Good afternoon. Welcome to the TriplePoint Venture Growth fourth quarter 2018 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Andrew Olsen, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We are pleased to share with you our results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2018. Here with me are Jim Labe, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board, and Sajal Srivastava, President and Chief Investment Officer. Before I turn the call over to Jim, I would like to direct your attention to the customary safe harbor disclosure in our press release regarding forward-looking statements and remind you that during this call, we may make certain statements that relate to future events or the company's future performance or financial condition, which may be considered forward-looking statements under federal securities law. We ask that you refer to the most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission for important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements.
We do not undertake any obligation to update our forward-looking statements or projections unless required by law. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements made during the call, which reflect management's opinions only as of today. To obtain copies of our latest SEC filings, please visit the company's website at tpvg.com. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jim.
Thanks, Andrew. Good afternoon, and welcome everybody. Today marks a really special day for us. Today is the fifth anniversary of our IPO and the day that we launched TPVG. On this anniversary, I'm not only pleased to share our outstanding performance of the past quarter, but also what was a record-setting 2018 and five years of outstanding growth, achievements, and results for our shareholders behind that. Before getting to the quarter and what was truly a stellar year, let's talk about the past five and some of the highlights that we achieved since our IPO through this past December. We made cumulative commitments of more than $1.6 billion. We made cumulative investment fundings of more than a billion dollars. We increased our investment portfolio three and a half times since the IPO.
We paid out $7.08 per share in distributions as of this past December, which provided a cash-on-cash aggregate return of 47.2% based on our original $15 per share IPO price. We are also proud to state that in the period since the IPO, we have covered our dividend, and that includes paying two special dividends as well in the period. We believe we are the only venture lending BDC to do so over that period. These are just some of the highlights during the first five years, with this past year, 2018, being a year where we finished with several all-time performance records for the business, representing our very best year yet as we set the following company records.
A record in an annual investment income, a record in our annual net investment income, a record in customer fundings, a record in portfolio growth and size, a record in dividends that we paid to our shareholders, and a record in earnings per share. While it is great to share these performance records, there is also a list of other achievements in 2018, including having a third portfolio company now to be acquired by Amazon and another portfolio company which debuted as one of the biggest tech IPOs of the year. We also increased our available borrowings under our credit facility. We obtained shareholder approval for increased leverage and received our exemptive relief from the SEC to permit co-investment across the TriplePoint platform. It was a remarkable year.
Let me wrap up these opening remarks by sharing some of the amazing fourth quarter results, as I know Sajal and Andrew will be providing much greater detail because what I would really like to talk and focus about is 2019. The fourth quarter, once again, to use the most repeated word here in my remarks, is one of records also. This included new records in quarterly debt and equity investment commitments, new quarterly records in net investment income, earnings, customer fundings and portfolio growth, and a record quarter in dividends that we paid out to our shareholders. We also ended the quarter with an all-time high in the venture growth originations pipeline, which could translate nicely into new business here in 2019.
The plans are not to rest on these laurels or all these long list of records, but actually to look at the past five years and this past record-setting year is only the beginning of what we plan to accomplish in the years ahead. As a reminder, although TPVG is only five years old today, we are not newcomers at all to venture lending. The senior members of our management team, in fact, each have decades of experience and were among the first to develop the investment class now known as venture lending. The venture growth segment that TPVG targets is only one portion of the overall business of our sponsor, TriplePoint Capital LLC. TriplePoint Capital was founded almost 15 years ago by our senior team and we are a leading global financing provider to venture capital-backed companies across all stages of their development.
In fact, for the year ended December 31st, I should also point out that the TriplePoint platform at the sponsor level signed up more than $1.6 billion of term sheets last year. Based on the publicly available information, this made TriplePoint one of the largest non-bank venture lenders globally last year. Believe me, we really know the venture lending business, and all of our business is also what we call 100% direct. All of our business is directly originated. We're an originations machine with many referrals from our select venture capital investors. We don't work with brokers or agents. There aren't any loan participations. We don't do loan purchases. We don't have club or syndication partners in our loans. We are in control. We don't make secondary purchases of stock in companies that we don't have relationships with either.
