Welcome to the Hercules Capital 2020 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. I will now turn the meeting over to Scott Bluestein.
Thank you. Good morning and welcome to the Hercules Capital 2020 Annual Stockholders' Meeting. My name is Scott Bluestein, and I am the President, CEO, and Chief Investment Officer of Hercules. It is my pleasure to welcome you today to this meeting. We're pleased to be hosting our meeting virtually, which allows us to be more inclusive and reach a greater number of our stockholders. As is our custom, we will conduct the business portion of our meeting first and answer questions at the end of the meeting. Though we may not be able to answer every question, we will do our best to provide a response to as many as possible. In keeping with the digital approach to this year's meeting, it is now shortly after 9:00 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time on June 12, 2020, and this meeting is officially called to order.
The company has appointed Broadridge Financial Services to act as Inspector of Election. Chris Wood from Broadridge is here with us today and has taken the oath of Inspector of Election earlier today. After the formal business meeting has been adjourned, we will provide a short presentation and then allow time for general questions. Only validated stockholders may ask questions in the designated field on the web portal. Out of consideration for others, please limit yourself to one question. Please note that this meeting is being recorded. However, no one attending via the webcast or telephone is permitted to use any audio recording device. The Board of Directors fixed April 20, 2020, as the record date for determining stockholders entitled to vote at this meeting.
An affidavit has been delivered attesting to the fact that a notice of the meeting, proxy statement, and the 2020 Annual Report on Form 10-K to stockholders were mailed on or about May 8, 2020, to all stockholders as of the record date and will be incorporated into the minutes of this meeting. Stockholder list shows that as of the record date, there were 110,594,697 shares of common stock outstanding and entitled to vote at this meeting. We are informed by the Inspector of Election that there are represented in person or by proxy shares of common stock representing 90,276,983 votes, or approximately 81.63% of the voting power on the record date. Since this represents more than a majority of the voting power of all issued and outstanding stock entitled to vote on the record date, a quorum is present for purposes of transacting business.
Now, I will present the matters to be voted upon. Please note that we will give stockholders an opportunity to comment on the proposals themselves after all proposals have been presented. Proposal one is the election of directors. The board has nominated two Class 1 directors, Mr. Robert P. Badavas and Ms. Carol L. Foster, to hold office until the 2023 Annual Meeting of Stockholders or until their successors are duly elected and qualified. Proposal two is the advisory vote to approve the compensation of our named executive officers as described in the proxy statement. This vote is non-binding. Proposal three is to ratify the selection of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP to serve as our independent public accounting firm for the year ending December 31, 2020. If any stockholder would like to make a comment regarding any of the proposals, please submit your comment through the web portal.
With no comments received, it is now 9:04 A.M. Pacific Time on June 12, 2020, and the polls are now open. Any stockholder who has not yet voted or wishes to change their vote may do so by clicking on the voting button on the web portal and following the instructions there. Stockholders who have sent in proxies or voted via telephone or internet and do not want to change their vote do not need to take any further action. Now that everyone has had the opportunity to vote, I now declare the polls for the 2020 Hercules Capital Annual Stockholder Meeting closed at 9:05 A.M. Pacific Time on June 12, 2020. Do we have preliminary voting results?
Yes, we do. The preliminary vote report shows that the nominees for the election to the Board have been duly elected, the compensation of the named executive officers has been approved by advisory vote, and the auditors have been ratified.
Thank you, Chris. We will be reporting the final vote results in a Form 8-K to be filed within four business days. There being no further business to come before the meeting, the 2020 Annual Meeting of Stockholders of Hercules Capital is now adjourned. Now, I will give a brief presentation followed by our question-and-answer session. I'm going to start briefly on page three, which is our safe harbor statement for forward-looking statements, and I would strongly encourage everyone to go ahead and read that. We're going to cover four specific things in this presentation. Number one, we're going to speak to some of the highlights and achievements that Hercules Capital achieved in 2019. We're going to provide a brief year-to-date 2020 update on key highlights and achievements. We'll then walk through a brief company overview, and then, as we indicated earlier, we will provide time for a question-and-answer session.
On page six, you can see that 2019 was a record year for Hercules Capital. This performance was largely driven by the strength of our team and the depth of our platform. In 2019, we delivered nearly $1.5 billion of new debt and equity commitments. That was a record number, and it was up nearly 22% from the prior year. We also delivered in excess of $1 billion of new gross fundings for the first time in the history of the company, which was up over 7% from the prior year. In 2019, we also delivered record total investment income, record net investment income, and we are very proud of the fact that we were also able to deliver record total declared distributions to our shareholders of $1.42, which was up nearly 13% from the prior year.
On page seven, you can see a few additional highlights and achievements of the company in 2019. We enhanced and added to our executive team. The company appointed myself, Scott Bluestein, as President, CEO, and Chief Investment Officer. The company also named Seth Meyer, Chief Financial Officer, in March of 2019. We increased our quarterly base cash distribution to shareholders to $0.32 per share. We ended the year with record undistributed earnings spillover of $68 million. We reaffirmed our investment-grade credit ratings from both KBRA and DBRS, and the portfolio continued to perform with 14 portfolio company IPOs and 13 portfolio company M&A events in fiscal year 2019. The strong growth that we delivered in 2019 was supported by strong capital-raising activities. In 2019, we raised $105 million of institutional bonds at 4.77%. We also raised an additional $250 million of asset-backed notes at 4.703%.
