TriplePoint Venture Growth BDC Corp. (NYSE:TPVG) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Kevin Fultz: Okay. Great. That’s it for me. Thanks for taking my questions.

Operator: The next question comes from Christopher Nolan with Ladenburg Thalmann. Please go ahead.

Christopher Nolan: Hey guys. Back to Medly again. Jim, did I hear you correctly saying that the company sort of imploded following a failed equity raise?

Jim Labe: There was actually a little bit more to it than that. Medly, optionally was a digital pharmacy and delivery business and they did raise significant equity dollars and accretive acquisition and revenue scale, and there were a number of lenders also caught up in this, including Silicon Valley Bank with a healthy exposure. But it’s an ongoing case in legal matters. I’m not able to elaborate much further at this time, but we are moving forward with the portfolio and putting that behind us.

Sajal Srivastava: Yes. And maybe just to clarify, Chris, so it was a filled kind of debt financing, and then there was additional financing that the inside investors as well as us put together to finance a plan to profitability for the company, but it was post that financing from existing investors and us when some of the impropriety activity that Jim had talked about that the bankruptcy financings — filings had mentioned were discovered, and that’s when things imploded.

Christopher Nolan: And I guess as a follow-up related to that, I mean I know in your comments, you’re saying that many of your portfolio companies are raising equity, but are they doing down rounds?

Jim Labe: Yes, I mentioned that a little bit. They’re doing down rounds, but there’s also up rounds by the way, going on. There’s kind of a mixture of both. We do have down round protection in passing in a number of our companies. But we’re more focused on the companies raising the capital and making payments and the debt service. But yes, for sure, and we anticipate there will be, as I mentioned, more down round.

Christopher Nolan: Great. And then Chris, just a reminder, does the look back reset every year, or is it cumulative to on capital gains going back to the IPO?

Chris Mathieu: It goes back to the IPO. It’s cumulative. There’s no reset.

Christopher Nolan: Okay. So the whole Medly thing should impact incentive fee accruals at least for a couple of quarters, I would think.

Chris Mathieu: Yes. It fully impacted the — there was no incentive fee for Q4, and it’s expected to impact Q1 as we expect some recovery in the overall portfolio, but there’ll be some impact unknown right now, but some impact in Q1 as well.

Christopher Nolan: Understood. Okay. Thanks for taking my questions.

Operator: The next question comes from Ryan Lynch with KBW. Please go ahead.

Ryan Lynch: Hey, good afternoon. Yes, I wanted to first touch on your commentary on expected funding for the year, $300 million to $500 million. I know you said you expect $200 million of scheduled repayments in the year. But given where you guys are from a leverage standpoint, at this point, aren’t your funding basically just going to match your repayment. And so really just the level of prepayments that you get above this $200 million scheduled repayments was probably going to be the number that you guys are going to be looking at for gross — for funded investments throughout the year, or am I missing something with that?

Sajal Srivastava: Yeah. It’s an interesting question, Ryan. So I would say what we’re seeing generally is — it’s somewhat surprising is lower overall utilization of unfunded commitments. And so — and again, I think it’s a testament to the quality of the portfolio companies that they’re focusing on cutting their burn, focusing on raising equity capital, not looking to dip into leverage to fund them necessarily in this environment. So I’d say, overall, we’ve definitely seen a drop in unfunded utilization. And then as we look to new origination, I think it’s a balance, I’d say, as we commented on, the companies that were originating transactions with right now are generally companies that have recently raised equity round. So we’re seeing fresh reset valuations or appropriate valuations vis-à-vis where multiples are, but their company is sitting on significant liquidity.