We don't lend to distressed public companies, and we don't lend to middle-market companies. We believe these direct originations provide us with a true edge in the marketplace. While we're proud of TPVG's performance over the past five years, again, we think of it as only the beginning. We're excited to build upon this past success in the years to come. As I mentioned, we're entering 2019 at TPVG with the largest originations pipeline in history. That's important because our portfolio is driven by originations pipeline, among other factors, which in turn helps drive earnings growth. While this market demand is strong and the deal flow continues to increase, I also want to emphasize that we're not compromising our underwriting standards, our pricing, or investment strategies. We plan to capitalize on this demand while continuing to maintain our time-tested and careful investment approach.
We will selectively invest in companies with innovative technologies and services backed by these select venture capital investors. Let me wrap up. We see great growth opportunities here in 2019, both in the venture capital equity and the venture lending markets. We plan to continue to capitalize on these opportunities in a significant way, given the strength and reputation of the TriplePoint global platform and the quality of the venture growth stage companies we're seeing in the pipeline. We'll continue to work with our select leading group of venture capital investors. These are firms that have sponsored some of the biggest tech and life science successes during the past few decades and drive the high quality of our portfolio companies.
While we're moving forward into 2019 with this abundance of investment opportunities and strong outlook, rest assured, as I always say, we will continue to focus on what we call the Four Rs that have always been the foundation of our business, reputation, relationships, references, and returns. I'll now turn the call over to Sajal.
Thank you, Jim, and good afternoon, everyone. In Q4, we signed a record $323 million of term sheets at TriplePoint Capital and closed $190 million of debt commitments with 12 companies. For the year, TriplePoint Capital signed a record $885 million of term sheets, we closed $508 million of debt commitments with 28 companies. During the fourth quarter, we added eight new companies to the portfolio, bringing our total additions for the year to 21. New customers in the quarter included Clutter, an on-demand storage company that lets customers store and retrieve their stuff without actually leaving their house. Clutter has raised $100 million of capital from Sequoia Capital, Atomico, Google, and others. We're pleased to report that here in Q1, Clutter announced it raised $200 million from the SoftBank Vision Fund. Lovepop is a maker of 3D pop-up greeting cards for all occasions.
Lovepop has raised more than $22 million from investors including Highland Capital and Kevin O'Leary from the Shark Tank. Qubole delivers a self-service platform for big data analytics built on Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle Cloud. Qubole has raised more than $75 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, CRV, IVP, and others. Quip designs and delivers oral care products, advice, and services. Quip has raised more than $60 million from investors, including Sherpa Capital. HealthIQ is an insurance company rewarding those with healthy lifestyles with lower rates using its proprietary data and carrier relationships. HealthIQ has raised more than $80 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Foundation Capital, Rivet Ventures, CRV, and others. HomeLight is a leading marketplace for finding real estate professionals that helps homeowners sell homes faster and for more money. HomeLight has raised more than $50 million from investors including Menlo Ventures and Crosslink Capital.
Sonder is a tech-driven hospitality company offering spaces built for travel and life in cities around the world. Sonder has raised more than $135 million of capital from Greylock Partners, Spark Capital, and others. Capsule is a healthcare technology company rebuilding the pharmacy from the inside out. Capsule has raised more than $70 million from investors, including Thrive Capital. During Q4, we funded a record $120 million of debt investments to 11 companies and acquired warrants valued at $2 million in 12 companies. The new debt investments funded during the quarter had a weighted average portfolio yield of 14.2%. For the year, we funded a record $265 million to 27 companies. We are particularly proud to have grown the investment portfolio to its largest level ever of $433 million with 57 companies, as compared to $372 million with 42 companies at the end of 2017.
