TPG Inc. ($TPG)

All right. Let's go ahead and get started here. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Mike Cyprys, equity analyst covering brokers, asset managers and exchanges from Morgan Stanley Research. And I'm thrilled to have with us for our next session, Todd Sisitsky, President of TPG. Todd, thanks for joining us here today.

Thanks for having me.

So TPG, as many of you know, is a leading global alternative investment manager with over $300 billion of assets under management. So a lot to get through today.

I thought maybe we could start with the current backdrop, Todd, deal environment. It seemed like the market had finally found its footing when we came into this year and then there was some momentum coming in. And then obviously, a lot has happened since. So let's talk about the deployment volume, which has generally been maybe a bit more sluggish than people had expected. Tell us about TPG's experience, how it differs maybe from others there and your ability to deploy in this current backdrop?

Absolutely. Well, we've actually been very busy, and I'll come to that in a moment. I think from an overall market standpoint, I think the way we've looked at it is, if you step back and you think back to the -- I'm surprised to say this, even to hear myself say it, to the relatively easy days of Brexit. There was a disruptive event every year or 18 months, maybe 2 years. Now there's Liberation Day, there's the war in Iran, there's Russia. There's the quickest rate increase and prior to that COVID and rate decrease. And so it feels like the volatility in the macro environment has accelerated. It's like the world has become predictably more unpredictable. And I think in a business like ours that does take time to create opportunities, that just has an implication for really all aspects of the business, including the origination side and the new investment side. At TPG, we've actually been able to stay quite busy. If you look at our first quarter, we were up actually 74% year-over-year. Actually, all of our business units, all of our asset classes were up, private equity up actually 100% plus. And I think one of the reasons is that -- on the scale of sort of the flow side of the market where larger deals would come with financing, a chaperone meeting with the CEO, and they tend to be there when multiples are good, there's a steady environment, if that's on one side of the continuum, we're sourcing most of our investments in the much more customized, I'd say, source part of the market. And so much longer dated, lower probability successful you start the dialogues. But when you get them done, they're a little more resilient and a little less impacted by some of the macro factors. And I think that's true really across the board for the various businesses that we're in. On the private equity. If you look at our flagship fund, 2/3 of the investments in the TPG 9 portfolio were either structured partnerships with corporates, the vast majority of which were proprietary, several of which actually had downside floors, so put call provisions or carve out, in many cases, carve-outs with the parent maintained an ownership stake. So those are much more customized in terms of how you get into those. And we have different flavors of that in real estate and credit. And I think that, that has reflected itself in a really steady pace. So if you look at our major funds, we've been investing in that sort of 3- to 4-year cycle that we advertise. And we've continued to find really interesting things in today's environment. And frankly, on an aggregate basis, if you look at credit, our deployment was up 56% in the first quarter. But if you look at just the AUM and the rate of investment since the combination of Angelo Gordon and TPG, that acquisition about 2.5 years ago, the AUMs going from $60 billion to $95 billion. So it's been a really healthy pace. And our activity flow is actually has followed.

Great. Why don't we shift and talk about realizations. There's been a lot of discussion about exit time lines getting pushed out. What would you say needs to happen to change or exits to become more durable in your view? And are you expecting a pickup here, particularly given IPO markets seem to be reopening here and -- but at the same time, maybe supply risk builds too?

