IP Group Stock

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the IP Group plc Half Year Results Investor Presentation.

[Operator Instructions]

The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and we'll publish responses where it's appropriate to do so.

Before we begin, as usual, we would just like to submit the following poll. And if you'd give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful.

And I would now like to hand you over to CEO, Greg Smith. Greg, good morning, sir.

Good morning, Jake. Thank you very much, and welcome, everyone, to IP Group's 2026 Half Year Results Presentation. And thanks very much to all the Investor Meet Company team and Mark for hosting today's session. Much appreciated, as always. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Greg Smith, I'm the Chief Executive of IP Group. With me today is David Baynes, our Chief Financial and Operating Officer. We deliberately tried to keep today's presentation a bit shorter and more focused at the half year after all. So I will cover the half year highlights and progress across the portfolio and our strategic priorities.

I'll get DB to take you through the financials before I return to summarize. And then, of course, there will be time for questions. And I would say the headline for today's results is that we have carried the momentum that we had from 2025 into 2026 with further NAV per share growth, strong cash realizations and, as I hope we will demonstrate, broad-based portfolio progress.

As usual, the disclaimer is here. Please note the sort of important disclaimers, particularly the bit about forward-looking statements. This presentation will be up on the Investor Relations section of our website for review post the call.

So in terms of what we'll cover today, short -- 4 short sections: the half year overview, portfolio progress, I think particularly the future value opportunity within that, then financial results, and then a brief summary. So please post questions through the platform as we go, as Jake said, we'll then group them by theme and answer as many as we can. We'll do that clearly and directly. So turning first to what we delivered for shareholders in the first half. And before we do that, I just wanted to note that this year marks IP Group's 25th anniversary. And over that period, we've invested over GBP 1.5 billion.

We've helped to form and support more than 600 companies, and those companies have created more than 15,000 jobs. That track record matters because science investing, in our view, rewards experience, specialist judgment, and also long-term relationships from a shareholder point of view, and also gives us a large and increasingly mature portfolio from which future value and cash realizations can emerge. But today is principally about the delivery in the first half and the little period afterwards. So let's move straight into the first half results. So the group made disciplined and tangible progress in the first half.

NAV per share increased by about 3% to 114p, taking net asset value of GBP 1 billion. Since the period end, NAV per share has actually increased further to approximately 117p a share as at 11th of September, last Friday. We generated GBP 69 million of cash proceeds in the 6 months, which was slightly more, actually, than the whole of full year '25. A further GBP 17 million since June takes our year-to-date proceeds to the mid-GBP 80 million. Portfolio companies raised over GBP 0.5 billion of third-party capital, and we contributed about 5% of this. So this is strong external evidence that other investors are prepared to commit substantial capital to companies as they progress.

Now the largest fair value driver in the period was the further derisking of Pfizer's obesity programs. That increased the value of our royalty interest by GBP 27 million to just over GBP 150 million, and we ended the period with a healthy cash balance of GBP 239 million gross. So the message is not that one asset performed well. NAV growth, cash realizations, external funding, and operational milestones all generally moved forward together. Now before going into the detail behind that and the portfolio, I just want to briefly acknowledge the possible offer process during the summer.

I would say, as we put in our RNS release, the Board sought to engage constructively with Railpen and its partners, and we remain very grateful for their effort and the constructive engagement of all of the shareholders who we spoke to during that period.

As you will have seen, the process did not result in an acceptable proposal. And so our focus as a management team and the Board is firmly on delivering the substantial value that we see in the Group. On that note, let's turn to Pfizer. So at the full year, I spent a bit of time explaining why that Pfizer obesity royalty interest have become such a significant asset for IP Group and our shareholders.

The first half has added further evidence to that and also reduce development risk. During the period, Pfizer released positive clinical data for the lead program, berobenatide, showing competitive weight loss efficacy alongside favorable tolerability and supporting the potential for a monthly maintenance regimen. The berobenatide and amylin combination also advanced into Phase IIb, and that was the primary driver of the GBP 27 million uplift that I mentioned.

Now this is an increasingly competitive market, so differentiation matters. I think the potential combination of competitive efficacy, favorable tolerability, and this sort of monthly maintenance profile remains one of the main reasons that Pfizer believes this program can be highly differentiated in that increasingly competitive market.

And also to reiterate, Pfizer has committed substantial resource to this. It is progressing 10 Phase III studies this year and launch is targeted in 2028. Now as we have said in previous notes, there remains clinical, regulatory, and commercial risk. And as a result, our valuation is based around a probability-weighted method and is discounted, but the progress in the half strengthens both the quality and the breadth of our exposure to a market that is externally forecast at around sort of GBP 100 billion to GBP 150 billion or thereabouts annually by 2030. To hopefully give you a little bit more color, this slide shows the route to market across the programs where we've got economic exposure.

And as I mentioned, the most advanced of the assets at the top there is berobenatide. Two Phase III studies are expected to reach primary completion in October 2027, and that supports a potential first approval in 2028. There's also a monthly dosing study and 7 further Phase III studies that are -- that could provide potential to broaden the label and therefore, the commercial opportunity. Worth noting that just yesterday at a conference, Pfizer also indicated that recruitment across essentially all of the berobenatide Phase III studies is now close to completion.

From our point of view, from your point of view, shareholders, that's very encouraging because patient recruitment is often the biggest factor in determining when studies read out and complete.

And so it supports good confidence in the current program timetable. The -- as I mentioned, the berobenatide and amylin combination is now in Phase IIb. So you can see that there. And that's got primary completion currently expected in April '27. We also have exposure to an amylin monotherapy and some earlier oral and next-gen programs. And there's a couple, as Dave will come on to explain, a couple of Phase I assets that are not currently attributed value in our model.

So I think the important takeaway from this for shareholders is that this isn't exposure to a single binary program. It extends across the lead program, which is an injectable, and some combination therapies and the potential for less frequent dosing and a number of these earlier-stage programs.

So that gives us several possible routes to value as Pfizer develops the franchise. And I think this point on the carrying value, I think the GBP 150 million we've got it in at, it definitely doesn't reflect Pfizer's commercial ambition, and it's based on these risk-adjusted probabilities. And so DB will take you through those assumptions in a little bit more detail later today.

In terms of our investment thesis, our default is to hold the asset and receive the royalties, and they're anticipated to begin in 2028 if the development and launch proceeds to the plan that is set out here. This is highly consistent with the venture model; a small number of exceptional outcomes can drive a very disproportionate share of returns.

And this share -- this asset, we believe, gives shareholders direct exposure to that potential. That being said, having a deep default path definitely doesn't mean that we stop exploring ways to accelerate value creation for shareholders. So as the program matures and derisks over this period, we would expect the range of strategic options available to us to broaden out, and we will continue to assess these carefully through the lens of long-term shareholder value.

And of course, we remain open to exceptional opportunities should they arise. On Oxford Nanopore, they have made, I would say, encouraging progress in the half and has performed strongly since the period end from a share price point of view.

As you can see from the slide, and many of you would have tracked this directly, revenue was at GBP 117 million, which is about a 12% growth at constant currency. A big thing for us was the fact that gross margin increased by 400 basis points to 62%, but I think even more importantly, and I think this was a bit that came out particularly in the half year results more than the trading statement, was the adjusted EBITDA loss more than halving to just over GBP 22 million. I think one of the key developments has been the strengthening of the leadership team. Francis joined as CEO in March, and the company has also added a number of senior hires in areas of key capabilities as it prepares for its next phase of commercial growth.

And I think under that leadership team, it feels to us that there is a more focused customer-led growth strategy. The company has spoken about narrowing down the 47 areas in which its technology could compete to the 18 that it considers most attractive. And interestingly, management's own analysis indicates that around 40% to 45% of revenue generated over the last 3 years already comes from those priority markets.

So the existing revenues, therefore, provide something of a strong foundation for that strategy and give the company a credible base from which to expand. And the opportunity available, which is clearly set out within their materials, gives very substantial room for expansion.

So I think we see this as very much a refinement of focus rather than a wholesale change of direction, and that gives us confidence in the team's ability to execute. That point on profitability or the progress towards profitability, that has been absolutely central to our investment thesis. And I think the results were ahead of where the market appeared to be. The company remains on track for that EBIT breakeven in full year '27 and positive free cash flow in 2028. And the other point of note is the cross-licensing agreement with a global diagnostics company. That brings $35 million of committed revenue over the next couple of years, but importantly, ongoing royalties, which we believe could be substantial.