We continue to see this strong level of demand so far in 2019, having closed $131 million of new commitments and funded $74 million of investments so far. We had $26 million of principal prepayments during Q4, which contributed an additional 4% to our core portfolio yield of 14% for the quarter, bringing total portfolio yield to an impressive, but not record-setting, 18%. Moving on to credit quality, as of December 31st, the weighted average internal credit rating of the debt investment portfolio was a record best 1.87 as compared to 2.09 as of Q3. As a reminder, under our rating system, loans are rated from one to five, with one being the strongest credit rating and new loans are generally rated two upon closing.
During the fourth quarter, on a net basis, there were two more companies in Category 1 versus last quarter, representing $83 million of net additional principal balance, and there were five more companies in Category 2 versus last quarter, representing $21 million of net additional principal balance. With regards to Category 3, one portfolio company totaling $34 million of principal balance was upgraded from three to two , and one portfolio company totaling $20 million of principal balance was downgraded from two to three. Finally, one portfolio company totaling $3 million of principal balance was downgraded from four to five. As Jim mentioned, our press release was a rather long list of successes. I would briefly like to talk about a few of them, as well as some additional ones not in the release. A year ago, our top five obligors represented 57% of our total portfolio.
As of Q4 2018, we've been fully or partially prepaid on four of those top five positions, grown our total portfolio, and taken advantage of our exemptive relief order to co-invest across our larger platform, such that our top five represented only 44% of our total portfolio at year-end. Here in Q1 2019, as a result of prepayment and continued investment activity so far, the top five represent around 30%. We're really proud of the $1.71 NII per share for the year, which was materially in excess of our $1.44 of distributions per share and enabled us to pay our shareholders a $0.10 special dividend in December. We met consensus estimates for Q1 and beat consensus for Q2, Q3, Q4, and fiscal 2018.
We're even more proud of our $1.78 of net increase in net assets per share, which enabled us to increase our net asset value by $0.25 from Q4 2017, even after paying that $0.10 special dividend per share. Our core portfolio yield, without the benefit of prepays, increased from 13.6% at the beginning of the year and remained at 14% in both Q3 and Q4. 14 of our portfolio companies raised equity rounds in 2018. Four of our portfolio companies were acquired or went public. So far in Q1, four portfolio companies have raised rounds and two have announced acquisitions. As Jim mentioned, Amazon has purchased three of our portfolio companies, Ring, PillPack, and eero, and SoftBank has invested equity in three of our companies, Clutter, Cohesity, and View. Finally, as I previously mentioned, we raised $94 million in an equity offering in August.
As our investors have seen, since that offering, we have closed $384 million of commitments and funded almost $220 million of investments. Before I hand the call off to Andrew, I thought it'd be helpful to share some of our strategic goals and objectives we have for TPVG here in 2019. As Jim mentioned, the industry-leading position of our platform and the hard work of our team has resulted in significant direct deal flow from our select VCs and strong demand for venture growth stage lending for high-quality companies, which reflects the natural progression of these VCs and their portfolio companies following continued strong equity investment activity and their thoughtfulness on how to optimize their capital structures with both debt and equity.
There has been no change in what we've been doing, how we structure or price our deals or deal quality. If anything, we continue to raise the bar in terms of what qualifies as a TriplePoint-worthy customer and investment. Volatility in the public markets only helps drive more demand for debt as venture capital-backed companies recognize they may need more capital until the IPO or M&A events, and we serve as a less dilutive and complementary source of capital. As we look to 2019, we have a clear near-term path to continue to grow and scale TPVG. Our expectation this year for portfolio growth is for quarterly portfolio fundings to be in the $75 million-$150 million range on a gross basis, up from our target in prior years of $50 million-$100 million per quarter.
On a full year basis, we see at least $300 million of gross fundings, but really we expect to be somewhere between $400 million and $600 million of gross fundings, given we had $294 million of unfunded commitments as of Q4. As a reminder, fundings typically occur in the last month of the quarter and don't contribute meaningfully from an income perspective until the next quarter. We expect that core yield profile of our portfolio will be stable and will continue to be leading in the industry in the 13%-14% range, again, prior to the impact of prepays. With regards to prepays, they continue to be a regular part of the business. Looking back, we had at least one prepay every single quarter over the past two years and 10 in the past 12 quarters. In fact, we've already had two here in 2019.
