Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Flow Capital's earnings call for Q4 and year-end 2025. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question -and -answer session. Instructions will be provided at that time for you to queue up for questions. If anyone has difficulties hearing the conference, you may press star zero for operator assistance at any time. I would like to welcome everyone, to remind everyone that today's discussions may contain forward-looking statements that reflect current views with respect to future events. Any such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. For more information on Flow Capital's risks and uncertainties related to these forward-looking statements, please refer to the Y/E 2025 company's management discussion and analysis, which is available on SEDAR.
Today's call is being recorded on Friday, April 17th, 2026. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Alex Baluta, Chief Executive Officer of Flow Capital.
Thank you very much, Joelle, and thank you, everybody, for joining here for our Q4 and 2025 year-end financial results. I am joined by our CFO, Michael Denny. You can find our results filed on SEDAR or in the investor relations section on our website. For the 12 months ended December 31st, we recorded CAD 13.2 million in revenue. That's up 41% from the year -earlier period. We had a 79% increase in recurring free cash flow to CAD 3.4 million. On a per share basis, that was CAD 0.11 , up from CAD 0.06. We also deployed almost CAD 28 million in new capital during the year. Book value per share is up to CAD 1.27 from CAD 1.20 at the end of the prior year. All in all, it was an excellent year.
That is the highest growth rate we've recorded in revenue and the highest revenue that we've reported since we transitioned to, actually, forever, since our entire history. If you recall, in late 2018, we transitioned to venture debt away from what the prior company used to do, which was royalties. That's been a very successful transition. For the three months, for the fourth quarter, revenue was up 33% to CAD 3.6 million. Recurring free cash flow was up 66% to CAD 900,000. We deployed CAD 4.5 million in new investments in the quarter. Overall assets at the end of the year, invested into investment assets has grown to 22% to CAD 73.5 million. Those assets are primarily in loans, but, I'll mention later on in the call that we are starting to increasingly do small equity investments.
One thing I did want to highlight is you'll note that the presentation of our financial statements has changed somewhat. We've tried to simplify it. We also want to mention that we have a new auditor this year in PricewaterhouseCoopers, and that has been an excellent experience, and I do want to thank them for their guidance and the hard work that they put in. For the year, we deployed CAD 27.5 million. Of that, CAD 17.7 million was into new investments and CAD 9.8 million was into follow-on investments or existing tranches into existing investments. I do want to point out that that's an important part of our model, which is those follow-on investments. It's become an increasingly important part of our model. We do small initial tranches, might be 2 or 3 or 4 million.
As the company continues to deliver, we then may add, in some cases, up to four additional tranches. From our perspective, that is actually a de-risked investment in that we've watched the company perform, and we're very comfortable with their capabilities, and therefore, we're very comfortable investing additional capital into the business. Almost CAD 10 million of our deployments last year were into follow-on investments into existing companies. It's also worth noting that a small portion of our investments are now going into actual direct equity. For the year, we did about CAD 1.2 million of equity. This is not a core part of our business, but often what we'll do is take larger equity positions in some of the existing investments that we have. Again, it's because of the quality of the investment. It's because of our comfort with the company, with their growth, and with management.
That adds upside to our overall performance as we go forward. Repayments in the year was CAD 12 million. That was across four deals. Of those CAD 12 million in four deals that repaid, about CAD 470,000 in cash came in the form of early prepayment fees. Again, an important part of our overall model. Three of those transactions had IRRs, I should say two had IRRs north of 23%, one had an IRR north of 30%, and one had a slightly negative IRR. However, it's interesting to point out that that company continues to exist.
It has been restructured. We have a meaningful position not only in a debt instrument to that company, but also in equity. It's another important part of our model is that we spend a lot of time working with our investee companies to ensure that there's a good outcome, even if that takes multiple years.
In fact, there was another deal this year that we exited after 4.5-5 years post-investment. That was an investment that years ago didn't work and was written off. We continued to work with management. We continued to provide them guidance, and in the end, it was a very successful outcome. From that deal, we actually continue to have equity upside. It's a part of our strategy not only to ensure we get better returns, but also to work with all stakeholders in the companies that we invest in. Looking at the overall portfolio, I mentioned it's CAD 73.5 million in invested assets or invested capital. There are 13 loans, which I call core loans. There are also three non-core loans. Very, very small amount of assets in that, but 16 loans in total. We have 22 warrant, well, let's call them equity-like positions.
