Horizon Tech Finance (NASDAQ:HRZN) held its first-quarter earnings conference call on Wednesday. Below is the complete transcript from the call.

This transcript is brought to you by Benzinga APIs. For real-time access to our entire catalog, please visit https://www.benzinga.com/apis/ for a consultation.

View the webcast at https://viavid.webcasts.com/starthere.jsp?ei=1756443&tp_key=fa8c08f088

Summary

Horizon Tech Finance completed a merger with Monroe Capital Corp, significantly increasing its equity capital for investments and enhancing its ability to compete in venture capital deals.

The company reported net investment income of $0.19 per share, exceeding its distributions, with a NAV per share of $6.98.

Horizon Tech Finance declared regular and special monthly distributions for July, August, and September 2026, supported by undistributed spillover income.

The company's debt portfolio yield was 15.2% for Q1, maintaining a high yield within the BDC industry, with a committed and approved backlog of $180 million.

Management highlighted a $10 million stock repurchase program due to the stock price dislocation and expressed optimism about future growth opportunities in venture lending and small-cap public companies.

Full Transcript

OPERATOR

Greetings and welcome to the Horizon Tech Finance first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press Star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Megan Bacon, Director of Investor Relations and Marketing. Please go ahead.

Megan Bacon (Director of Investor Relations and Marketing)

Thank you and welcome to Horizon Technology Finance Corporation's first quarter 2026 conference call. Representing the Company today are Mike Balkan, Chief Executive Officer, Paul Seitz, Chief Investment Officer and Dan Trollio, Chief Financial Officer. I would like to point out that the first quarter earnings press release and Form 10-Q are available on the company's website at horizontechfinance.com before we begin our formal remarks, I need to remind everyone that during this conference call the Company will make certain forward looking statements, including statements with regard to the future performance of the company. Words such as believes, expects, anticipates, intends or similar expressions are used to identify forward looking statements. These forward looking statements are subject to the inherent uncertainties and in predicting future results and conditions. Certain factors could cause actual results to differ on a material basis from those projected in these forward looking statements and some of these factors are detailed in the risk factor discussion in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the company's Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025. The company undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. At this time I would like to turn the call over to Horizon CEO Mike Balkan.

Mike Balkan (Chief Executive Officer)

Thank you Megan and welcome everyone and thank you for your interest in Horizon. Today we will update you on our quarterly performance in the current operating environment. Paul Seitz, our Chief Investment Officer, will take us through recent business and portfolio developments as well as the current status of the venture lending market and Dan Trollio, our Chief Financial Officer will detail our operating performance and financial condition. We will then take questions. It has certainly been a very newsworthy and exciting couple of months for Horizon. In March we were pleased to form roho, a new joint venture with Ross Capital which will provide growth financing solutions to small and microcap public companies. Then in April we successfully completed our merger with Monroe Capital Corp. Or Monroe Capital Corp. (MRCC), officially embarking on an exciting growth path for the combined new Horizon. The merger provided us with significant increase in Horizon's equity capital available for investment and earning assets. This larger capital base affords us greater economies of scale to compete for larger cutting edge early and later stage venture capital deals backed by some of the leading venture capital and private equity funds. We are also increasing our lending to small cap public companies as evidenced by some of our latest announced transactions. Aided by the full support and backing of Monroe, we are taking the Horizon platform to the next level and are well positioned to succeed over the longer term. Turning to our specific results for the quarter, we grew our portfolio for the second consecutive quarter, funding 5 investments totaling 120 million and bringing our total portfolio size to almost $700 million. We generated net investment income of nineteen cents per share exceeding our distributions while our Net Asset Value (NAV) per share ended the quarter at $6.98. Based on our outlook and our undistributed spillover income, our board declared regular monthly distributions of six cents per share payable in July, August and September of 2026. Consistent with our announcement prior to the closing of the merger, our board also declared special monthly distributions of three cents per share payable in July, August and September 2026. As we prudently work to deploy the incremental capital from the merger and move to our target leverage, it remains our goal to deliver Net Investment Income (NII) at or above our declared distributions. Over time, we achieved a portfolio yield on debt investments of over 15% for the first quarter, once again at or near the top of the BDC industry. We finished the quarter with a committed and approved backlog of $180 million. And finally, we continue to close attractive venture debt and small cap public company investments while our pipeline of loan opportunities continue to grow. Moving forward, we believe we are stronger than we have been in years and are excited for the long term growth path we see ahead. To that end, given the dislocation between our stock price and the current net asset value, we intend to utilize our $10 million stock repurchase program in the near term. Again, we appreciate your continued interest and support in the Horizon Technology finance platform. I will now turn the call over to our Chief Investment Officer Paul Seitz to give you the details of our first quarter results and progress.