Well, I think the exits are certainly really across private capital, particularly across private equity. They are a big area of focus for our partners. And actually, I think going back to the original comment I had about the world becoming predictably more unpredictable, it means you really have to hit the exit windows when you see those opportunities. And the implications of that environment are different if you are more oriented towards IPOs as your exit as opposed to strategic exits as opposed to sponsor sponsors, which may require a more robust financing environment. And so from our standpoint, we have looked at this world and said, we have to approach the exit strategy with the same intentionality, the same focus and the same sort of centralized engagement as we do the investment decision. I don't know that, that was true 15 years ago, but it's true today. And so we push one another. I actually think it is one of my most important jobs as President to sort of make sure that we're pushing one another because delivering DPI, I think, has been a differentiator for us, and it's very important for our partners. So our results, I think, have shown that. We had a $25 billion -- $28 billion LTM and $9 billion in the first quarter, and that reflects a lot of intentionality. If you look at some of the drivers of the eggs in the first quarter, you also see a sale of One Oncology Syncora. That was a structured deal with a corporate partner that we've subsequently partnered with in other ways, where we had a call. So you sort of have more certainty around your exit, you have more certainty around the timing, the partner, in some cases, even a minimum valuation. So I think that has a big impact. Intersect Power with Google, again, a partner deal that Google ended up buying us out of. So our portfolio construction has a big impact on our ability to exit. And if you look at the sort of various avenues that we've used to drive liquidity over time, focusing on the TPG Capital business, the flagship fund in the U.S. and Europe, about half of our auto vendor strategics. So I think that, again, is a little bit more of a resilient part of the world in terms of exits. IPOs can be compelling. And in fact, if you look in India where it's been particularly compelling, I think we have to be the leading sponsor of IPOs. We have 14 exits over the last couple of years that have been through an IPO route. But they do require more time. They require -- they often take years to actually exit once it's really a path to liquidity. It's not liquidity. And so we've been very focused on creating businesses that are interest to strategic and, in many cases, again, entering into investments with clarity around how we're going to exit those investments.

And how is that pipeline looking so far here into the second half?

The pipeline continues -- oh, from a liquidity standpoint?

From a liquidity standpoint.

I think it continues to feel like there are opportunities. We have businesses that we've had a couple of years with that have really shown nice inflection in their growth. We feel like there's a particular opportunity. In some cases, the dialogues have been -- the conversations have been inbound. So I think that the volatility in the broader marketplace is always going to be a headwind for exit. But we've been very intentional and we do feel like we have a number of shots on goal. So we continue to feel like there's an opportunity for meaningful liquidity in the second half.

Okay. Great. So why don't we shift gears talk about fundraising. You recently reiterated your guidance for capital raising to exceed $50 billion this year with a pickup in the second half of the year, and you guys are in the market with a number of several important campaigns. So maybe you can bring us up to date on the funds that are in the market that are raising the expected timing there. And just if you could also touch upon how LP conversations are progressing in this environment today as there are ongoing DPI pressures that continue to absurd, how is that impacting the LP conversations and what you're hearing?

Absolutely. Well, I think you're right. The LPs in a world of volatility are thinking increasingly about particularly in illiquid investments, what's the appropriate liquidity premium? The translation of that, I think, has been -- we've heard about the selection and the down selecting of large allocators of capital globally, we've heard about that for years. We're seeing it real time and I think in a very intentional and immediate fashion. So I think you have a set of GPs that folks feel have strategies, portfolios that meet their strategies have been delivering DPI. We've gone from most of our careers being in an environment where interest rates were declining multiples were increasing to a world where -- we're modeling multiple headwind, we're modeling multiple compression between -- in our base case is now for the last 2.5 fund cycles. And so you have to have a way to drive the growth and to drive those returns. It's sourcing and it's what you do with the portfolio of companies when you own them. I think that the broader group of LPs, particularly the global asset allocators are looking at the range of options out there, and they're coming up with that list of folks that they really want to lean into. And we feel like we've been a real beneficiary of that. And we've seen that in the significant growth we've seen in credit, the growth we've seen fund or fund cycle and things like TREP on the real estate side, and I'll come back to real estate in a moment, and in growth and in our private equity platforms. And we continue to feel that we have a lot of support from our LPs. You also see that an environment like fundraising is not easy, it's hard to raise first-time funds. We've actually had a lot of success. That's been a core strength. It's been part of our DNA for the whole 23 years I've been here and before that. But if you look over the last 3 years, we've raised, I think, $13 billion of capital for essentially new strategies and the sports fund that I've been involved with, we're at $1.1 billion. These are really interesting businesses on their own, and they have a lot of scalability opportunity. And you have our big institutional partners excited about the idea of building businesses together. So I think it's a tale of different quadrants here in terms of the the experience that people are having with fundraising. There is still capital available. We've never lived through a period where it's easier to measure investors, where it's easier to measure absolute performance and to compare it on a relative basis. And so results really matter as does strategy as does the continuity of the organization. So I would not -- I would say it's not an easy environment, but I do actually feel like the breadth and depth of our relationships with our most important strategic partners has really increased in the last few years. And it's why we continue to have confidence. You mentioned the $50 billion. I mean I remember a time, and I don't know whether I'm just estalgic for it or glad it's behind. We have -- this year, we're going to have a big flagship fundraise and then we'll have a quite a couple of years that's not how things are now. They're always on. So we have -- it has been a real step function in credit, which I think is a testament to the cross-selling and the ability for the interest and excitement rather for the historical traditional LPs on the TPG side to see this great talented group that came in with the Angelo Gordon acquisition and to back these successively larger funds. And that's sort of continuing -- that's continuing to pace. But we had a big first close in Capital. We'll finish that up this year. It's an important year for real estate. So our TRAP business, which is an excellent performer is -- had a $6.8 billion fund, the fund that's just been invested. We have confidence for -- that we'll see a meaningful step-up in that subsequent fund. So we're really pushing on all fronts. And in a sense, you're always on in terms of the existing funds. And as I said, we're seeing a lot of uptake in new funds and new strategies as well.