We expect to see that pattern of one on average per quarter in 2019, and along with our expected originations and increased leverage, is something our board is taking into consideration as we consider possible increases in our dividend policy on a go-forward basis. Given our strong outlook for portfolio growth, we are grateful to our shareholders for approving the lower asset coverage requirement, which will enable us to take advantage of using leverage to serve as the primary source of funding portfolio growth for us here in 2019. Plus, we intend to continue to take advantage of our exemptive relief order, which we received in 2018 as well, to co-invest with other entities in the TriplePoint platform and further diversify as we scale. With that, let me say that as we look ahead, we're particularly excited for what 2019 has in store for us and our shareholders.
We will continue to be highly disciplined and expect to grow our portfolio in a manner that is accretive to our stockholders and provides them with an attractive yield on their investment. The trust you have placed in us motivates this team to remain aligned, focused, and enthusiastic. I'll now turn the call over to Andrew to highlight some of the key financial metrics achieved during the quarter and fiscal year.
Thank you, Sajal. As mentioned by Jim and Sajal, 2018 was an exceptional year. Before we get into the quarterly figures, I thought I would highlight some of the many milestones reached for the fiscal year 2018. We ended the year with a record total investment income of $64.6 million, record net investment income of $36.6 million, record net investment income per share of $1.71, record net change in net assets per share of $1.78, record ending portfolio investments of $433 million. In addition, we outearned our distributions for the second consecutive year with net investment income, and we paid $1.54 per share. Even with that, our quarterly results were equally impressive. Q4 total investment and other income was $17.8 million, or $0.72 per share, compared to $11.1 million or $0.64 per share for the same quarter of 2017.
Our investment portfolio generated a weighted average portfolio yield of 18% during the quarter, including prepayments and other activity, and 14% without. This is compared to 13.6% and 13.5% in Q4 2017, respectively. The increase in total investment income and yield relative to the prior year was primarily due to portfolio growth and higher prepayment and other income related to portfolio turnover. In addition, the increase in recurring portfolio income is mainly due to the cumulative rise in benchmark interest rates. Expenses during the quarter were $7.6 million, consisting of interest and fee expense of $1.9 million, base management fee of $1.7 million, income incentive fee of $2.6 million, and administrative and general expenses of $1.4 million.
Net investment income for the fourth quarter was up nearly 99% to $10.2 million or $0.41 per share, compared to $5.1 million or $0.30 per share in the fourth quarter of 2017. We recognized net realized losses of $17,000 or $0.00 per share in the fourth quarter of 2018 from foreign exchange activity and had net change in unrealized depreciation during the quarter of approximately $900,000 or $0.04 per share, consisting of mark-to-market activity on the investment portfolio. The mark-to-market depreciation was primarily concentrated in our public warrant investments, specifically our investment in Farfetch Limited, a publicly traded warrant with a cost basis of $169,000, which depreciated approximately $1.6 million during the period. Since the end of the quarter, that position has nearly appreciated $1.8 million here in 2019.
Net increase in net assets for the quarter was $9.3 million or $0.38 per share, compared to $3.9 million or $0.22 per share in the prior year. During the quarter, we generated a return on average equity of 11% and a return on average assets of 8.6% on an annual basis, and generated an ROAE and ROAA of 13.4% and 8.9% for the fiscal year, December 31st, 2018, respectively. Now turning to the balance sheet. We funded $119.8 million of debt and equity investments to 11 companies during the quarter and had one company repay its outstanding obligations prior to maturity in the amount of $26.4 million. We also had one company repay its outstanding obligation at maturity in the amount of $5 million and had principal amortization on the remaining portfolio of $7.3 million.