Paul Seitz (Chief Investment Officer)

Paul thanks Mike and good morning to everyone. I want to echo Mike's remarks about our excitement at closing the merger with Monroe Capital Corp. (MRCC). With the additional capital from the merger as well as our new joint venture with Ross Capital, we now have more size and scale as well as products to originate venture and growth loans to growing public and private companies. We believe this positions us well to continue growing our portfolio and NII over time. At the end of the quarter, our current portfolio stood at $696 million as we produced our second consecutive quarter of portfolio growth. In the first quarter we funded five life science debt investments, including one free refinancing of an existing investment totaling up $120 million. We also made further progress in building our pipeline, including larger venture loan opportunities in our target sectors. One of those pipeline opportunities, Stellar Cyber, closed in April. In Q1, we increased our committed backlog by $26 million from the end of Q4, which positions us well to further grow our portfolio in the quarters ahead. In Q2, we expect to further grow our portfolio driven by our current pipeline along with Stellar Cyber. Since the end of the quarter, we have been awarded five new venture loan transactions representing $90 million in total commitments. It goes without saying that we will always be disciplined in originating and underwriting new loans. During the first quarter we experienced one loan prepayment and one refinancing totaling $63 million in prepaid principal. Our onboarding debt investment yield of 12% during the first quarter remained consistent with our historic levels. We expect to continue to generate strong onboarding yields with our current pipeline of opportunities which we believe will generate strong net investment income over time. Our debt portfolio yield of 15.2% for the quarter was once again among the highest yielding debt portfolios in the BDC industry. Our ability to generate industry leading yields continues to be a testament to our venture lending strategy and our execution of such strategy across various market cycles and interest rate environments. As of March 31, we held warrants, equity and other investments in 99 portfolio companies with a fair value of $50 million. Structuring investments with warrants and equity rights is a key component of our venture debt strategy and a potential generator of shareholder value. As mentioned, we ended the quarter with a committed and approved backlog of $180 million compared to $154 million at the end of the fourth quarter. We believe our pipeline of investment opportunities combined with our committed backlog, with most of our funding commitments subject to companies achieving certain key milestones, provides a solid base to prudently grow our portfolio over time. As of quarter end, 88% of the fair value of our debt portfolio consisted of 3 and 4 rated debt investments, while 12% of the fair value of our portfolio was rated 2 or 1, which is a modest improvement from our levels at the end of the fourth quarter. We continue to collaborate with all of our portfolio companies in utilizing a variety of strategies to optimize returns and create future value. Turning to the Venture Capital Environment According to PitchBook, approximately $267 billion was invested in VC backed companies in the first quarter, which by itself exceeded all full year totals for investment except for 2021 and 2025. However, this record performance was completely due to a large investment in AI. In fact, the top five investments accounted for $196 billion of that amount. Venture capital dollars are flowing again. However, there is a significant bifurcation in the marketplace as only the companies at the very top are receiving the lion's share of capital. A similar story is playing out in the exit markets. While exit value of nearly $350 billion puts 2026 on pace to smash records by June, 72% of that value is due to SpaceX's acquisition of XAI. Still, excluding that acquisition, exit value of $97 billion was the largest quarter since the fourth quarter of 2021, driven primarily by AI acquisitions. The IPO market however, remains muted with only 15 VC backed IPOs during the quarter. Given the current geopolitical and macro uncertainty, we believe the IPO market will remain somewhat muted in the near term. Nonetheless, we believe the limited life science IPO market creates more opportunities for venture loan originations as evidenced by our fundings in the quarter. On the tech side, though we see the IPO market is muted, we see considerable optimism for tech iPodOS. While we continue to conduct deep due diligence, particularly in AI and defense technology, to determine the best types of opportunities for future investments, we continue to believe the venture debt remains a compelling option for these high quality companies to access additional capital as we move through 2026. We are excited for the new horizon and have been hard at work in identifying and targeting larger venture loan opportunities for both private and small cap public companies given our substantially enhanced capacity profile. Additionally, we continue to work diligently on optimizing outcomes with respect to our current portfolio. We remain confident that we are on the right path to expand our portfolio over the longer term and continue to lead in the venture lending space. We expect this will lead to increased NII over time and ultimately additional value for shareholders. With that, I will now turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Dan Trollio.