You mentioned an interesting point that in prior years or years ago, at some point in the past, you would raise your flagships and then you'd have a quiet period. Why not -- why is that not going to repeat this time?

Well, the reality is that we have more strategies in the sense that we have credit -- they're shorter fund cycles. TPG growth is out of the market. It had its close in 2025, but TPG Capital is in the market and TPG Asia will come over the next couple of years. So within asset classes and across asset classes, we have a robust set of offerings, and we're adding new offerings all the time. So advantage direct lending, our growth fund in Asia, sports. These are -- these have gotten a lot of traction on their own. So the reality is that that's what our partners want. They're always investing. They want to understand the broader array of strategies that we have and how they can fit their own objectives and needs with what we have coming to market, not just this year but in years to come. So we came off a very important year in terms of our $51 billion, I think, in '25, a little more on an LTM basis through the first quarter and we have another year where we're looking for 50 plus. And I think that will continue.

One of the other areas that you have added is private wealth, arguably one of the biggest growth opportunities across the industry. You have a private equity strategy, T-POP. I think it's now over $2 billion of AUM and under a year. So how are you managing the trade-offs there between growth, liquidity and valuation discipline as this Evergreen Capital scales?

Absolutely. And I know we're going to come to this, but the other aspect of fundraising for us are these new channels. So as you say, retail, I think maybe we'll talk about insurance for a minute after as well.

That's my follow-up question.

Absolutely. There we go. So that's a perfect lead me here. But on the private wealth side, I think this is a natural for us. And there's 2 sort of -- we have retail in our drawdown funds. -- and there was a substantial increase of 2/3 increase in sort of overall private wealth in the LTM period relative to the prior period. But these evergreen vehicles are really important. So there's sort of -- there's 2 vehicles I probably want to spend a minute on. T-POP, as you said, is our foray into evergreen private equity fund. For us, it is a greatest hit. It's across our 14 strategies. It's had really exciting traction. We're at $2-plus billion, $2.5 billion. And this is a strategy for us that allows -- we have to feel like we have a real right to win in private equity, and it allows the private investors and the wealth managers to participate in the keep in all of our private equity strategies on the same basis, on the same time frame in the same investments as our core institutional funds, mostly institutional funds. And that's really appealing to people. There's excellent alignment. So you asked about how do we adjust our liquidity, how do we adjust our strategy. The shorter answer is we really don't. The appeal for this is to look at over the 30 to 15 -- the inception to date, 30 to 15, 10, 5-year periods. Our returns in private equity have gone up our gross and net returns over that time period. This is not something -- there's some of our -- some of the competitors are sort of have deemphasized privacy. This is a core business for us. We really do feel like we have a right to win, and it's resonated. These are sort of interesting businesses. This gives the investor an opportunity to participate across that spectrum of private equity. And they like the fact that we're not going to sell from the institutions to them or from them to the institutions, they're going to go in, and they're going to exit as though they were an SMA on the same basis. And so that's sort of part of the appeal. And we've started with 2 really strong relationships in the warehouse side to sort of international private banks. We we're adding another this summer. We have a really exciting pipeline of dialogues around additional platforms. We've had a lot of success internationally. I probably would have expected more of a concentration in the U.S., but in Europe and Asia, it's actually resonated and we've had a lot of uptake. And for us, we've taken it very seriously because it's our opportunity to introduce ourselves as a firm in a very intentional way to this broader market, and we feel great about the reaction. So behind that, we'll have TREP which some folks call TREP. I'm going to keep a TREP. We already have TPO, too many acute names is not a good thing. And that will come in the near immediate term. Multi-strategy credit fund, I think, is also a natural addition. So we're going to keep driving this platform. We really feel like we have an incredible set of relationships on the institutional side. And we have an opportunity to translate that into the high net worth retail side, and that's exciting for us. If you look at TCAP for a moment, which is our non-traded BDC, we've had a pretty different experience than some of the other folks in the market. We -- because I insisted we filed yesterday, our latest results and we had -- I think 181 of inflows and gross inflows and then it was at 2.1% in terms of redemption, so well under the 5% cap. And I think that reflects a number of different things. This is the lower middle market strategy. These are 100% credits with a covenant in the revolver for -- so you really see what's happening relatively early. 40% loan to value, very strong credit results, which have been stable quarter-over-quarter. I think 1%, 1.2% pick, which no pick at the outset. So a really healthy portfolio with strong results, very little software, zero ARR-based loans. So I think that the world has discerned among different strategies, and this has been, I think, a source of a lot of pride for us. This is a 10-plus percent performer over the last year. It's a very good product and folks are excited about it and not trying to redeem.

