Sajal Srivastava
Analyst · Wells Fargo. Please go ahead
Thank you, Jim and good morning everyone. During the first quarter, we closed $115 million of debt commitments with four companies, and added two new companies to the portfolio. The first was Toast, which offers a mobile cloud-base point of sale and management systems that helps restaurants improve operations, increase sales and create a better guest experience. The company has raised over a $130 million of equity capital from Bessemer Venture Partners, GV, the venture capital on with Google, Generation Investment, which is Al Gore’s investment firm and others. The second was QuadCast, which is a machine learning and artificial intelligence driven direct audience insights and measurement platform. QuadCast has raised over $60 million of equity capital from Founders Firm, Revolution Partners, Polaris Adventures, Cisco and others. And as Jim mentioned, we achieved the record level for our investment portfolio this quarter as a result of funding $38 million of investments with 13.8% weighted yield to six companies, and increased our leverage ratio to 0.73. The majority of the fundings occurred in the last month of the quarter so they didn’t contribute meaningfully to income in Q1. However, at this portfolio level, yield profile and leverage ratio, we cover our dividend from a portfolio without the need for any prepayment related income. Also during the quarter, HP prepaid $3.3 million lease tranche for SimpliVity, a mature investment that was roughly eight months away from its scheduled maturity date, which contributed an incremental 0.4% to our core portfolio yield of 13.6% for the quarter, bringing total portfolio yield to 14%, up from 13.5% last quarter. Moving on to credit quality, there were no changes to the ratings of companies on our watch list during the quarter, and the weighted average internal credit rating of the debt investment portfolio was 2.03. As a reminder, under our rating system, loans are rated from one to five with one being the strongest credit quality, and all new loans are initially generally rated two. So far in Q2, we signed $80 million of term sheets, closed $70 million of debt commitments and funded $16 million of investments. We expect to deploy all the Ring repayment proceeds into investments this quarter and to receive an higher level for investment portfolio. Although, as usual, we expect of the majority of fundings to occur at the end of the quarter. Before I hand the call over to Andrew, I would like to share some thoughts regarding our Board’s approval of the modified asset coverage requirements, enabling our asset coverage ratio to change from 200% to 150%, effective April 24, 2019 and our intent to submit a proposal to shareholders to approve the application of the reduced asset coverage requirements earlier than April 24th 2019. In particular, the Board approved the modified asset coverage requirement based on the Company's strategic objectives, business opportunities, operating requirements, history of prudently using leverage, anticipated leverage utilization and the benefits to stock holders, while balancing the risks and other considerations. With regard to strategic objectives, as we articulated on last quarter’s call, our highest priority in 2018 is to capitalize on the strong demand for venture growth stage lending and grow the Company from an exceptional but small-cap BDC to a larger and more diversified BDC. We discussed our plan to achieve this by growing our investment portfolio, using our recently obtained exemptive order to co-invest with other funds or sponsor manages and raising more capital, both publicly and privately. We believe that having the flexibility to incur additional leverage assist with these objectives by serving as another source of capital to fund the portfolio, especially when equity capital may not be readily available, or when it may make sense to delay an equity capital raise until we believe conditions are optimal for one. We do not plan to change our investment strategy, product mix, security profile or the targeted yield profile and the investments we will make as a result of the availability of additional leverage. We see this is enabling us to continue to meet the strong demand and pipeline we have today, and we expect to continue to see. Our revolving warehouse credit facility lenders are supportive of reducing our asset coverage ratio below 200% as our credit facility allows us to reduce our coverage ratio to match the statutory limit. And our publicly traded five and three quarter notes due 2022, which we raised in July 2017, do not include any restrictions on our ability to reduce our asset coverage ratio. With regards to actual leverage utilization guidelines, we intend to use the additional leverage in a focused and balanced way. And in particular, are expanding our target leverage ratio range to 0.6 to 1.0. So again 0.6 to 1.0. Given that our debt investments are initially structured as unfunded commitments and once funded, typically have short term durations with amortization and often prepay, we believe there maybe periods when be maybe below or above this target leverage ratio. We expect to use, however, proceeds from prepayments and repayments, as well as proceeds from equity capital raises to reduce our leverage outstanding, but may also maintain liquidity employment capacity in anticipation of new unfunded commitments and investment fundings. We believe that with this approach, we are not changing the risk profile for our shareholders, while increasing the potential to drive higher returns on equity through higher net investment income. In closing, I am pleased to say that we’re on track with the game plan we articulated to investors for 2018, and our brand, reputation, relationships and track record, continue to differentiate us in the market and with prospective portfolio companies. I'll now turn the call over to Andrew to highlight some of the key financial metrics achieved during the quarter.