Dan Trollio

Thanks Paul and good morning everyone. As Mike mentioned, we're excited to have completed the merger with Monroe Capital Corp. (MRCC) which significantly strengthened our balance sheet upon closing with 141 million of additional capital. With the merger complete and with us exiting our blackout period, we expect to begin tapping our $10 million repurchase program. Given the dislocation between our current valuation, not our confidence in the near and long term outlook of Horizon in addition, we continue to diligently work with all of our portfolio companies to optimize outcomes for our investments and improve our credit quality. As such, we believe we are well positioned to grow our portfolio in the coming quarters and create additional value for our shareholders moving forward. As of March 31, we had 105 million in available liquidity consisting of 73 million in cash and 32 million in funds available to be drawn under our existing credit facilities. As of March 31, we had 45 million outstanding under our 150 million KeyBank credit facility, 181 million outstanding on our 250 million New York Life credit facility and 90 million outstanding on our 200 million Nuveen credit facility, leaving us with ample capacity to grow our portfolio of debt investments. Post merger, we paid down the full amount outstanding under the KeyBank facility. Our debt to equity ratio stood at 1.35 to 1 as of March 31 and netting out cash on our balance sheet, our net leverage was 1.13 to 1 below our target leverage based on our cash position and our borrowing capacity on our credit facilities. Our potential new investment capacity as of March 31st was 357 million. Post merger, our new investment capacity is increased by $141 million of additional capital. Turning to our operating Results for the first quarter we earned investment income of $24 million compared to $25 million in the prior year period primarily due to lower fee related income on our debt investment portfolio. Our debt investment portfolio on a net cost basis stood at $655 million as of March 31, up 9% compared to 602 million as of December 31, 2025. For 1Q26 we achieved onboarding yields of 12% in line with what we achieved in 4Q25. Our loan portfolio yield was 15.2% for the first quarter compared to 15% for last year's first quarter. Total expenses for the quarter were 14.8 million compared to 13.4 million in 1Q25. Our interest expense of $8.2 million was $0.5 million lower than last year's first quarter while our base management fee was $3.1 million. In line with prior year period, we received $1.8 million of performance based incentive fees in the first quarter, but as a reminder, our advisor agreed to waive up to $4 million of fees or $1 million a quarter post merger starting in Q3 of 26. Net investment income for the first quarter of 2016 was nineteen cents per share compared to eighteen cents per share in 4Q25 and $0.27 per share for 1Q25. We continue to expect prepayment activity will remain modest in the near term and for the second quarter we expect to record a non recurring one time transaction expense of 4.3 million related to the completion of the merger. The company's undistributed spillover income as of March 31st was $0.52 per share. Based upon our outlook and undistributed spillover income, our board declared monthly distributions of six cents per share for July, August and September 2026 in concert with the completion of the MRCC merger. Our board also declared three cents per share special distributions payable in July, August and September of 2026. We anticipate, with our expanded capital base and available leverage, our expectation for growth and our predictive pricing strategy will enable us to generate NII that covers our distribution over time. To summarize our portfolio activities for the first quarter, new originations totaled $120 million, which are offset by $5 million in scheduled principal payments and $63 million in principal prepayments, refinancings and partial paydowns. We ended the quarter with a total investment portfolio of $696 million on March 31. The portfolio consisted of debt investments in 41 companies with an aggregate fair value of $646 million and a portfolio of warrant equity and other investments and 99 companies with an aggregate fair value of $50 million. Our Net Asset Value (NAV) as of March 31 was $6.98 per share compared to comparable with where it stood on December 31 and compared to $7.57 as of March 31, 2025. The stable Net Asset Value (NAV) on a quarterly basis was primarily due to NII exceeding our distributions and a shift in when we account for monthly distributions. Moving forward, you're accounting for distributions on the ex dividend date, which is more aligned with when most BDCs record their distributions. As we've consistently noted, nearly 100% of the outstanding principal amount of our debt investments bear interest at floating rates. Of those investments, approximately 71% are already at their interest rate floors, which should mitigate the impact of decreasing interest rates. This concludes Opening Remarks. We'll be happy to take questions you may have at this time.