They are not currently included in the medium-term guidance. So any early adoption, which we might see as soon as this year, actually, could increase recognition of that strategic value to the platform. And there's been a bit of an increase in the value of our holding since the half year of about GBP 26 million, but we remain very focused on that sort of operating thesis and the route to sustainable profitability.

Delivery against that should also create more attractive monetization options for us over time without prejudging the timing of those. On the wider portfolio, don't worry, I'm not going to go into all of these in detail, but I think the central message from this slide is breadth and the fact that the progress was not confined to Pfizer or Oxford Nanopore.

Quantum Motion, Quantum Circuits, Oxa completed major funding rounds, and First Light Fusion and Mantle8 raised capital. Hysata secured its first commercial electrolyzer order. Centessa was acquired by Eli Lilly. So there's been good progress across the portfolio. I would just say Oxa is worth a brief comment in there. So following its strategic reset last year and this sharper focus on what we term industrial mobile autonomy, it has formed a new joint venture with the Dubai Future Foundation called Shift, and the venture is designed to put autonomous vehicles to work in ports and airports in an integrated product that combines Oxa's self-driving software, its fleet management platform, and its autonomy hardware.

And this is really targeting practical gains in things like productivity, efficiency, safety, and operational resilience within these environments. And the first scalable commercial deployment is planned before the end of 2027. From Dubai's point of view, of course, it's trying to support the state's ambition to double its foreign trade by 2033.

And of course, given the current regional uncertainty, the near-term emphasis from the company is correctly on disciplined execution and securing those early deployments. Management definitely deserves the principal credit for delivering that partnership, but it's worth saying IP Group supported the company in bringing it about.

And this is hopefully a useful example of how our network and our international network can help portfolio companies across these strategic international partners to accelerate into large markets. Still delivery ahead, but pretty encouraging process from one of the companies that was affected by a significant valuation reduction last year. So overall, the breadth of the financing, the clinical progress, and the commercial partnerships provides evidence of greater maturity across the portfolio with a couple of negative movements as a reminder that execution risk always remains in the portfolio. Cash generation was one of the clearest positives from our first half.

We realized GBP 69 million, which compared with about GBP 30 million in the first half of last year. And as I mentioned, it's actually now more than the whole of 2025. The principal contributors are set out on the slide: Monolith, Centessa, and Hinge Health. And I think they both provide sort of some good illustrations of our model. Hinge Health, following their 2025 IPO, we've now generated a total of GBP 46 million of total proceeds. That was a 50x multiple of invested capital and almost a 50% IRR. Monolith is a bit different. That provides an example of where we've had a strategic acquisition of an important deep tech capability, and that was an acquisition by CoreWeave.

And since then, we've generated around GBP 23 million of proceeds this year with, again, greater than 50% overall IRR. So I think they show that we can create and realize value from different parts of the portfolio, whether that's a public market success or a strategic acquisition. And it's exactly the sort of profile that we would expect from a diversified science and technology portfolio. Including post-period end receipts, we've now delivered GBP 154 million, just over GBP 150 million since the beginning of 2025. So we're well over halfway towards our GBP 250 million target by the end of 2027. Looking forward, we continue to see a healthy pipeline of maturing assets and potential realization opportunities over the next 12 to 18 months.

Fair to say that timing is never entirely within our control, but the breadth of the portfolio gives us a number of different paths to achieving that target. As a reminder of the way the components of IP Group work together, Parkwalk provides differentiated access to sort of pre-seed, seed, and into Series A through our dedicated EIS funds and relationships with leading universities. The permanent balance sheet, which shareholders are exposed to support selected companies as they mature, while our private funds can add science and technology scale-up capital alongside the balance sheet. That additional capital matters in 3 ways. It can accelerate our strongest businesses across a broader opportunity set.

It can generate management fees to help reduce our net overheads over time, and strong investment performance in those funds can generate performance fees for shareholders. So the model gives us proprietary sourcing, long-term ownership, and the potential to increase the capital available to portfolio companies without relying solely on our balance sheet. On the subject of third-party capital, we made progress in expanding that platform during the period, although I'd say the focus is now firmly on delivery of the 2 new mandates that we announced during the first half. Our strategic relationship with Aberdeen is moving quickly towards its first investment, and we expect the initial portfolio to be up and running by the end of the year.

And this is definitely an early example of a dedicated defined contribution mandate providing access to scaling science and technology businesses. And we believe there is good potential for it to provide a route for further long-term capital savings coming into this sector. In Australia, just after our full year results, we also launched the A$50 million IP Group Climate Catalyst Fund. That was with the Clean Energy Finance Corporation in Australia, which is the sort of equivalent of the Australian Green Bank. And similarly for that fund, the next milestone is to begin investing that capital by the end of the year into Australian companies that are addressing hard-to-abate industries.

So together with Parkwalk and Hostplus and those funds, we manage around GBP 550 million of third-party capital. And we have further opportunities in the pipeline where we aim to demonstrate material progress over the next 6 to 12 months. So this remains at the moment a smaller part of today's shareholder value story. But over time, it should help us support more companies, reduce our overheads, and create this performance fee potential if we can deliver strong returns. So I'll now turn to the first half outcomes in the portfolio, but also the future value opportunities that we see within them. So at 30th of June, the total portfolio is valued at about GBP 900 million, and that's equivalent to about 100p per share -- 103p per share.

And the top 5 assets account for about 50p per share. You see them set out on the slide. And probably just worth recognizing each of these has different value drivers. So royalty income and clinical derisking for our license, listed market performance and path to profitability at Nanopore, clinical milestones at Istesso and Mission, and industrial scale-up at Hysata. As I mentioned, Hysata secured its first binding megawatt-scale order during the first half, and delivery is expected in the first half of 2027. And I should also note that Mission Therapeutics, their acute kidney injury program was acquired by Dimerix for potential consideration of up to nearly $300 million.

And that upfront extends the -- obviously, not all that was upfront, but the upfront they received will extend Mission's runway for its core Parkinson's program. And I think the broader point here to make is the top 5 assets do provide distinct routes to value, but the other 53p per share gives us and shareholders exposure to a much wider group of businesses and the -- and a good level of optionality within those. And I'm just going to highlight a few of those over the course of the next few slides. Before I do that, it would be worth just pointing out our successful exit in Centessa. This is another example of realized value, not paper value. This -- our involvement in this company began through a University of Cambridge spinout that we backed in 2017.

That ApcinteX became part of a roll-up, Centessa, which then listed on NASDAQ in 2021. And then earlier this year, it was acquired by Eli Lilly for about $6 billion upfront with a further $1.5 billion in potential milestones. For us, we sold during the course of the development of that company during its NASDAQ life, and the remaining balance we sold during -- at the point of completion this year. That has given us a realized IRR of about 24%, and there's a bit of potential CVR payments that could be another sort of GBP 3 million, GBP 4 million potentially. And I think really, this is just to illustrate the validation of the model.

So breakthrough university science supported through several stages and has exited to a global pharmaceutical buyer. And we believe that there are a number of assets that look today like ApcinteX did back then at the early part of its journey. In terms of the rest of the therapeutics portfolio, I think there's just a few things to highlight 3 milestones, particularly from the half, stand out. Two of these were catalysts that we flagged at the full year that have now delivered. So Enterprise Therapeutics met its primary endpoint in a Phase II cystic fibrosis trial, and that showed improved lung function over 28 days compared with placebo.

And Microbiotica delivered a second positive Phase Ib, this time data set, and that was in melanoma. And I think that's building evidence that its precision microbiome platform. Its sort of gut microbiome platform -- can increase or improve responses in these quite difficult-to-treat indications. Istesso began dosing the new Phase II study of leramistat in June. As everyone will know, the previous rheumatoid arthritis study didn't meet its primary endpoint, but it showed significant improvements in things like disability, fatigue, and reduction in markers of muscle loss. And so this trial, therefore, follows those signals into secondary sarcopenia caused by RA, and we are testing muscle quality, repair, and function in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study that will read out in the second half of '27.

This is worth noting that this sort of sarcopenia market is very significant. It affects around 110 million people globally, and there are no treatments currently approved to treat it. So a safe oral treatment that improves function would be a very significant unmet need. Istesso remains a significant holding from the group from a valuation point of view. And we will, of course, review its valuation through the normal year-end processes in light of the evolving clinical evidence and the commercial opportunity. And I think for today, the important point is that the company has followed the biology into a more focused trial with a clear unmet need and a very differentiated oral regenerative approach.