So beyond private wealth in terms of emerging sources of flows for you guys in the years ahead versus in years past, insurance is another one.

Yes.

So why don't we talk about the Jackson partnership, how that's progressing, key learnings so far. And how are you thinking about expanding to additional partnerships over time -- relationships?

Absolutely. Overall -- I mean, we have a lot of insurance relationships that participate in different vehicles. But we've tried to become a lot more strategic in building those. And the Jackson example is a great one. That partnership is excellent. There's a tremendous amount of dialogue. It feels very natural. It feels like a real partnership. And there's a -- at the outset, there was $2 billion allocated to our asset-based strategy. Among the many things that's exciting about this for us is it's helping us build out other capabilities that are really important for our insurance clients. So we're putting a lot of energy and resource behind investment-grade ABF. That's -- one might wonder whether the other insurance clients would be concerned when you have the edge. In this case, it was quite the opposite. It was a view that we are going to increasingly focus and expand our product set to address the needs of the insurance partners. And so we have a number of other dialogues. We feel like there are a lot of other opportunities to keep expanding. And the Jackson relationship, I think, will continue to expand. We're talking about a host of different strategies that I think -- that I think have a lot of traction that are appealing to their book. We're looking at one-off opportunities together. We're sort of doing things that are essentially unlocking by virtue of the partnership between Jackson and ourselves, and we think there's the opportunity to do that again with other partners. I think the insurance side is another area that should represent a big opportunity for us to go forward. We've tended to look at things more on the asset light side. But again, that doesn't, in any way, connote less of an integrated strategic relationship with partners like Jackson.

Great. Why don't we shift gears and talk about AI. It's reshaping both investment opportunities, operating models. For you guys, it's there's implications for the portfolio at the operating company level and also a deployment theme. So we kind of break it into three. I'll start with the first question out of three there. So portfolio company side, right? So talk about how it's impacting your portfolio companies. To what degree does AI represent a disruptive threat versus an alpha creation opportunity as you think about your toolkit, right, working with portfolio companies? And how do you start to get confidence on the underwriting side as you're making new investments as well?