We have 16 either private or public equity positions. Again, this is a very, very important part of our model is that in the 38 positions that we have that are equity-like, and when I say equity-like, sometimes we have what's called an exit fee or a success fee. It's not a warrant; it's actually a success fee that is paid upon the exit of the company. That may happen well after our loan is repaid. These warrants and equity positions represent an important part of our overall return, but also an important buffer for us. By that I mean, not all the equity positions will turn into positive outcomes. In fact, the way we evaluate it is probably less than a third of our warrant positions ever translate into anything.
However, when they do work, they work meaningfully well, meaning that they do make up for our losses, and that's historically been our experience. To the extent that we do have a principal loss, which is very rare, in one of our underlying entities, the warrants on our other entities more than makes up for those losses. What that means is that in real numbers, over the last seven years, more than seven years, our top-line portfolio IRR is about 24%. That is a really strong track record that, quite frankly, I'm proud of us, I'm proud of the team, I'm proud of our structure and our approach. To have achieved 24% portfolio-level IRR, is pretty remarkable, and I think it's now well-proven, in terms of our approach to quality underwriting, our approach to risk management, risk assessment.
It's something that we hope to continue in the future. Overall, the health of the portfolio, I think, is very good today. Probably as good as it's been over the last several years. Now, I want to talk a little bit about industry. You probably heard some industry headlines about private capital, private credit bubble. To be honest, there's lots of moving pieces. I look at it as if you go back into the 2022, 2023, 2025 timeframe, a lot of extra capital made its way into private credit. In some instances, more than doubling or tripling the amount of capital available in entire credit sectors, like the BDCs in the U.S., for example. That led to pricing pressure. That led to aggressive loans.
Eventually, that led to some bad news, and you've seen some of those bigger bad news stories in the broader private credit sector. That led to fear, uncertainty, and doubt on an investor's perspective, and that led to redemptions, which has finally led to gating. What you saw was positive headlines in the 2022, 2023, 2024 timeframe, concern headlines in 2025, and now more concern headlines in 2026. Many of these private credit funds who are open to investors have been gated, meaning they've stopped redemptions in order to ensure that they don't have a mismatch between their assets and their liabilities. We're a small section of the private credit space, specifically focused on venture debt and growth venture debt, and we have seen pricing pressure in our space. Headline interest rates have come down. IRR overall has come down.
Now, for us, we're in a unique position. When I say come down, it's by no means, they're still in the low teens, but it's come down from where it was before. I don't think there's a bubble, and frankly, I don't have the expertise or insight to prove otherwise. We are seeing some pressure, but it's not overwhelming pressure. It's important to point out our model and our approach. We are an evergreen fund. With CAD 38 million in equity, the money from a return transaction or a repayment of a loan comes back into our balance sheet, and then we generally redeploy that. What we don't have is deployment pressure because we also have lines of credit that are repayable lines of credit. Essentially, warehouse lines.
We can pay down our warehouse line without having to keep excess capital on our balance sheet, which means we're not paying for excess capital, which means we don't have price or margin erosion pressure based on paying interest on a line of principal, or I should say, capital that is undeployed. That's a unique benefit of our model. It's important because it allows us to continue to be very selective, to continue to maintain our high standards in underwriting, and continue to therefore try and generate very strong top of the funnel or I should say, top of the portfolio returns. We are being very selective. We continue to be selective and will always be selective. That does mean that we may not close as many deals as we may have wanted to or we may have been able to in the past.
Nevertheless, I do feel that given that a lot of the major funds are gated, that means they're not going to be deploying capital as aggressively. I think that what we saw was a trickle-down of pricing pressure over the last several years. I suspect and expect that that's going to reverse over time, over the coming quarters, and pricing pressure will ease, and deployment of capital will continue. One thing is certain is that high growth companies, the type that we invest in, and really, if we solve for one thing that we look for when we invest in, and that is growth. We invest in growth companies that are growing greater than 20%, doing revenue usually above $5 million, and we'll invest anywhere from $2 million-$10 million into those companies, and we sell for growth.