Throughout the course of 2019, between a common stock offering and ATM issuances, the company raised over $130 million of equity capital, and we also completed a new $200 million credit facility led by Union Bank. These capital-raising initiatives and activities in 2019 have been further enhanced year-to-date in 2020. We increased our credit facility with Union Bank from $200 million to $400 million in February of this year. Not only did we increase the size, but we decreased the pricing, decreased the number of covenants, and significantly increased the flexibility associated with that facility. We also raised an additional $120 million of institutional unsecured bonds in early 2020. On page nine, you can see that Hercules has historically and continued to outperform its peer group with respect to total shareholder return.
Hercules has outperformed in each of the one-year, three-year, five-year, and seven-year periods that we use to track our total shareholder return metrics. On page ten, you can see that 2019 was also very strong for Hercules with respect to, broadly speaking, delivering strong shareholder returns. We delivered in Q4 of 2019 return on average assets of 7.3%. That was nearly a 300 basis point premium to our applicable peer group. With respect to return on equity, we delivered 15.4% in Q4, which is nearly a 700 basis point premium over our applicable peer group. At the bottom of page ten, you can see that Hercules has now, since inception, declared $962 million of cumulative distributions that have been paid to our shareholders since our June 2005 initial public offering. The strong performance that we delivered in 2019 has continued into the early parts of 2020.
On page 12, you can see that in Q1, we crossed the $10 billion cumulative commitment number, and we also crossed nearly $7.8 billion of cumulative fundings since inception. The item that we are probably most proud of is the bottom of page 12, and you can see that on a cumulative basis since inception, across nearly $10.2 billion of commitments, we have total aggregate net realized losses of $16.6 million, which is equivalent to an effective annualized loss rate of only one basis point. On page 13, you can see a small number of the achievements that we've achieved year-to-date in 2020. In Q1, as we announced in May, we delivered record net investment income of $40.6 million. We increased our undistributed earnings spillover to $73.2 million.
As I mentioned earlier, we increased the size and syndicate of our Union Bank-led credit facility, and we also completed the additional investment-grade private placement of notes in February with a follow-up delayed draw closing that took place in June. The total of that was $120 million of additional institutional capital raised to support our continued growth in 2020. Switching briefly to a quick overview of the company, Hercules is set up a little bit differently than the majority of other players in our space in that we have domain expertise specifically in each of the verticals that we cover. We do not have a generalist model. We have a separate team that focuses on technology, a separate team that focuses on life sciences, and then we also have separate teams that focus on SaaS financing , sustainable and renewable technology, and select special situations when those opportunities arise.
We have key venture capital offices in each of the core venture capital markets across the country, with main offices in California and Massachusetts and satellite offices in New York, D.C., Chicago, and Connecticut. We are also very proud of the fact that we have done transactions with over 1,000 different venture capital and private equity firms, which speaks to the breadth and depth of our investment platform. On page 16, a few highlights of our portfolio activity as of Q1 2020. As of the end of Q1, nearly 98% of our portfolio continues to be floating-rate instruments with a contractual floor. You can see that over 95% of our portfolio continues to be in senior secured debt with less than 5% exposure to equity and warrants.
And on the bottom of the page, you can see that we are diversified not just by specific sector or industry, but also by geography. On page 17, you can see just a small number of the companies that we are very proud to have partnered with either currently or over the years. A couple of names that I will just mention that speaks to the fact that these companies continue to perform despite some of the market turbulence that we've seen in early 2020. I would highlight on the technology side our investment in Couchbase. That company just recently announced an equity financing where they raised over $100 million of new equity capital. On the life sciences side, we've had ChemoCentryx, BridgeBio, and Tricida, just to name a few.
Each of those companies year-to-date through the most recent reporting period have raised well in excess of $150 million each of new capital, which speaks to some of the trends that we are continuing to see across our portfolio. On page 18, you can see that on the liability side, we continue to be highly diversified. Our firm has been built on a diversified asset base, and we have that same mentality with respect to how we've managed the liability side of the business. We do not have reliance on any single instrument or any single investor to fund the needs of our business. On page 19, you can see the sources of funding that we have with the specific duration and rates on each of those instruments.
But I would highlight on page 19, if you look at the bottom of the page, you can see that Hercules has no material near-term maturities on any of its liabilities until 2022. So with respect to navigating the current challenges in the market, we are in a great position given that we do not have any maturities or any material maturities until 2022 per the chart that we show on the bottom of page 19. In closing, I would just highlight again that 2019 was a record year for Hercules. We followed that up with strong performance in Q1 as well, and we certainly look forward to providing a more recent and relevant update when we close Q2 and we deliver our Q2 earnings to our shareholders in the late July, early August time period. Now we would like to open things up for stockholder questions and comments.
We will take stockholder questions that are being entered today on the web portal. Please note that we will attempt to answer as many questions as time allows, but only questions that are germane to the meeting will be addressed. With no questions, I would like to now thank everyone for joining, and we certainly appreciate your historical and ongoing support. Thank you and have a great day.
The conference has now concluded, and we thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.