OPERATOR

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press Star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two to remove yourself from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up the handset before pressing the star keys. Thank you. And our first question, we'll hear from Corey Johnson with ubs.

Corey Johnson (Equity Analyst)

Hi, thanks. I was wondering, could you actually just, on the last point that you had just regarding, I guess like the Net Asset Value (NAV) bridge, could. Could you tell me, I guess to maybe understand that because I don't know if maybe I wasn't getting incorrectly, but I still, you know, NAV was flat this quarter. And you know, obviously there were some of the unrealized losses and such. So my understanding is correctly that the dividends that were used for the, for the first quarter were actually the $0.18 rather than the, the $0.33. Is that correct?

Dan Trollio

Yeah. So every quarter we will accrue the distribution that is declared in that quarter. So normally it would be the 18 cents. There's two accounting guidances that public Business Development Company (BDC)s could follow. The first is related to recording your distribution on the declaration date, which would be in the quarter. And the second is recording your distribution on the ex dividend date. And so this quarter, because of the merger and the different shareholders at different periods of time, we adjusted our policy to record the distribution on the ex dividend date. So one of the three distributions that were declared is accrued this quarter. So the impact is 6 cents instead of the 18 cents. Got it. Okay. And so that will bring you from where you're looking at the, from the unrealized. Just giving a little more information to help you bridge from the unrealized to the nav.

Corey Johnson (Equity Analyst)

Got it. Okay. And then just to follow up so, you know, you do, I guess, have, you know, now all this additional capital on hand. But I was just wondering like, you know, what is, I guess the environment like for you to be able to deploy that capital? Like, you know, how aggressive do you think you'll be able to be or the quality of deals that you're seeing strong enough to allow you to be able to deploy that. You can maybe just give a little bit of background on that.

Paul Seitz (Chief Investment Officer)

Yeah, yeah, thanks for that question. This is Paul Seitz. So one is, I think the market's pretty active right now. It's pretty evidenced by some of the larger funds moving down market in terms of activity with the venture ecosystem, it's picking up quite a bit. So our focus is to obviously deploy capital, but we need to be resilient and unrelenting on credit quality. And the way we structure our deals is critically important. And the Way we approach the risk adjusted return profile of each company is critically important. So while it's active, we remain very diligent on structuring our deals and only doing the deals that are the highest of quality.

Corey Johnson (Equity Analyst)

Great. Thank you.

OPERATOR

And as a reminder, it's Star One if you would like to ask your questions. Next, we'll move to Sean Paul Adams with B. Riley.

Sean Paul Adams (Equity Analyst)

Good morning. It looks like you guys have actually had a pretty good quarter as far as credit quality. It looks like a good amount of non accruals fell off the portfolio as well as your watch list also decreased. Can you provide a little bit of, you know, a little bit of color on the remaining two names kind of on non accrual? It looks like you guys actually experienced a write up on Pro VV and just a little bit more color on how you were able to move so many names previously on Non Accrual, you know, back to accrual. Thank you.

Paul Seitz (Chief Investment Officer)

So, yeah, we, I guess if you look quarter over quarter on our schedule of investments, we had three names last quarter and three names this quarter. So they were Vesta, Pro Vivi and Nexcar. So the previous quarter Q3 to Q4, we were able to drop off some non accruals. And because we were able to work through some transaction and maximize those, those returns. And then this quarter related to Pro Vivi specifically and the change, like we say, you know, we're working on each one of the deals and we're trying to maximize returns. We were able to receive some pay down related to Provivi as we continue to work through that account.

Sean Paul Adams (Equity Analyst)

Got it. Thank you guys.

OPERATOR

There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the floor back to Mike Balkan for closing remarks.

Mike Balkan (Chief Executive Officer)

Thank you all for joining us this morning. We appreciate your continued interest and support in Horizon and we look forward to speaking with you again soon. This will conclude our call.

Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.