So, the common thread across these is large indications, high unmet need, and programs moving into study that provide clearer evidence and, if they're successful, support partnering and value realization. Two of our companies in the quantum space raised significant capital this period. And they -- the common thread amongst these is the IP Group and Parkwalk were early investors -- and our balance sheet exposure to quantum companies is probably worth about 2p per share at the half year. And these brands bring substantial third-party capital into that sector and validate the sort of strategic importance of that. And Quantum remains genuinely exciting. It's a longer-duration opportunity.

But I think alongside it, we also have significant ownership in businesses tackling quite immediate constraints in AI computing. And I'll just turn to some of those now to round up this section. I think one of the themes for us, and I'm sure you are all seeing it across your lives, is that AI is rapidly moving from experimentation into large-scale industrial deployment. And as models become more embedded in products and services, the constraints are increasingly physical in nature. So things like electricity available to data centers, the heat being produced by conventional processes, and also the energy and time required to move data between the memory bit and the compute bit.

GPUs remain absolutely central to the system, but they definitely can't solve every part of that equation on their own. So we have 3 complementary physics-led approaches: light, memory, and probability. So on the first, Lumai, which is valued at about GBP 9 million, about a [ 1p ] per share, where we have a 26% holding, uses 3-dimensional optical computing for the matrix multiplication that goes on at the heart of AI inference.

During the period, it announced that its first Iris system is now running billion-parameter language models in real time. So that hopefully means something to some of you; I guess, sort of in commercial terms, this is designed for high-throughput workloads in data centers.

And the plan here is to develop that system and work -- it will work alongside conventional GPUs rather than trying to replace the whole computing stack. And if you look at their website, you can see those sort of initial products. Intrinsic on the memory side, again, valued at about 1p a share. We own about 28% of this. This is generating and developing what we call next-generation ReRAM, that's memory. And this is -- it's important because getting faster and non-volatile, i.e., remembers, and low-power memory can sit much closer to the processor and reduce the energy and a little bit of time moving data between memory and processing.

Relevant applications here can include things like edge AI, autonomous vehicles, wearables, remote sensing, that sort of thing. And the company is well-capitalized and is seeing strong commercial interest from important industry participants. And then finally, at about 0.2p or 0.3p of a share is our holding in Quantum Dice, and this is photonics and it is for probabilistic computing. The aim here is to try and accelerate problems that required repeated sampling under uncertain conditions. So there's things like logistics and asset management and asset optimization, financial modeling, particularly relevant here. And so things that are used in robotics and machine vision. So 3 very complementary areas of the value chain.

So although these 3 represent about GBP 20 million each of carrying value, we have 17% to 28%, as you can see, ownership. And so a meaningful proportion of any future upside belongs to the group and our shareholders. And each has milestones ahead that could become the next value events. We expect and hope to be able to report further technical and funding and hopefully some commercial milestones from these businesses over the next 6 months or so. So with that summary of the main drivers and some of the future value drivers, I will hand over to DB to take you through the financial results. Thank you.

Thank you, Greg. Yes, I'll just take you through a quick canter through the financial results, being only the half year. Most of this you've heard already, but it's always good to reiterate the message. So NAV about [ GBP 1.14 was -- GBP 1.14 ] (sic) [ 114p ] at the end of the period. It's actually slightly up. You'll see in the release, the slide, at GBP 1.17 following improvement in Oxford Nanopore price. At the end of June, that was a 3.2% increase in the period, which is following the 13% increase in period before. So we're a couple of good periods.

Overheads, similar, slightly up. I would expect -- I think total overheads last year were just under GBP 16 million. I think for the full year, that is. But I would expect it to be something slightly higher than that this year, just due to the nature of inflation. So probably we'll have a sort of similar amount in the second half, maybe slightly more, maybe making it about GBP 17 million. But overhead is still in control and only really growing by inflation. Gross cash very strong, as you've already heard. Gross cash actually up over the period, and I'll talk about that briefly in a minute.

Balance sheet, very simple, not much change. Actually, the actual math of the portfolio is pretty much exactly flat at about GBP 907 million, GBP 908 million. And you can see the effect of that, that is -- we have invested GBP 30 million in the period, fully itemized in the report. But we've had quite a lot of exits, as you heard, very strong exits of GBP 69 million and more since the period end, GBP 17 million. So exits have been strong.

With the fair value gain then taking us back to where we started, effectively, that's what the movement has been. So the value of what we've invested, what we've gained count as perhaps exactly the money that's been realized, which, of course, has moved into cash, as we'll see in a minute.

Pfizer royalty asset, Greg has explained this, but always good to actually see what it means in terms of numbers. So we're actually up from about GBP 127 million to GBP 153 million. And the main -- this is a chart I showed you at the time of full year. And it's got the main programs. If you look at this, there's actually 6 programs here. And the main one there on the left, the lead one at the moment is the berobenatide, the monotherapy, which is one that's in these Phase III clinical trials. No significant change in the value because the probabilities haven't changed. It's still in that Phase III trial. The next key milestone for that will be if it gets successful completion of that trial, then those percentages will obviously go up, percentage probability and therefore the value will go up at that time.

There has been an increase in the second part there. So that's a combination therapy with the GLP and the amylin. That moved into a Phase IIb trial. So about a 25% probability when last reported. It's now 39%. If it's successful in that trial, it will ultimately move into 53% when it moves into the next phase, following the same logic. But that has resulted in most of the increase of about GBP 27 million in the period is actually in that bar there. That's gone up. The third bar if we're following the [ oral ] bar, we haven't changed the value on.

Actually, no -- nothing really to report. Greg has already explained. Pfizer did talk about the fact that they've actually terminated one of their [ oral ] assets, but that wasn't our one they had one asset they sourced from somewhere else. So at the moment, we haven't really got anything to report on that. So at the moment, we're carrying it still at a very low probability success.

And talking about low probability successes, we do, of course, have 3 programs we're not revaluing at all. Again, Greg mentioned them, that there's what's called GIPR, an alternative to the amylin, that program is now in a Phase I clinical trial as is the pro drug, and that pro drug you can see in the far right there is actually a quarterly dosage rather than monthly in a Phase I trial. Thing at the moment it's still -- we still consider it too early to actually put values on those, not least of all -- it's very difficult to identify market size to do the calculation. But if they progress -- certainly if they progress in the Phase II trial, we will then have to start recognizing those values and that will have a relatively significant impact on that value at that time, I would guess. So that's why we still got about GBP 152 million.

Going quickly on the funding profile, very slightly different, but pretty much similar as we see. We tend to talk about third funded, third in a year, third in 2 years, changed very slightly. Actually, we've only got about 6% to fund for the rest of this year and 19% for the 6 months after that. So actually, 12 months now is only about 25%. And quite a lot of funding actually moved out into the year after that. So after next half year, the half year after. So if anything, actually, the funding profile has slightly improved over other periods. But the truth is the message always is the rate at which our company funds is relatively constant and it gives you a chance to do funding as they come along. You don't get a kind of walls of funding requirements.

And as always, I say follow the cash on these things, the cash is really repeating what we've seen before, but the cash has actually improved and that with investments in about GBP 30 million have been outweighed by the exits and relatively small amount of costs to reduce that. And really what's happened is effectively the profit we've seen, that GBP 31 million profit has effectively gone into cash. That's where it is. And as we've mentioned already, we haven't been doing buybacks. There's quite a lot of questions about that, doing buybacks in the period. So that money is sitting in cash at the moment and that explains that increase. And I'll hand back to Greg.

Thank you very much, Dave. So let's just quickly finish with a recap of the key messages and a little look forward. So as I mentioned at the start, the first half of 2026 has been a period of disciplined execution and hopefully growing momentum that you're seeing. NAV per share increased to 114p and has increased further to approximately 117p since the period end. We delivered GBP 69 million of proceeds in the half and actually mid-80s, GBP 86 million, I think, from -- for the year-to-date, and that takes total proceeds since the start of 2025 to GBP 154 million, and we remain on track for the GBP 250 million by the end of 2027.

And from a portfolio point of view, the Pfizer programs continue to derisk. Oxford Nanopore made good financial and commercial progress, and the broader portfolio attracted over GBP 0.5 billion of third-party capital while delivering milestones that ranged across therapeutics, quantum, autonomy, climate tech, and AI-enabling compute. As I said, we ended June with GBP 240 million of gross cash and deposits. So I think importantly, from our point of view, the progress is becoming increasingly visible in outcomes. So per share value growth, cash realizations, external validation through funding rounds.