While that industry itself, not the industry, that sector has also seen uncertainty with AI, there continue to be deals underwritten, and I expect that the volume of deals underwritten that could use minimally dilutive growth capital will recover over the coming quarters. Lastly, those are really wrapping up my formal comments. I do want to mention that we continue to have, as many of you know and many of you are invested in, our SAFERs. Our SAFERs is a form of yield security that we provide to investors. For Canadian dollar-denominated SAFERs, the return is 8%. That's at its floor. It's actually a floating rate. The floor is 8%, the ceiling is 12%. If for investors with more than CAD 1 million, the floor rate is 8.5%.
For our U.S. dollar-denominated SAFER investors, the current yield on sub-$1 million investments is 9.14%, and on investments greater than $1 million, it's 9.64%. For investors who are interested in yield, please feel free to call us at any time. With that, I'll pause my commentary and open it up for questions.
Your first question comes from Ed Solba with Barton. Your line is now open.
Hi, Ed.
Hi, Alex.
Congrats on the quarter and the year.
Thank you.
I joined late. Thanks for the cover. Did you mention the book value per share?
Yeah. Book value per share was CAD 1.27, up from CAD 1.20 the prior year.
Okay. Very nice. I think that's it for me, but thanks, and I look forward to coming here.
Thank you, Ed. Thanks for being a longtime supporter and happy to chat at any time.
Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, should you have a question, please press star one. There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call over to Alex for closing remarks.
Operator, it looks like there's one other question that just popped up from Trevor Wilcox. Can we allow him to ask that question, please?
Yes.
Thank you.
Good morning. Can you hear me?
Yes, Trevor.
Great. Thank you very much. Thank you, team, for the review. A couple of quick questions. Can you characterize what drove the big increase in revenue this year? I think that's great. Can you characterize the three main things that drove that?
Yeah. Really, it's just additional deployment of capital. Our objective is, well, really two things. One, new deals, and two, follow-on investments into existing deals. This is our average duration of the loans that we issue is three years, 36 months, or at least that's at the time of issuance. The average duration, we're usually repaid early on many of them, so let's assume that that's 30 months on average deployed. If we're deploying more capital per year than we're getting repaid, and the average duration is 2.5-3 years, you'll see us continue to grow our portfolio. It's really a function of the deployment of capital , and both into new deals and existing deals. We've been squarely focused on that market now for eight years. It's our core business.
We are doing slightly more, and when I say slightly, just on the order of less than 5% of our total assets into equity, which are non-yielding portfolio investments. We're squarely focused on making investments into cash-yielding monthly -pay loans to high-growth companies, and we're simply deploying more than we've had repaid. It's actually, Trevor, a very simple business. Source, find high-growth companies, make very strong risk-adjusted credit decisions, monitor those companies, work with those companies. In the vast majority of cases, those companies refinance us through either an exit, they sell the company, they refinance us with cheaper credit, or they do a large equity raise. Over this year, I expect you'll see one or two of those. That's a natural progression of our portfolio, but it's pretty straightforward. No magic, just hard work.
Yep. No, that's great. My follow-on to that is what's the challenges in terms of keeping that growth going?
Yeah. I mentioned the industry headwinds. It's a challenge where, with pricing pressure, we want to be careful that we don't make investment decisions that on a risk-adjusted basis, don't have the necessary hurdles. One of the challenges is kind of staying the course of quality and slowing down deployments when the industry is, I don't want to use the word irrational, but when the industry is behaving in a manner that puts us outside of our comfort zone from a risk-return perspective. We have to be careful. We don't have deployment pressure, but if deployment slows down, you'll see our top-line revenue slow down. The growth slow down. If we have early repayments, which we have had, as I said, our average duration is less than 36 months. Usually, those early repayments are good.
It's because something good has happened to that company. They've grown, they've gotten cheaper, they've grown into an equity round. Those repayments come with prepayment fees. There's upside to our book value per share, in particular with early repayments, but that then comes with a reduction in revenue, and we have to deploy. The challenges are making sure that we see enough deals and invest in high-quality companies, and in a market where there's pricing pressure because of excess capital that flowed into the market in 2022, 2023, and 2024. I wouldn't be surprised to see a slower growth rate in the coming quarters just because we're being more careful in deployment.
