Ridgepost Capital, Inc. (RPC) Q1 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

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.