And hopefully, you're seeing clearer routes to potential future value. This is the same set of priorities that I outlined we will be targeting this year at the full year, I changed the slide. I guess the first point to make is the sort of accountability. So this is what I said we would do and reporting back on the progress that we have made to date. So we've made continued positive NAV per share performance. We have generated about GBP 154 million of exits, as I mentioned, including those post-period receipts since the beginning of 2025. We've moved the Aberdeen relationship towards its first investment. We announced that further fund, the Climate Catalyst Fund, and we've maintained a disciplined approach to deployment.

For the remainder of the year, those objectives sort of largely still stand: the continued positive NAV per share performance, making the first investments in those -- both of those private capital arrangements, and keeping executing towards that GBP 250 million exit target. So that's the sort of accountability piece. I would say that the second point, though, is more around pace and ambition. You'll have seen that Michael Queen joined us as Chair during the half, and he brings a substantial level of experience from his role at 3i, where he was Chief Executive, and many private markets companies, most recently Coller Capital, where he was Chair.

And we also heard a range of views from our shareholders during the summer, and we will continue that engagement now as part of this half year results roadshow. I would say Michael, the Board, and management are using all those inputs to determine and implement the most effective ways for us to be able to accelerate realizations, sharpen our capital allocation, and convert more of the portfolio's underlying value into per share returns while also retaining the valuation discipline that protects you as shareholders. Third-party interest and that shareholder engagement we saw during the summer underline for us the attractiveness of the underlying assets and also the strategy that we're following.

And of course, the task for us as a management team now is to convert more of that value into outcomes that you as investors can see in cash and per share returns. As Dave mentioned, we have approximately GBP 50 million of proceeds from realizations that is now available for future shareholder returns under the capital allocation policy that was approved by the Board. Now of course, following the AGM vote, as you would expect, as a public company, we are engaging constructively with shareholders on the appropriate form and timing and how we can consider we can deliver against our capital allocation policy.

From our perspective, the principle is clear. We should allocate capital where it creates the best risk-adjusted per share outcomes. So I want to be clear that this is not simply business as usual. We've got a strong portfolio. We've got a clear strategy for growth, and we've got substantial opportunity ahead. Our priority is execution and converting that opportunity into outcomes that shareholders can see and measure.

I thank you all very much for your continued support. DB and I will be very happy now to take your questions.

I'm going to try and group them. I'm looking at them as they're coming through. Some of them, I think we've now answered in the presentation on areas like capital allocation, and we mentioned the bid process during the summer. I probably can't say an awful lot more on that. But yes, that's...

I agree, exactly what I was going to say we'll have a go. So please don't be offended this year if I don't include your question. I've traditionally included every question.

I'll do some grouping. And as Greg correctly said, I think we really -- we certainly covered off the capital allocation. I feel we've given a fairly good description around also the bid. So I probably won't do any more on those. So Kane [ Anderson ] Deutsche, love to have you with us, Kane, as always, lots of long questions -- or a long question with lots of complexity in it. Would you consider partially monetizing the Pfizer royalty interest at an attractive opportunity arose or is the intention to remain fully exposed given the potential upside of the programs' progress?

I hope I answered that one in full. We have a default position that we would hold it. But as the asset derisks over the course of the next sort of 12 to 18 months, and we think there could be opportunities that could be attractive. And absolutely, I always say to all the investment team, everything is for sale in the portfolio at the right price. So if there was an attractive offer, of course, we would look at it.

Sorry, I'm sometimes reading the question [indiscernible] I'm sorry. With respect to the portfolio companies still came, raises of which there's has been a lot. Do you think this reflects a genuine improvement in the funding environment or investors simply becoming more selective and concentrated into a smaller number of higher-quality assets?

Both [indiscernible] . I mean we're certainly seeing that in -- if you look at the broad statistics across the industry, there are some mega rounds that are attracting huge amounts of capital. I mean maybe a good example is Fusion. If you look at the analysis of the Fusion funding environment, quite a lot of capital has gone into that space. I haven't got the stats to hand, but it's in the billions. And there are 3, 4, 5 companies that have identified or have received a substantial amount of that capital with much of a thinner tail.

Interestingly, a stat that we were looking at the other day in our analysis of this sector. And of course, we have our exposure through First Light Fusion, and this is an area of particular interest to them. It's something -- when they analyze the companies in the Fusion space about the level of capital that they believe they still needed to access in order to deliver the commercial milestones, it was something like 4x or 5x the amount of capital that's been raised even in this increased period. So I would say it is selective. The environment for certain of the sectors is strong. We see it as a good validation of the portfolio, and it's a metric that we track and report on for that reason.

And last piece, I can probably deal with this. This is related to the 43% of priced funding rounds which were down. People noticed in the report, we track how many funding rounds are up from the last one, how many flat, how many down, slightly more in this period. And the question was, should we think of this as a lagging effect from impairments or you recognize in prior periods or do you see pockets of valuation pressure across the portfolio? Funny enough, I don't want to read too much into it. By number -- by number it's slightly up into well the number that is down slightly increased, I should say. But actually, by value, it happens.

And also it's important to note, I think, that this true, almost every year we've ever done this. These adjustments are from the last funding round. Actually, we had already recognized all those in the last set of accounts. So we're tending to run ahead of that. So where we think something might be down, we've already factored into our numbers. These aren't things that normally catch us out.

Moving on a little bit. We've covered pretty well on the Metsera stuff, but the particular question just to clarify, question was the GBP 27 million uplift milestone.

I guess they nearly all of it acted as a valuatin adjustment. There was a small milestone during the period. It was only about GBP 3 million. The next one back to you, Greg, I think, from Paul B. Bulk of transaction activity, both in exits and investments looks to be concentrated in health tech and AI. Can you comment on strength or weakness of activity outside of these areas? And in which sectors do you see the bulk of activity in the near term?

Yes, that's an interesting one. I would say I've hopefully tried to set out there was quite a breadth, both in terms of the larger portfolio companies and the other milestones and progress underneath that across each of the 3 main areas in which we invest. I didn't dwell too much on Hysata, for example, which is very much in the clean tech space, delivering, hopefully, its first commercial order for a megawatt-scale plant in South America in early 2027, first half of 2027. So we do see opportunity across all of them.

I mean interestingly, your question actually is a great observation on what we're seeing in our opportunity set is actually quite a convergence of deep tech, clean tech, and health tech. So many of our opportunities touch those areas in different ways. So Oxa would be a good example. That is a company that has both a software model and a hardware model. It is clearly deploying machine learning and AI and software into physical environments. In some cases, that is being used to increase efficiency. In some cases, it's being used for security and defense for improving resilience.

So it's to -- that's one that probably doesn't touch health tech, for example. But if you look, that's a trend that we think is interesting and something that our multidisciplinary site-based approach hopefully gives us a competitive advantage in.

Thank you. Again, just to clarify from [ John B ]. Is the amylin -- does the amylin belong to the group? Yes, it does. I explained in the Metsera and that sort of IP Group owns a lot of the Pfizer weight loss franchise, quite a few parts, not just -- not just the lead programs, but the combination therapy and the prodrug and the GIPR. So it's quite a wide estate of about 6 different patent areas which we originate to at IP Group. Going back to -- the next one I would say from Lucas, I think one of our most loyal shareholders, definitely deserves to have your question read out in full, Lucas.

Congratulations on the strong results. Given the very positive presentation and very strong underlying performance, we still find it difficult to understand why the stock continues to trade at 40% discount level. And this is a question we talked about many times. What do you believe are the key reasons for this discount?

Well, yes, we've discussed this a lot -- that's part of the reason that we have the capital allocation program that we do. I mean, I guess there are broad ways we can reduce the discount over time. The first is simply delivery. Ultimately, discounts narrow when investors gain confidence that our NAV growth, our portfolio progress, our cash realizations are repeatable rather than one-offs. So that's why we've been so focused on the NAV per share growth, the exits, and the portfolio execution. The second is conversion.

So we've talked today about the quality of the portfolio, but investors quite reasonably want to see more of that value translated into cash and then hopefully into shareholder returns and realized outcomes. And that's why we set that GBP 250 million cash exit target. I mean we felt that was an ambitious target. That was, I think, at the time, more than half our entire market cap that we said we were going to deliver in cash exits. And it's obviously why capital allocation remains such an important area of focus.