All told, we ended the quarter with long-term investments of $433.4 million, up 16.5% from the prior year. At quarter end, we held 144 investments in 57 companies with a cost of $435 million and a fair value of approximately $433 million. The company's debt portfolio ended the quarter with a cost of $414 million, of which 59% of the debt investments carried floating rates. Our unfunded commitments totaled $294 million to 20 companies, of which $87.5 million is dependent upon the companies reaching milestones. Of those commitments, $183 million will expire in 2019 and $111 million will expire in 2020 if not drawn prior to expiration. We ended the quarter with total liquidity of $197 million, consisting of cash of $10 million and $187 million of undrawn availability under our revolving credit facility.
Total outstanding borrowings as of quarter end were approximately $96 million, consisting of $75 million of long-term fixed -rate notes, $23 million drawn under our revolving credit facility, which put us at a leverage ratio of 0.29x. Below our target range, gives us ample headroom to expand the portfolio without accessing additional capital in the short run. We ended the quarter with net assets of $335 million or $13.50 per share. This is up $0.25 from $13.25 per share in the prior year. During the fourth quarter, we distributed $0.46 per share, consisting of our $0.36 quarterly dividend and a $0.10 special dividend. For the year, we distributed $1.54 per share of income and ended with projected spillover income of $4.6 million or $0.19 per share.
With that, I'm pleased to announce that for the first quarter of 2019, our board of directors declared a distribution of $0.36 per share, payable on March 29th to stockholders of record as of March 20th. This marks the 20th consecutive quarter we have increased or maintained our quarterly distribution rate. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Jim.
Thanks, Andrew. Before I open up the call for questions, we announced today that Andrew will be leaving the company on March 22nd to pursue other opportunities. We wish him well, and I'd like to take a minute to thank you, Andrew for your help and contributions during the short period you were here. We're very pleased to announce that Chris Gastelu will become our interim CFO as of that date while we conduct our search for a permanent CFO. Chris has been serving as a consultant to TPVG since 2014, and prior to his own consulting business, he was a managing director at UBS in New York City in financial services and specialty finance. At this point, we'll be happy to take your questions. Operator, could you please open up the line?
We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch -tone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Our first question will come from Fin O'Shea of Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Just to start with a couple housekeeping items. Well, actually, first, I want to congratulate Mr. Olsen for moving on. It's been a pleasure working with you. Sorry about that. Sajal, you mentioned some of the deals this quarter were platform-wide allocated. Can you give us a little more color there on a vertical sense if deals were all evenly allocated or some in the early late-stage strategies, for example, and then if you can quantify given its low rates of leverage, what TriplePoint, the BDC received on this quarter's origination?
Yeah, sure. Let me start and then, Andrew, if you want to jump in. Fin, to be clear, all the co-investment activity that was completed and on a go-forward basis are all in our venture growth stage strategy. TPVG is only lending to venture growth stage companies. I think the interesting dynamic is we're seeing even more robust and even higher quality companies with significant scale, be it revenues, hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, billions of dollars of enterprise value, looking for larger transactions. With our exemptive relief order, we're able to diversify these larger, lumpier loans per se, with our TPVG investing and then our private funds investing alongside in the same strip, same transaction, same terms. I believe we had two transactions in Q4. I don't think we've reported yet how many here in Q1.
All right. Okay, thanks. I know you mentioned there, I actually wanted to ask as a follow-on. With some of the more famous unicorns reaching their sort of liquidity IPO chapter, can you tell us about, remind us of your typical enterprise value issuer in terms of the proposition you offer at TriplePoint and if that is changing, if that is gliding up given the dynamics of the market and your platform's growth?
Yeah, no, again, no change. If anything, I would. Please, Jim, jump in. Fin, I think the beauty is we have such deep and trusted relationships with our select group of leading VC funds. They look to us as partners and problem-solvers, although they're not problems. As they look to preparing their kind of the best of the best for their exit events and having sufficient runway, a number of these companies either lever up and then raise big rounds or raise big rounds and then lever up. I'll use one example is Clutter, which is, again, the storage company we closed in Q4. We entered into a debt commitment with them in Q4. They drew on our facility. Here in Q1, they raised $200 million from SoftBank. I think the use of proceeds is still the same.