Sure. I think on the question of whether it -- AI represents a disruptive threat or an alpha curation opportunity? The answer is definitely yes. It is both. And it is a dramatic transformation that is -- it's not limited to software. It's really flowing to all of the industries that we invest in. And I think that the first reaction, whenever there's new technology, I think, is this perception that the incumbents are going to get overwhelmed and it's going to be all the disruptors. I think as people spend more time on it, you realize that there are certainly situations where that's the case, but there are also a lot of incumbents that benefit. And one of our jobs, both in our existing portfolio and as we look at new investments is to figure out both the situations, the phenotypes of companies, particularly if you look at software, for example, where you're positioned to benefit from AI as opposed to be impacted by it. So these are companies that have have perimeters on their data are volumetrically exposed in the case of many companies in cybersecurity to the rising threat associated with are physically integrated into the work streams and the operations on the ground, areas of manufacturing software are like that. So there's a number of different systems of record where you're really very hard to displace. So there's a number of different models. But the second side is what you do with that -- what you do with the resources you have and how you drive it. So we have been very intentional, as I said, about selling over time. If you look at where our -- for example, Software as a Proxy, sits for us, the average portfolio company and our soft portfolio is 3 years old, so very recent. -- in 2021 when a lot of folks were buying, we were selling. And we sold everything in TPG 7 in prior, including all of our remaining software companies and at great prices I might add. And so we have a young portfolio. Our recent TPG Capital 9 and the very recent TPG Capital 10, which is just starting. We feel excellent about those are all in full view of agenic software -- excuse me, Gen-AI. So it really leaves us with one fund that was a tenure fund that has about I think at this point, half of the fund has been returned, 60% of that portfolio looks like it's in a -- is outperforming and is a very strong momentum. And we look at 7% as in that mitigate category in terms of of exposure. But we're working hard on sort of all of those companies as well as many companies that are using AI to their advantage. And the overall portfolio is performing very well. mid- to high teens in terms of revenue and EBITDA growth as we shared in the earnings call. But even within software, the first quarter alone, we're showing north of 20% bookings growth, which was better than 3 to 4 quarters in the prior year. So in some ways, we're seeing actually a nice acceleration. And I do think part of that is where we sit with these companies, but also how we're pivoting to try to benefit from AI. So we actually think that -- as you step back from -- you have a key focus on the risk. But as you sort of step back, these moments have changed there have been enormous opportunities for folks like us in private investing. And we have a very deep team. I mean it helps that we live in San Francisco and can throw a rock at 60% of the you had a good enough arm, I guess. 60% of the AI companies that are moving things in the world. And we've taken full advantage of that. I mean you saw that with the recent investment on the -- you mentioned on the deployment side, the OpenAI deploy cut, where we were really the founding partner that is trying to address the biggest bottleneck right now in AI, which is the tremendous limitation in forward deployed engineers who can help to implement and sort of make the AI dream a reality. This is the company that sort of set up to do that because you really need these folks to be able to get back into the code and to see where the development is going. So we feel extremely well positioned by virtue of our technology heritage, our proximity and just the sort of depth and breadth of AI savvy resources we have sitting inside of the firm.

And maybe we could talk about your approach to it at the management company level, right? So how are you using AI to operate the firm differently, more efficiently? What are some of the use cases you've identified? What are your plans around implementing new use cases over the next 12, 24 months? And what sort of, I guess, improvements have you seen so far?

Well, there's a lot of exciting work going on in that front. We've had since 2019 an internal AI team that's our lab, as we call it, that's been focused on of these opportunities. And in each part of our business, there are different sort of -- there are different opportunities to uncover. In the front office, we have -- the tools are incredible. But 1 of the things that's most important is the proprietary data. I mean we have hundreds of companies over time. I think we have last count, at least maybe private equity alone, 5 million pages of proprietary research over time. In Healthcare, we -- over the last 15 years, we've looked at 6x the number of companies that are publicly traded. And so trying to sort of leverage that data pool for insights to do our job better to sort of take people away from some of the mechanical also and to focus on the judgment part of the business. that's an enormous opportunity, which I think we're still in the early innings of tapping into. And we have AI synthesis of all the materials we have, but the ability to look across this much broader data pool, all the results that are coming in from our hundreds of companies. it's really powerful. And again, it's an extraordinary proprietary opportunity to sort of leverage the things that we do and all this work that we create. On the credit side, we have the ability to look across tens of thousands of properties for risk score for our MBS market. And that's something we're doing. I think that increases the flow -- the workflow by two or threefold relative to what we've be doing if we're doing it personally. So that's an opportunity to do a job better probably to take some cost out as well. At the Alberti company in the middle and back office, we have a host of opportunities that we're piloting and that we're executing on. We probably started by saying how can we do what we're doing more efficiently. But we've migrated to the other question of what are the things we can do that with AI that we just couldn't have done with people at all. And that's that -- because I think we were kind of limiting ourselves on how we were framing the question. So I think there are a lot of things that we are doing today and that we are piloting that will have a big impact. And if you look at our -- the longer arc of -- we went public not that long ago, 4.5 years ago with $100 billion of AUM. We're now well north of $300 billion. So as you think about different ways to leverage AI to to sort of affect the rate of growth or the trajectory of your cost base as you grow the AUM as you grow your revenues, it could have a really profound impact, I think, on our business model.