And then I suppose the third, we're increasingly focused on the sort of the structure of the portfolio itself. So that obviously includes shareholder returns, which we need to engage on further during the rest of this year, the development of our third-party capital platform, and how we can maximize the value. We definitely heard a range of views on that front during the summer, and we are, of course, now actively considering how best to reflect those views while remaining disciplined and focused on long-term value creation. So I think there isn't a single action that closes a discount of this size. I think that sustained delivery, the thoughtful shareholder-focused capital allocation, continued realizations, that seems to be the most credible route to narrowing it over time.

Yes. And [indiscernible] a number of questions about reducing the discount. A question from John L. Is Saba a shareholder? Factual answer, yes, they are. They own about 12%. Next question from Bill H. Has IP Group's new Chairman bought any shares in the group? Are there any signs yet of how his contribution to the group's effect will be different from the predecessor? You have talked a little bit about this, but just perhaps on the shares.

Yes. On the shares, yes, Michael was very keen to buy shares and bought them, I think, within a week of the end of the offer period. I bought a few more shares too. And I think that hopefully signifies to shareholders that we believe in the value of the group, believe that there is upside in the share price and voting with our capital. I'm very exposed to the IP Group share price as you would expect as shareholders. So it's my #1 KPI, obviously.

One from also an analyst, nice to have you with us today. How much M&A upside do you see for pre-commercial stage biotech companies from big pharma.

I would say there is -- I mean there's always active discussion ongoing. And the route to value creation for that bit of our portfolio, we will hopefully demonstrate over the course of the next 12, 18 months, I would say. There's a number of the bigger readouts coming, and there remains significant appetite for sure.

4 or 5 more on buybacks. I won't repeat those again. This is from [ Sam E ], who is also another analyst. Nice to have you with us, Sam. Thank you. How much visibility do you have on realizations out end of '27 that gives you confidence to deliver on the GBP 250 million realization target? Perhaps I'll answer that one. The forecasting realization is quite tricky because it's not like the majority of our stocks are public companies. If you just make a decision, you're going to sell something. A lot of them require also transaction either the company making float or someone to buy it.

However, we found we can get relatively accurate on this by looking at a probability basis. And based on that, you can see that 15, 20 different things that have varying probabilities. And overall, I think we're relatively very confident that we will achieve that target in the next year and certainly based on our accuracy of forecasting. So it comes from a deep knowledge of a large number of companies and understanding relatively realistically what the probabilities of all of them are.

And once you weight for that without weighting, if you see what I mean, you can get relatively accurate forecasts. So our visibility is actually good without being precise is what I would say. Looking down. Okay. Sam again, you're back. Outside of direct AI exposure, what extent do you see AI as a value creator across the portfolio versus something that creates a risk of disruption? I have a topical question.

Well, it's being used significantly. I mean we've said that a lot of our -- the value drivers for our businesses are heavily aligned with AI and the use of AI. And this ranges from things like Oxford Nanopore's base calling software and ability to be able to improve the efficiency of that. We're seeing it being used in therapeutic areas to help around the clinical trial design and analysis. We're seeing it in -- we've just done a new -- we're just looking at a new AI-supported materials discovery and development company, for example, that will have to combine a direction of travel that we see, which is sort of combining the digital electrons with the physical atoms and materials in a sort of an iterative loop.

So I think that's a trend that will be important actually for the next 2, 3 years, where are the places where there is a sustainable competitive advantage brought about by a technological advantage that can be paired or accelerate paired with or accelerated by the potential for AI. And of course, we're using it significantly within IP Group and using it to improve all aspects of our business very significantly. I think it's having a profound effect here just as much as it is in the portfolio, and we'll definitely report back more on that over coming months.

There's a couple around sort of governmental support here, which I'll kind of combine. So generally, what's your engagement if any with the new government and its focus on backing British business turning up and help you a follow-on, are there any concrete from the U.K. government sectors by encouraging pension funds to invest in tech.

Yes. I would say the trend that began, not to ramble here because it's trying to sort of look back to where a lot of the current things like Mansion House started, they were back in sort of 2016 or so. And it's been a number of years for that to come to fruition. I mean, definitely, one thing we've learned over the years is that government support is not something that we build any investment cases around, but it is becoming an increasingly important tailwind for us. I mean, over the last 12 to 18 months, we've seen a lot more policy emphasis on innovation, science and technology as drivers of U.K. growth, support for scaling companies and that point definitely around greater engagement with institutional capital and this sort of recognition that particularly in the U.K., more U.K. businesses need access to growth funding if they're going to remain and grow here.

I think to sort of specifically answer the question, I mean, I guess the -- and there was a recent announcement by a big consortium of pension funds headed up by the -- or endorsed by the U.K. government and the U.K. scale-up fund. That's part of wider efforts to bring pension capital into innovation and trying to address that sort of funding gap.

I think and would hope that the relationship that we've started with Aberdeen also is a way that we can sort of significantly address that gap. There's a lot of defined contribution. So you've got sort of the defined benefit government pension schemes pool of capital and then you've got the direct contribution DC savers pool of capital and both present opportunities.

The Aberdeen one is more on this side of the opportunity. And I think there's good strategic alignment between us and Aberdeen and the underlying investors about the opportunity here and getting capital into the space. So I think sort of overall policy is aligned, maybe more aligned around what we're trying to achieve, and that's building and scaling leading science and technology companies in the U.K.

I'm conscious it's 11:00. And obviously, for those who want to go, please do. But I'm going to -- we've done a fairly good won't We won't be half an hour more. There's still sort of 7 or 8 questions. I'll try and answer those or combine where I can. But quite understand people have to drop off that I mentioned that.

There's a very specific question, I'll just quickly deal with anyway because it was a clever observation by Andrew. Can I clarify the Hysata valuation at June did not affect the third-party valuation commission? Well, it was totally I guess it hasn't changed much. We actually did choose not to change it. The valuation actually was slightly higher, but we thought on balance it made sense to probably leave it until the next funding round. We don't always use the valuations as religion. They don't have to adopt them, but they are a useful guide that we are materially in the right area and we are. The difference any [indiscernible] material...

That valuation was within the range.

It was right at the bottom of the range in the end. So we didn't want to change it. Yes. And there's a slight technical question about the valuation of Metsera. Do the probability weightings go to 100% once an asset is approved? Or are there commercial risks including that or the peak sales estimates? In short, yes, once it's launched, your probability is now probably 100%. But at any time, the forecast will change. So about where you'll get there and when you get there, how big it will be. So that basically sums it up.

So at any time, you could find the forecast increasing a lot, a big increase or vice versa. So those are really the 2 things to bear in mind. But certainly, once these things launch, you've eliminated your risk of the trial component and now, I guess, risk of market size. Briefly, perhaps a question about the most exciting new investments, Greg, something you might touch on briefly. You could go on for a long time on that...

Yes. Well, I think the ones that I've tried to set out and give you a whole list of some of them, we've got a very interesting health tech, Series A business that we just invested into, again, sort of slightly later stage. There's some opportunities to come into things slightly later stage now, looking at analyzing the health of tissues during surgery.

Again, it's AI-powered enhanced, but enables both sort of human surgeons and robot surgeons to be able to analyze the integrity and health of tissue, which is very important sort of during an operation. So that's sort of an interesting one.

There's the materials -- AI-driven materials opportunity. Yes, there's a good breadth. All of those sit at the very early stage in that 53p of NAV per share. I've tried to highlight the ones that probably provide the nearest opportunity for sort of shorter-term catalysts in the next 6 to 12 months in the presentation. I definitely would say we've had an increase in pace of new investments this year. I think we've done 6 or so year-to-date on the balance sheet. We've continued to do plenty in our Parkwalk funds.

But I think that 6 to date is, I think, double what we did last year, if I remember correctly, on the balance sheet. I think we did about 3 last year. So yes, no, we're definitely seeing opportunities for investment. And I think with the confidence around realizations, we need to make sure that shareholders' capital is at work.

A couple more. I'm finding quite a lot of my repeating. So there's a very specific one about the increase from GBP 1.13 to GBP 1.17 and asking what is that attributable in the portfolio related to valuation? Probably worth making the point is it just generated by the movement in Oxford Nanopore or Shelving Nanopore, which has performed strongly since it reported fully year results. We've not done a full revaluation of the portfolio at that date. So it's just been adjusted by the movement in the public shares, which is mainly Nanopore. I may well be well. I've covered Saba. No, I would say that we cover them all. I think I'm back to repeat now. So we didn't overrun by too much.