We're working with companies that are trying to achieve amazing things. They're going for the touchdown. They're using a combination of debt and equity to achieve that, and they're not going to let market volatility stop them from achieving their goals. They're not dependent on IPO or M&A. They want to conquer the world. They're using us and equity capital to do it. From an LTV perspective, I think it's been relatively flat. Andrew, you tell me. I mean, are 8% or 9%, right?
Yeah. It's remained relatively consistent across the life of TriplePoint Venture Growth. We ended the quarter or ended the year with about 9% of LTV on the portfolio.
Okay, thanks, guys. That's all for me. Thanks for taking my questions. Again, congratulations Andrew.
Fin, you didn't mention the Celtics romping the Warriors, so thank you.
I was going to say, you guys are the Celtics of BDCs.
Ouch. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Ryan Lynch of KBW. Please go ahead.
Hey, good afternoon. First, Sajal, I wanted to talk about the sort of quarterly funding guidance you gave of $75 million-$100 million. That's a pretty substantial increase over historically where you guys were kind of in the $50 million-$100 million range. Can you just talk about what's driving your confidence in your ability to increase fundings meaningfully as well as also maintain a good portfolio diversification, which you talked about earlier in the call of reducing those top five investments substantially?
Yeah. First, Ryan, great question. I'll start off with the guidance we gave is $75 million-$150 million, even at higher at the top end. I'd say it's multiple factors. I think one is just the significant backlog that we have in the form of existing unfunded commitments, and the fact that, again, on average, our customers draw between 50%-75% of that unfunded commitment generally within 6 to 12 months from when we enter into it. Plus, more importantly, is we're seeing higher utilization at the time of close. I believe of the customers we closed in Q4, 50% of them actually drew at close. Again, no change in our underwriting methodologies. These companies had cash. Again, I'll use the example of Clutter, which well-capitalized using our capital and then raising a big monster round of financing.
I'd say it's backlog, it's our customers using our capital. It's also overall just demand for debt is particularly strong, we're seeing strong I mean, as Jim said in his prepared remarks, the pipeline is the strongest it's ever been at this time of the year. Unprecedented levels from high-quality companies backed by our VCs. We continue to feel confident that the demand from really great, awesome companies that we have visibility on today will enable us to hit these portfolio growth targets that we have for the year.
Yeah. Not to jump too much into the fray here and agree with all the prior comments. I would just add that definitely our reputation, references, and relationships is starting to continue to gel and get around. We have significant deal flow from the select folks we've been running with long-standing profitable relationships for quite a while. There's a strong demand. There's record amounts of equity, billion-dollar funds among our select investors. Good activity. We have a good name, good reputation, a good business, and it's driving this. In fact, quite frankly, we're increasing the bar for some of the quality. Although we're going to write and see record fundings and record business, we're anticipating here in 2019. I want to emphasize, we're not changing any of our practices, and the diversification is great because of the exemptive relief.
We're accomplishing a lot of things at once, but there's continued great supplemental that we're doing with.
I would only add, Ryan, we're not whale hunting. As we look through the beauty of our sponsor and our origination capabilities, there's no doubt we're seeing strong demand across the board, all stages, all sectors. But in particular, on venture growth, it's not that we're getting calls from five or 10 companies looking for $50 million-$100 million debt facilities. The beauty is the TriplePoint Capital global platform is the only platform that can digest those kinds of transactions. The benefit to our public shareholders is that we can now allocate an appropriate risk-diversified transaction to TPVG, enter into that transaction with that customer, allocate to TPVG and our various private pools of capital to close those transactions.
Okay. That's helpful color. Next I wanted to talk about slide 28 with the portfolio yield as well as some of the prepayment that you had. Obviously, you guys have seen a big jump in the effective portfolio yield over the last several quarters, including the most recent quarter. I know you said you expect maybe, I think you had two prepayments in the first quarter of 2019, expect at least one per quarter, going forward. Can you just talk, is there anything different that you guys are doing as far as structuring or types of investments you guys are looking for that's driven this big increase in prepayment that we've seen over the last several quarters and it looks like you guys expect going forward in 2019?
