structural advantage in our part of the market. Most of these companies, the vast lion's share of the companies that are in kind of our GPs portfolios don't end up going public, right? They end up getting sold in some sort of transaction, whether it's a trade sale to a strategic or whether it's a sale to, frankly, one of these larger financial sponsors or one of their larger platforms that they own within their portfolio. And so we think that while certainly a robust and vibrant capital market environment, IPO environment is good for everybody, and I suspect it would be good for us and for our GPs. We're kind of a little less sensitive to it than folks playing at the upper end of the market because they obviously had a much more meaningful part of their exit via IPO. And so we continue to like and value our part of the market.

Then you're asking what do we do for our GPs. And it's a really great question. And I think one of the advantages that we have in really getting folks to want to engage with us is the franchise, the history, the track record, the imprimatur, frankly, we give because of who we are. And a lot of that is informed by our data insights, right? And so when we work with our GPs, we can obviously give them through our GPScout, through our data solutions, tremendous insights around everything from macro trends in the market, trends in their space, trends in the geography they play in, and even kind of insights on specific deals, how have similar deals done historically, what are the things to watch out for, what has worked, what has not. And they often come to us in sort of an anonymized way and say, hey, we're looking at a deal that has XYZ parameters, can you help us think through this, what are the benefits, what are the detriments, what are the risks we ought to consider. And so you're not just getting capital from us. You're getting strategic advice. You're getting real insight.

And then I think one of the other advantages is given the RCP platform, given the kind of brand and stature that RCP has in the marketplace, and I think very similar with Qualitas in Europe, when somebody -- when other LPs or prospective LPs see an RCP, see a Qualitas in the cap stack, they know that these are high-quality managers, that these are folks that have demonstrated good performance metrics, and that these are people who have been diligenced by kind of the best in the business, so to speak, and we're really proud of that. And so those are kind of some of the things I think we're super helpful with in that part of the business.

I would also just highlight, and just to knit one other thought together, I think we're building as well a broader ecosystem of capital solutions for GPs. And so for instance, if you're a GP and you want to raise capital for one of your flagship funds, obviously, we can do that. We do that through RCP. We do that through Qualitas. And you can engage with us in that way, and we're very happy to, and we can provide all that information and insight that I talked about. If you then -- if that fund is now out of its investment period and there's a really attractive bolt-on opportunity and you need more capital through Hark, through being in that ecosystem, we can work with you to provide some sort of NAV loan that will help kind of boost the returns in that portfolio or enable you to do a tack-on deal or what have you. And if ultimately then you decide maybe I want more permanent embedded capital in my capital structure, and I want to embark at a GP stake sale, we can obviously engage with you through that via our Bonaccord business. And so I do think that that kind of platform synergy is another really powerful thing as we engage with GPs, Michael.

Our next question comes from the line of Benjamin Budish of Barclays.

Luke, you alluded to what I wanted to ask about a little bit in your prior response about P10 being a little less levered to kind of the broader M&A environment. But I'm just curious, when we listen to a lot of your peers who are much more tethered to that, whether it's through realizations or much bigger exposures to net credit deployment, we do hear more about an excitement that IPOs that M&A is going to pick up meaningfully. So just curious what could that mean for P10? Obviously, your model is less tethered to that, but where do you maybe see opportunities accelerating should the M&A environment pick up as rates are coming down? Where is there potential near-term upside just from that macro perspective?

Well, look, it's a great question. And when I say -- when you say we're less tethered to it, I guess what I would say is, I think we are a little inoculated on the downside is maybe how I would say it, right? But look, let's be clear, a good market is good for all participants regardless of size they play and regardless of segment. And so if we have a more accommodative backdrop with better M&A volumes, with more capital markets activity, with more financing and origination, that's going to be good for all players in the private asset ecosystem. And by the way, it will be really good for P10.

And I think to the point that you mentioned where people are seeing and talking about more optimism, I think we are seeing more activity as well across our businesses. Generally, you obviously see it kind of manifest itself first in transactions at the kind of GP level and then what does that origination bleed through into credit and then the opportunities for monetizations and so on and so forth. And I think, like others have observed and opined on the calls that have happened and are going to presumably continue to happen, we see a more benign and accommodative macro environment than we have for probably at least a few years, if not longer. And that will augur well for our business. That will accelerate deployment opportunities in our credit businesses in the short run. That will amplify, I'd say, returns across the private equity ecosystem we're engaging in. And I think as people get more risk on, they really want to lean into places where there's the potential for magnified returns. And there's no place like venture, if you want to express a view on magnified returns in a more robust and risk-on growth environment. And so we think a broader positive accommodative macro trend is good for virtually everything across the platform, and we're hopeful and optimistic that we're getting to a better part of the cycle here, and we think it will be really good for P10 then.

Maybe just one maybe more kind of narrow technical question. You mentioned that some buybacks have been, I think, pulled forward in -- earlier in the year and the absolute number was a little bit lower in Q3. What's the current level of your capacity into Q4? Do you need to sort of re-up your authorization? Just any kind of tactical details around that would be helpful.

I'm going to let Amanda take that one, but good question.

Thank you, Ben. So we have $26 million remaining on our buyback authorization. And I will say that while we continue to see share repurchases as an important tool for us to return capital to shareholders, we will continue to repurchase as it makes sense. Our long-term capital allocation priorities are to pay our dividends, which we've grown since -- 25% since instituting it in May of '22, M&A opportunities and share repurchases as it makes sense along with debt paydown.

I would now like to turn the conference back to Luke Sarsfield for closing remarks. Sir?

Thanks, Latif, and thank you all for joining us today and for the great questions. We look forward to reviewing our fourth quarter performance with you in February. On that call, we will review full year 2025, outline an exciting 2026, and provide financial guidance for the year. We are aligned with you, our fellow shareholders, and remain deeply committed to the long-term interest of our franchise. Thank you, and have a good day.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.