There's a couple of small ones on the portfolio. We could -- I mean whether people are interested in these or IP Group ever look and seek to work with, I'd have to double check, and could leramistat be granted orphan drug status by the FDA. It has previously been granted orphan drug status in an indication called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis or IPF. So of course, that's something that we -- our portfolio companies and we work together on in order to build up this sustainable competitive advantage and hopefully contribute to increased commercial value at the time that we get to sort of partnering and exit. So it's certainly something that we'd be looking at. Let's see if there's anything else -- there are lots, to be very transparent, there are a number of questions on differing views amongst our shareholder base and things like that. But I think we comment, I think, to the extent is appropriate. If we've missed any, apologies.

Yes. And if you want to reach out, please do.

Perfect. Great, David, at this point, if I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much indeed for addressing all of those questions that came in from investors this morning. And of course, if there are any further questions, we'll get them back to you immediately after the presentation for you to review. But Greg, perhaps before really just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company. If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, that would be great.

Thanks, Jake. In summary, there's probably 3 things to highlight. First, we've continued to deliver against the priorities that I set out at the start of the year, further NAV per share growth, strong cash realizations and that broad progress across the portfolio. Second, to give comfort to shareholders, we're seeing that increasing external validation of the quality of those portfolio companies, whether that's fundraising, strategic partnerships or continued progress in the therapeutic areas.

And third, we are very focused on turning that progress into tangible shareholder outcomes. We will work on that capital allocation piece, but the things like active portfolio management and continued cash generation are very high on our priority list.

That's great. Greg, David, thank you once again for updating investors this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback. On behalf of the management team of IP Group plc, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. So good morning to you all.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the IP Group Plc Full Year Results Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and we'll publish their responses where it's appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet Company platform.

Before we begin, we would like to submit the following poll. And if you give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. And I would now like to hand over to the executive management team from IP Group Plc. gx Greg, good morning, sir.

Good morning, Jake. Thank you very much, and welcome, everyone, to IP Group's 2025 Full Year Results Presentation. Thanks, as always, to you and the team for hosting today's session. These forums, which are open to all shareholders and potential shareholders are a really important part of how we communicate the IP Group story because this is a business where understanding the long-term context genuinely matters.

I'll start by saying we are speaking to you today live from Berenberg's Annual U.K. Corporate Conference. Thanks to the Berenberg team for hosting us. Apologies that we're not on video. The hotel WiFi at -- the Grove isn't quite up to video, but the IMC platform has done wonders to get us online, nonetheless. So you can see the slides, and you'll just have to remember what we look like from the images on the website.

The good news is we are here for a day and have a full schedule of investor meetings ahead, and we see that as a good reflection of the engagement and the interest around the strategy and the progress that we're making. I think it's fair to say we are presenting against a backdrop of considerable global uncertainty geopolitically, economically, technologically.

And I think investors are understandably asking tougher questions about the durability and the resilience and where long-term value will be created. And of course, one of the most active debates at the moment is all around technology itself and in particular, the impact of AI on things like traditional software businesses.

Some of you might have seen recent commentary from leading investors such as Anderson Horvitz or A16Z, and they have argued that AI is fundamentally reshaping the whole application software landscape. Some others have labeled this as the. And I think the important nuance in that work is that AI doesn't eliminate value, it moves it, and it's moving it away from thin application layers towards hard IP, towards data, infrastructure and real-world constraints like energy. And interestingly, that debate really sort of actually sharpens the IP Group investment case.

We have very limited exposure, if any, to application layer SaaS in the portfolio and instead focus on deep tech, clean tech and life sciences, businesses that are built around defensible science and intellectual property. So many of our companies are not so much disrupted by AI. They are enabled by it, whether through compute power or energy systems, advanced materials or drug discovery, and they support the infrastructure needed for an AI-enabled world.

So although you can't see me, I'm Greg Smith. And as CEO, I have the privilege of leading IP Group and working alongside an exceptional team on our mission to accelerate the power of science for a better future. With me on today's call are our Managing Partner, Mark Reilly, who is in Oxford; and our CFO, David Baynes, who is with me here.

As usual, this presentation will be available on the IR section of our website. And of course, please note all the usual important disclaimers about the information that we give here, particularly any forward-looking statements that might be contained within. So here's today's running order. I will start with an overview of the 2025 full year results and put them in the sort of broader strategic and market context. Mark will then go deeper into portfolio progress and the future value opportunities there. And then DB will follow up with a detailed work through of the financials, how we're thinking about things like valuation, which are always high on shareholders' minds, cash and capital allocation. I'll then summarize and look forward before we do some Q&A. And as Jake said, please post questions, and we'll endeavor to answer them all.

Let me start with the headline. So as regular attendees on our results call will remember, delivering positive NAV per share growth was my stated priority for 2025. So it's pleasing to be able to report that we delivered against that objective. NAV per share increased to 110p, an increase of 13% over the year and about 15% from the last time we reported at the half year.

The largest contributor to the value was the rapid progression in both stage and scale of a group of obesity drug compounds that are now being developed by Pfizer, a clear example of how long-held scientific value can be recognized at scale with substantial downstream economics now anchored to a global pharma platform. Alongside that, we made good progress on realizations. We generated GBP 68 million of cash exits in the year, and that allowed us to continue investing behind our highest conviction opportunities and allowed us to retire almost 10% of the company's shares during the year through our buyback program.

Taken together, this is exactly the type of year we set out to deliver, NAV per share growth, disciplined realizations and capital returns to shareholders. I think it's important to be clear about the nature of venture returns, outcomes and therefore, our year-to-year results are often driven by large single events. Now that's not at all unusual in this asset class. In fact, it's quite often what good looks like as portfolios mature to the point of exit. A good recent example was last financial year, full year '24, where the Featurespace exit was the standout event, which we delivered our largest cash realization to date and demonstrated really clearly our ability to take a company from being the first institutional backer through to a strategic exit.

And this year, the progress, both clinical and financial of the licensed obesity compounds has played a similar role. I think what matters most, however, is not any single event in isolation, but whether we are building a repeatable track record of delivering these outcomes over time. We are increasingly seeing that pattern emerge across the portfolio as companies mature, as scientific risk is retired and assets move on to becoming platforms capable of scaling globally.

And finally, on that Pfizer obesity exposure, we've recognized the fair value of that interest this year, and that reflects a discounted risk-adjusted view of the current position. I think it's equally important to recognize that this isn't a ceiling on the value. The ultimate value will be driven by clinical, regulatory and commercial progress over the coming years, and we think there remains substantial upside potential alongside the inherent risks that DB will cover in more detail in his section. So in short, full year '25 is a year where we've delivered against our near-term priorities and strengthened the long-term value embedded in the portfolio.

I want to now briefly explain the background to this year's financial outcome. I think this helps put in context the really long-term nature of the opportunity you're discussing. Now you probably won't recognize the gentleman in this image. However, this is Professor Steve Bloom, and here he is speaking at an International Neuroscience and Medicine Conference, the Brain Forum in Saudi Arabia in late 2013, so 13, 14 years ago.

At this point in his talk, he was reflecting on academic research into the role of gut hormones in appetite and metabolic control that happened decades earlier. In fact, his research started in the 1980s in the London Medical School, which became part of Imperial towards the turn of the century. And interestingly, during those years, he was also the Chief of Service for Pathology and Endocrinology at Hammersmith Hospital. And I think this quote helps sort of set in context quite nicely how what he saw in his clinic inspired his breakthrough work. And I think that proximity of research and clinical practice is one of the real strengths in the U.K. research and innovation ecosystem.

Now from a patient point of view, the scale of the problem that Professor Bloom was describing is immense. Today, around 1 in 9 adults globally, about 600 million people live with diabetes, hundreds of millions more live with obesity, around 1 in 6 adults. And these conditions contribute to millions of premature deaths each year. The International Diabetes Federation estimates diabetes drives about $1 trillion in health expenditure, while McKinsey estimates roughly $2 trillion as a result of obesity and that it's associated with about 5% of worldwide deaths.

So I think that combination of huge unmet clinical need, societal cost and obviously, the rapid science progress is what has drived more recent sustained investment and innovation in this space. And I think it also probably goes some way to explaining why large pharma companies are now committing very significant capital to this area and these pipelines.

But I guess for us and for our shareholders, it's a bit of a reminder that the value we're seeing crystallize now is in common with many IP Group portfolio companies, the result of decades of foundational science. So that journey took place over 3 decades. And often, the commercial relevance value only becomes visible many years later. And IP Group's role is to engage early, take and price complexity and technology risk and support the transition from discovery to development and commercial relevance.