Part two maybe of the question is, given your anticipation of at least one prepayment per quarter going forward, with some meaningful prepayments in the last several quarters, you guys have had an effective yield of 17%-18%. Is it reasonable to expect a yield in that level going forward?
I'll take a first stab and feel free to add in. Our guidance has always been consistently, we anticipate on average one to two prepayments per quarter. The portfolio is growing, obviously there's going to be, as we grow, more growth in that kind of activity. As a lender, a recall, we don't mind. We actually like getting prepayments. It says we're doing something right with these companies when they get acquired, when they go public. We also love the income that it contributes as well as the yield contributions. I think on a continued basis, we want to see that continued activity.
Yeah. Just to parse through a little bit further. As we look to the prepayment activity, Ryan, over the last, let's say one to two years, I think the beauty of our prepayment activity is the primary reasons for the prepay have been the customers have been acquired. The touchdown that we talked about. You can't do anything more. The company got acquired or went public. To have a meaningful percentage of the prepays due to that, we put that up on the win column. I think the second largest reason for prepay has been raising monster rounds of equity financing where these companies have potentially overfunded themselves with equity. It's sitting in a bank earning negative interest or no interest. We've got a 14%, 15% something percent loan. We use that analogy in prior calls. It's halftime, they pay us off.
We get nice prepayment acceleration. We go sit on the bench and wait to be called back in late Q3, early Q4 of the proverbial football game where they need us to come back. It's actually been only a few, I'd say less than a handful of scenarios where we've been refinanced by other lenders. Usually those have been scenarios or companies where we opted not to continue the relationship. I'd say that's generally how the prepayments have broken out. No change in how we've structured. No change in terms of the profile of companies that we lend to. We do not lend to distressed companies that are bridge financing out of cash, that we're short-term financing partners to them. That's not the relationship we have. Now with regards to the yield profile.
Again, as you saw, our yields at the core portfolio have been 13%-14%, regardless of the impact of prepay. That's regardless of the impact of prime. It's been relatively consistent. Now we can't control who prepays and when they prepay. As you know, the more mature the loan is, the less of an impact it has from a yield perspective because you've already recognized the majority of that end of term payment and potentially other fees, which may cause that income acceleration. I'd say, again, we can't guarantee that with every prepay it's going to cause portfolio yield to bump north of 14% because to the extent it's a more robust loan prepaying, it's not going to have so much impact. At the end of the day, still leading the charge from the asset class from a yield perspective.
Well, great. Well, that's definitely helpful color. Those are all my questions. I appreciate the time and congrats on a really nice quarter.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Christopher Nolan of Ladenburg Thalmann. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Andrew, congratulations and wish you the best.
Thank you, Chris.
Sajal, $75 million-$150 million in guidance that you provided. Back of the envelope, it indicates to me that if you achieve that fully, your regulatory debt-to-equity ratio would be north of 2 times. What's the priority here? To grow the portfolio or to not dilute shareholders on a NAV per share basis?
Yeah. I think right now, in order for us to even get to the 1:1 ratio, we could fund potentially $240 million of incremental debt. Fund loans via incremental debt. We look at it as we've kind of given the guidance previously as we reduced our asset coverage ratio to provide us the headroom. We don't expect to over-leverage the business, but we want to put it at an adequate leverage point where we're generating the right amount of risk return to our investors. We think, over the short run, using debt to fund the growth is the right approach.
Plus the reality of prepays. Again, given here in the first quarter we've had, was it $56 million of prepays. The beauty, Chris, is it's redeploying that capital. Yeah, again, from our perspective, we think that looking to leverage as the primary source of funding the portfolio growth this year as well as redeploying the capital from the prepays that we've already had and expect to have.