And then lastly, maybe AI is a deployment theme. You touched on this I did a moment ago a little bit. Can you just expand on that? And just more broadly, how are you thinking about the opportunity set? What areas of standout as most attractive to you?

I think it's a very exciting opportunity set. So we've invested directly in entropic, directly in SpaceX, directly in OpenAI. We've created, as I mentioned, this sort of tool, which leverages our operating capability and our ability to sort of help stand up companies in deploy co. But we've also invested across our platform. So I think we had really 1 of the first credit investments in and around the AI space with XAI through our Credit Solutions fund. That was a very successful deal. We've invested in Intersect Power and Google. That was 1 of our exits in the first quarter. Our real estate team started investing in 2019 in data centers. So we see actually a lot of different opportunities across the firm. We also are using AI because we have this sort of -- you got to understand TPG, half of our partners on the capital side, half of the folks above the associate level are operating people. So we have a very deep bench of expertise and operating expertise, and that's been everything through the lens of AI. And so we just underwrote a business services deal, which had 1,000 basis points of margin improvement built in through leveraging AI to redesign workflows. So AI has a lot of impact, both on discrete opportunities, some of the many, whether it's energy and power and the use of clean energy to supply this ever-growing need for energy or it's infrastructure some of these derivative plays that I think are very appealing. And then AI has a big impact on sort of these sectors that we've been in for 2 and 3 decades in terms of creating tools that are now allow us to look at a totally different set of numbers than you would otherwise be looking at when you're underwriting these businesses.

So we talked about fundraising across a whole different number of channels and opportunities as we think about organic growth. So final question here on the inorganic side, Angelo Gordon was the largest acquisition that TPG has done. So how are the M&A conversations evolving today versus, say, a year or 6 months ago. And from here, is the focus more on filling capability gaps or continuing to scale existing verticals.

We have a very ambitious strategy for the future. We really want to grow. Again, we tripled our AUM plus since we went public. We feel like there's a lot of opportunity ahead of us. And I think that, that will come both in the form of organic growth, continuing to grow our flagship funds and our existing funds. New organic growth, which has been a core skill set of ours forever. I mean, that's from the earliest days we've had this culture, this entrepreneurial culture of going off, creating new funds and building them -- and these are businesses that might be a BGS or secondary business that was 1.9 in the first fund has an opportunity to grow materially. And so those will have a big tailwind for us as we think about growth. The inorganic growth aspect is also very important for us. Some of that, again, is in distribution. But as you look at new platforms, I think it falls into two categories, big scale acquisitions like Angelo Gordon, Pepper has been another exciting opportunity for us that feels more like a tuck-in that is an excellent business on right and works very well and sort of increases the view of us as a strategic in the digital infrastructure space. We have opportunities across both. We've always felt very capable on the organic growth side. I think with the Angelo Gordon acquisition, which to us has been a tremendous success is -- it's given us confidence that we can also identify, execute and then integrate these businesses in a way where we make both sides of the equation a lot better. So I think you'll see us look for new capabilities. I think we want to continue to grow in areas like secondaries. That could be organic. I think it would certainly be organic. It could also be inorganic in areas like infrastructure, likewise, organic plus inorganic potentially in geographies. We have an excellent business in Europe. I'm going to spend a lot of time in the summer to try to support the team as we grow it. I could see opportunities to expand inorganically there as well. And with more tuck-ins as we think about ways to sort of keep building out the -- and really logically grow from the platforms that we have in place, I think that we're seeing a lot -- and again, I feel like we feel very confident in our ability to do that and to do that in a way that is accretive to both TPG and the business that we acquire.

Great. I'm afraid we're out of time. Todd, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you.