So our involvement began in the early 2010s, and this reflects our role at the commercialization end of the science, not just the financing end. Through our subsidiary, Imperial Innovations, we effectively operated as the tech transfer office for Imperial College London, and that meant working right at the interface between world-class research and early commercialization. And in the case of Zihipp, a new company, this involved spinning out research from Professor Bloom's lab into a dedicated vehicle, securing exclusive rights to a family of GLP-1-related patents and ensuring that the IP position was robust enough to underpin future clinical development. Zihipp, the company was actually only incorporated in 2012, and it laid largely dormant through the next few years. Back at that time, there wasn't really meaningful venture or pharma interest in obesity of today's scale. But we continue to support the academic team in the background over several years before the IP was eventually licensed from us into the company in early 2019. Zihipp actually existed as a really streamlined operation with about 5 people, no premises and relying heavily on Imperial College for all the early preclinical and early clinical work while they engaged with potential investors, and we remained on the Board during that time.

And that kind of early involvement is very typical of IP Group. We aim to be a long-term partner to world-class science, and we step in at points where the risk profile is often too complex for most capital. Other than raising a few million pounds of development capital in 2020, Zihipp stayed very lean. The company was actually then acquired by Metsera in 2023, and the upfront cash was very modest at a few tens of millions of dollars. This wasn't a large cash-heavy exit in the conventional sense.

But what it did do was to enhance our long-term economic exposure. So the majority of those acquisition proceeds were in the form of milestone payments and royalty streams that layered on top of the existing economics from when we originally licensed the IP into Zihipp. Now we get to the year just gone in January '25, Metsera floated on NASDAQ. They raised about $275 million, valuing the company at just under a couple of billion. And this gave them the additional firepower to then be able to progress the compounds into the clinic. And then you might remember in September, less than 8 months later, Pfizer announced that it had entered into an agreement to acquire the company for up to 7 billion, including just under 5 billion in cash upfront.

Following a competitive bidding war with Novo, the deal was eventually finalized in November '25 for a significantly higher value of up to $10 billion. Now for IP Group shareholders, the relevance of this, I guess, is sort of twofold really. First, we now have exposure to a long-dated royalty interest that's being developed by one of the world's best resourced pharma companies and is linked to one of the most significant pharma markets of the coming decades.

And you can see from this slide, our milestones extend out into the 2030s and the patent life actually runs out into the 2040s. Our IP is comprehensive and covers the lead program, which is now in Phase III and market approval is targeted for 2028. Secondly, we have recognized a fair value of GBP 128 million for that interest at year-end. That reflects the discounted value of future royalty and milestone income, and that creates really meaningful potential for future value while obviously recognizing the risks that remain. We don't have any future development costs that we have to bear.

So our risk profile is asymmetric, and DB will cover the financial modeling behind this and show you the methodology that we have taken. I guess one final point to make on this asset. Pfizer's own public commentary makes it very clear that their ambition extends well beyond the assumptions that we've used in our modeling. Our valuation is a fair value approach. We've used standard probabilities of success, as Dave will talk about and average peak sales forecasts. But I think the key message to take away is that the current value reflects an appropriate fair value today, but there's a really wide distribution of outcomes and potential for the long-term value to be materially higher if clinical, regulatory and commercial milestones are achieved and higher still if the market size and share is anything like Pfizer's stated ambitions.

Stepping back to the wider portfolio, the examples on this slide are meant really to convey momentum rather than detail. Across health tech, clean tech, deep tech, a growing number of our more significant holdings are now demonstrating that combination of technical progress, commercial traction and external valuation that can typically signal a step change in maturity and hopefully, value potential. In HealthTech and in therapeutics, several companies are moving beyond that early scientific risk stage and into a phase where progress is -- can be more significantly underwritten by significant third-party capital.

The Pfizer-Metsera transaction is an obvious example of this, but it's not an isolated case. And across the portfolio, the majority of our therapeutics assets continue to increase with multiple companies now approaching meaningful and hopefully catalytic clinical readouts over the next 12 to 24 months. There's a summary of all of those in the appendix as usual. In deep tech and clean tech, there's a similar pattern. Businesses such as Oxa are moving from proof of concept into scale pilots, customer deployments and long-term commercial partnerships. And this shift materially reduces execution risk and broadens the range of credible outcomes over time in a way that we recognize from previous successes like Featurespace.

And hopefully, another common theme that you'll see is the quality of the funding syndicates forming around these companies. During 2025, our portfolio companies raised over GBP 900 million of third-party capital. That was about 17% up year-on-year, and there was participation from high-caliber global investors, strategic partners, specialist growth funds and long-term institutional capital. A good example of that is Artios' recent GBP 115 million funding round, and that was co-led by RA Capital and SV Health.

So I'm not going to go into detail here. Mark will expand on these shortly. But taken together, this progress gives us confidence that the portfolio is moving in the right direction and that the conditions are increasingly in place for value to be converted into cash over time.

Capital allocation remains a central discipline for us, and we use our strong performance on cash exits in 2024 and '25 to accelerate our cash returns during 2025. As a reminder of our policy, we use a proportion of all realizations to reinvest into growing the value of our portfolio and a portion to supplement capital growth for shareholders with cash returns. where our shares are trading at a material discount to NAV and specifically where that's above 20%, buybacks are the tool which offers the most immediately accretive use of capital for our continuing shareholders.

Secondly, the balance of reinvestment versus cash return depends on various factors, very mindful of the continuing deep discount at which our shares traded relative to NAV per share and also our strong liquidity position. In full year '25, we allocated 50% of our cash exits towards buybacks, which meant we completed a GBP 45 million program during the year, retiring almost 10% of our share capital at around a 50% discount to NAV.

And then looking forward, we have around GBP 30 million of cash from exits that is available for the next program, giving us flexibility to continue executing that policy while also supporting our highest conviction opportunities in the portfolio. And as we said in the release, the Board expects to update on timing of the commencement of the 2026 program in due course.

So looking forward, our investment case for that future capital investment is summarized in 3 parts: First, significant value potential in U.K. science and tech. Second, we're well positioned to exploit this, partly because we help to shape this industry and sit across the whole pathway from early sourcing, late-stage support and scale-up capital. That combination is difficult to replicate and becomes more valuable, particularly when capital is scarce or markets are volatile.

And I think in terms of today's market narrative, the reason we feel well positioned is that we have limited exposure to that application layer of SaaS and meaningful exposure to deep tech, clean tech, life sciences, those parts of the economy where AI increases demand for things like next-generation compute, resilient energy production and transfer, advanced materials rather than software. so this together creates an attractive shareholder opportunity, partly because of the returns that we believe can be delivered from the portfolio itself and even more so when the share price trades at a discount to NAV and we can retire shares through buybacks.

And on that point of significant value potential in the U.K. science and technology, I think the broader context is getting increasingly compelling. As we've said many times before and as many of you will know, the starting point is that the U.K. really isn't short of innovation. I mean, by most objective measures, we are an innovation superpower. We produce more scientific papers per capita than any other country, and we have a venture ecosystem that's ranked second globally. And the interesting thing is that global investors clearly recognize the quality of what's being created here. More than 85% of mid-stage venture rounds involve overseas capital. But I would say capital, particularly from domestic sources remains the missing ingredient. And sentiment has improved and policy initiatives such as Mansion House and Sterling 20 point to a positive direction of travel, but the scale of capital actually flowing does remain modest relative to the opportunity. In fact, the U.S. invests nearly double the percentage of GDP into VC compared to the U.K.

So the consequence of that is quite material without sufficient domestic capital, often companies are forced to exit early and often that's to international buyers. And some modeling suggests that when a high-growth U.K. company becomes majority U.S.-owned or indeed any other country, the U.K. can lose almost $5 billion of economic value over time. That's lost capital growth, tax revenues, broader economic activity, et cetera.

The good news is the opportunity is equally clear. So for a small relative increase in allocations from U.K. asset owners into domestic ventures, that could have a really outsized impact. And I'm pleased to be able to say that this year, we could update that we are now working with Aberdeen to build a portfolio of growth stage investments for DC savers. So if we can address all this comprehensively and urgently, this is an opportunity that can genuinely transform the U.K.'s competitive advantage into tangible economic value and make great results for our shareholders and investors.