Yeah. Great. Thank you. I got one other question, but I don't want to waste time.
No, go ahead. There's no other callers, so go ahead and ask, Trevor.
Okay. I think you've covered the private markets and the challenges that were reflected with that. I don't see this company having the same exposure. It's not the same. What you spoke to is managing the risk of the portfolio.
Yep.
I think the way that you provision your loan loss and look at your expected loss in the different phases is good. That's where my question is in terms of how you're managing that process because the-
Yeah
Quality of it is going to be key.
Yeah. The 24% seven-year IRR that I mentioned includes losses and write-downs. We're pretty aggressive, or maybe it's the opposite, conservative. We tend to write down our loans and warrants quickly. We don't like writing them up. They're uncertain. They're long-term. We try to be very careful. It really comes down to a philosophy. I mentioned earlier, we had four repayments. We actually had five. The fifth, though, was a deal that had been written down to zero years ago, but we continued to work with management. It's very important to be focused on. Well, let me step back. We monitor all our companies monthly. Every company always has to provide its monthly financial statements. We monitor trends. We have covenants. We talk to all of our management teams monthly, if not more.
We will often give them a heads-up on their performance because let's be honest, management of growth companies are optimists. They have to be. We have to be focused on the non-optimistic scenario. We'll often say, "Hey guys, this metric is starting to get offside. Are you concerned? What can we do about it? How do we manage that?" The point of having covenants is to be able to provide stronger guidance to management. Even before a covenant is tripped, which doesn't happen that often, but it does happen. We're watching and monitoring behavior of companies. Without overstating, we're experts in, particularly on our credit team, in understanding growth in high-growth companies. Often, management teams aren't.
We spend a lot of time, we spend a big lot of time building a sort of an infrastructure to track the behavior and the performance of companies, and then we stay on top of it. You'll find many of our companies will. Frankly, they said to us, "You give us better feedback than our board does." I don't mean to disparage board members. That's not always the case in growth companies, but what we find is that we're very helpful. The feedback is that we're helpful because of our knowledge, because of our monitoring, and we'll help them manage their businesses. That is super important for us to manage our risk. If a company is missing on metrics, but they can slow down their growth rate and reduce their burn, that not only helps us, that helps them and their stakeholders.
There's an entire process that we have in place of monitoring, reporting, management, communication, et cetera. If something does go off the rails, we then continue to work with those teams. It has been a long-term investment of our time to work with those companies that have gotten into trouble. We'll write them off in terms of our own carrying value and our asset base. Ultimately, we saw a successful exit this year, late in the year, of a company that was struggling and working to repair itself for over four years. That's important, that it represents upside to us. That also represents a safe exit for the other stakeholders. It's just our philosophy. What we won't do is, unless we absolutely have to, we just won't walk away from a company.
It's a long answer to, there is heavy lifting in this business, but it's served us very well. We'll continue to behave that way. At the end of the day, the other thing that I mentioned earlier is that the upside on our equity positions has historically more than made up for the downside in modest principal loss that we may have experienced in some of our prior investments. One other point to mention, in another one of our portfolio companies that had struggles, we returned CAD 0.92 on the dollar. We continue to have a position. The assets were then sold to another entity, and we have a meaningful common equity position in that entity, plus a loan that is repaid through revenue. It's not a royalty, call it a deferred purchase price. Already we made CAD 0.92 on the dollar.
That company and the assets lives to fight another day, and we continue to have upside. It's a long answer to monitoring companies, managing risk, working with managing teams, not having pressure to deploy. It's a full circle in all the component pieces of our strategy and our approach.
Fantastic. Thank you. Sounds like you've lots of good management going on, lots of use of the flexibility that you got. Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks again for your support, Trevor, and your questions.
Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, should you have a question, please press star one. There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call over to Alex for closing remarks.
Thank you very much, Joelle. Thank you everybody for listening. As I said, you can find our results on our website on SEDAR. Our Q1 numbers will be out within 4-6 weeks. We'll be talking to you relatively shortly again. Thank you all for your time.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your line.