Yeah. No, I understand that. My point is, what's the reasonable level of leverage? Because by my calculation, if you achieve $300 million in incremental portfolio growth, your regulatory debt to equity is 1.18. Is that a reasonable level of leverage?
Are you including prepayments in that?
No, I'm just sort of back of the envelope, just assuming the portfolio grows $75 million per quarter.
Yeah. I mean, right now we have under $100 million of leverage on net assets of $335 million. We have quite a bit of room just even to get up to that 1:1 debt-to-equity ratio. We think with the prepay and with what we anticipate to fund, we wouldn't expect us to push it above that one-to-one. We think that 1:1 is a reasonable buffer. It might be periods where we're slightly above that, but we wouldn't anticipate any period where we're.
To get to your bigger question, Chris. In the guidance that we gave when we got shareholder approval on our expectation for target leverage. We don't need to lever the business up more than 1:1 given the return profile of our assets. Having said that, we did say that there are periods where portfolio growth in between capital raises to optimize when we raise equity. We would expect to go north of 1:1 to take advantage of that and building portfolio and then waiting for prepays and for the capital markets to cooperate.
Great. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for my questions.
Our next question comes from Casey Alexander from Compass Point. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon. Can you tell us what the loan or loans were that prepaid in the fourth quarter that created that amount of extra income?
Yeah. There was one loan which was a prepayment. Then one that repaid a maturity. The prepayment was the primary driver of the income. That was View, which is an existing portfolio company. They partially prepaid their position with us. They still have existing debt positions with us or equipment loans that continue on.
Did they complete the investment with SoftBank?
I don't know if View has publicly announced what has. We know a significant amount of capital has been funded.
Okay. I may be wrong. Your unfunded commitments, I'm pretty sure that that's a record level also. How much of your guidance of funding $75 million-$150 million per quarter is driven by the high level of unfunded commitments that you have right now?
You know, Casey, I think it's a combination of unfunded commitments, plus it's the pipeline. I think we had $130 million of deals closed so far this quarter, another $100 million of signed term sheets. I don't think it's relying on the although it's pipe or it's backlog with the unfunded commitments. It's also a function of the robustness of the pipeline, the deals that we won, the deals that we're bidding. Actually, as [audio distortion] just pointed out, it's actually not a record as a percentage of the portfolio. Again, I think the challenge with unfunded commitments or existing portfolio companies, when companies raise large amounts of equity, they may have an unfunded commitment, but we may sit, and that may expire unutilized or remaining available amounts may expire undrawn. You can't rely solely on unfunded commitments to be the source of portfolio growth.
Okay. Could you review for me again, you guys did give what up to the date, the first quarter fundings and the first quarter repayments were?
Yeah, sure. The first quarter fundings were $73.8 million. Repayments to date, early principal repayments to date were $56 million.
$56 million. Okay. You're already in the bottom end of your fundings guidance for the quarter with still three weeks to go.
Yep.
Okay. All right. Let's just check to see if I have anything else. I'll save the rest of my questions for offline. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Casey.
Our next question is a follow-up from Ryan Lynch of KBW. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Just one follow-up. I'm trying to get a sense as we kind of talked about the prepayments. It depends on kind of where the life cycle they are that would kind of drive the OID and potential prepayment fees. You guys had $56 million of early prepayments or repayments in Q1. Can you at least give us a sense, or if you can quantify where in the life cycle are those prepayments, and what should we expect from a prepayment or accelerated OID standpoint from those prepayments that have already occurred in Q1?
Yeah, I don't think we specifically ever disclosed the amount, but we would typically expect 1% - 2% of the total loan value to be accelerated income.
Okay. All right. Thank you.
This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Jim Labe for any closing remarks.
Thanks, operator. I'll close again by expressing my appreciation to all of you for your continued interest. If you can't tell, we're really happy here on our very fifth year anniversary of this day to talk about all these records, not just for the quarter, not just for the year, but also for the entire last five-year period. Thank you again for your support. I hope you share our excitement here as we go forward with TriplePoint Venture Growth. Thanks, we'll speak to you all again soon.
The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.