And this obviously is exactly where IP Group sits. We operate at the intersection of world-class science, patient capital and disciplined execution. Our role is to help convert the U.K. structural advantage in innovation into durable financial and social returns and do that in a way that aligns the interest of founders, institutions and, of course, long-term shareholders. As a reminder, at the earliest stages, Parkwalk EIS funds, our specialist subsidiary fund manager, working with leading universities provides a pipeline of new opportunities. That pipeline feeds into our balance sheet as companies mature and require follow-on capital.

And at later stages, we've been managing, as you will know, private capital for Hostplus, one of the largest Australian superannuation funds for the past 7 years. And as I mentioned, we're very pleased to be working with Aberdeen and hopefully, that is an important step in broadening access to U.K. innovation for long-term savers and strengthening the capital base behind the portfolio. So with that context on the model and this year's headline outcomes, I will now hand over to Mark, who will take you through portfolio progress and where we see future value opportunity across our balance sheet holdings.

Thank you, Greg. Good morning, everybody. Greg, can you confirm the line can be heard? Thank you. So good morning, everyone. Yes. So I will start by just reminding you of the most material positions in the portfolio. So this is a wagon wheel showing the portfolio holdings that make up the larger proportion of the top end of the portfolio. So first of all, there is that Pfizer holding now that we -- or Pfizer-related holding that we have the rights to share and the royalties from that drug that Greg talked quite a lot about at the beginning of this presentation. That's now our largest asset on the books.

So I won't talk any more about that because Greg has already given quite a lot of detail other than to say it's a great validation of this sort of broad exposure to U.K. innovation, giving you this opportunity to pick the -- or to gain access to these outliers that can suddenly have a lot of value, and that's certainly what's happened here, which is really great news. The second largest holding remains Oxford Nanopore in the portfolio. That company had another very good year in 2025. They released their annual results, which cited over GBP 220 million of revenue now, and that was about 24% growth since the previous year. And I'll make the same point that I made at our half year results to highlight the fact that we're seeing really impressive growth in the applied domains.

So this is not just a research tool. Their clinical market sector grew by nearly 60% in 2025, which is really encouraging news that we are now seeing this tool being used in those settings. New CEO has just joined. So we're very excited to work with him and to see the success and further growth that he's going to deliver. The third largest holding in the portfolio is Istesso. So Istesso, of course, we've communicated to you before, they had the setback that they didn't hit the primary endpoint of their Phase II trial. But the positive from that, as I talked about in our last presentation, is that they learned an awful lot from that trial, and there was a lot of data came out of that, that informed us about the drug and its efficacy.

And so what they spent a lot of time in 2025 doing further analysis of that clinical trial data, and they've discovered that it showed sort of bone protective effects and signs of muscle protection, which is really exciting that supports the use of their drug, lat in conditions linked to aging and physical decline when there are not many treatment options in that domain at the moment. And so that's really exciting. So we look forward to seeing the next development with that company. It was definitely a setback rather than a sort of a complete roadblock that they encountered, and we've learned an awful lot from that setback.

Next asset by value is Hysata. So we have GBP 76 million exposure to Hysata. You may recall, this is our hydrogen electrolyzer company. So they have this hydrogen electrolyzer that is 95% efficient, which is very substantially more efficient than the sort of state-of-the-art hydrogen electrolyzer that you can buy in the market today, and that company continues to progress. They're progressing towards commercial scale manufacturing. So they have been building larger scale versions of their device in their facilities in Australia, and we're getting good results over those systems and overcoming the challenges of plumbing all of those cells together in that device and also starting to build them on customer premises as well, which is really exciting development.

So we're pleased with the progress of that company. And then we've got mission as our next largest holding, which raised money in 2025, raised $13 million, which will be deployed to keep on developing its lead drug, which is a Parkinson's disease treatment. We're expecting that upcoming study to start in the first half of this year as in -- around now and complete by 2027 end of '27 at the very latest. So we'll keep a watching brief on that company, very exciting potential in their drug.

And then finally, we have Monolith on here. I'll talk about Monolith in a moment, which, of course, we sold during 2025, but this remaining holding represents our exposure to the earn-out on that asset. But before I come on to Monolith, I wanted to just mention the other very exciting thing that happened in 2025 is that we finally ended our journey with Hinge Health, which was an extraordinary success.

So Hinge Health, you may recall, we were the first institutional investor in the company that became Hinge Health. This was an energetic young entrepreneur at the University of Oxford, who came into our offices and told us that he was going to make us all rich. And I think that he can say that he was on to something when he said that because it has been a great success for us, that company went on to base itself in Silicon Valley and raised a lot of money from the sort of top-tier venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and in 2025, had a very successful IPO, and that price remained strong after the IPO.

And so our task our exit from that asset. And we did that carefully over the course of the last several months. And so we've delivered this GBP 46 million of proceeds with an IRR of 50%. And then coming back to Monolith. So Monolith was an AI company that spun out of Imperial College in London. and they use AI to analyze engineering data, and they were particularly applying that in the automotive industry to optimize automotive batteries. You get these sort of slight variations as a lot of material variations across the different cells of automotive batteries. And if you can learn all of the behaviors of those batteries, you can address them and control them in a specific way that's tailored to the individual behavior of the cell, and that can enhance the life of the battery, which stands out to be a very powerful and impactful thing for battery automotive battery manufacturers. And so Monolith's doing well, and we're growing and we're securing customers and a company called CoreWeave, which is a U.S. entity that you may well have heard of large listed entity in the U.S. decided that this would be a very valuable thing for them to add to their stable. And so they acquired Monolith. And as you can see, another great result for IP Group there where we got a 70% IRR on that investment.

This is another investment managed by my colleague, John Edington, who was the chap who invested in and oversaw Featurespace. He also did Garrison and Cybersecurity, both of which we sold in 2024. So another great success from John and many congratulations to him and all of our gratitude for that excellent work. Picking up some of the other highlights that Greg's very briefly mentioned already. So we've got Artios in the portfolio that has raised an oversubscribed $115 million funding round very recently that was announced recently. So they are developing these drugs that exploit the weakness in how cancer cells repair their own DNA. If you interrupt the ability of a cancer cell to repair its DNA, then that cancer cell won't survive. And they have shown in their early clinical trials, tumor shrinkage in around 50% of patients in early trials, which is extremely exciting that they're actually seeing tumor shrinkage. So this funding enables an expansion of those cohorts in -- particularly in the areas of pancreatic and colorectal cancers. And they also have a second drug that they're working on that targets cancers that have a gene mutation that's common in breast and ovarian cancer.

So we'll also be funding clinical trials in those areas as well. In the middle of this slide is OA. So this is our vehicle -- autonomous vehicle company that's focused its strategy entirely now on off-road applications, so ports and airports and other areas where there are autonomous vehicles that are not on-road, which we think is an outstanding opportunity in terms of size, but in terms of the specialization that OXA can deliver in this area, they have a really sort of compelling differentiation and ability to differentiate themselves in that market.

I won't claim that 2025 was an entirely rosy period for this company. They did have some challenges in access to capital. It was a challenging period to raise money, and it took us time to close that round, and you'll see that the round was done at a lower price than the previous round, which is frustrating, but there's still a huge sort of upside potential in this company. We really think it has the potential to be a genre defining company with some of the best talent in the U.K. and really sort of globally leading position in terms of its capability of its products. And so that company has now raised $103 million in Series D. So it's fantastic to have gotten that closed. We're very grateful to the support of the National Wealth Fund in that transaction alongside NVIDIA, which is the venture arm of -- sorry, -- in Ventures, which is the venture arm of NVIDIA. And then finally, on this slide, we have Microbiotica, which is another exciting life sciences asset. So they develop medicine that's based on the human gut micro that they're targeting the treating of immune-related diseases.

And so they have a drug that they're developing for ulcerative colitis, which is an unpleasant condition, and they have done some early clinical trials and have just released the results of those clinical trials, which showed that 63% of treated patients achieved remission versus 30% on placebo, which is fantastic news for those on the trial and for those of us hoping that this drug will be successful. So again, another really positive development in the portfolio.

Now finally, I just -- it's nice in these presentations to remind you that in addition to those sort of large and material assets at the top of the portfolio, you're also exposed to a whole stable of a large number of really exciting assets in terms of your broad exposure to technology and your broad exposure to these global megatrends that need to be enabled by innovation. And there's lots of examples in the portfolio. I just picked out a handful of them on this slide. So going clockwise from the top left, you have, which is a next-generation nonvolatile semiconductor memory company. which has the potential. It's a UCL spinout, University College London spinout and it has the potential to enable much faster and more powerful data processing. If you have faster and more capable memory, you can process data a lot faster, which will be critical as Greg was talking about, if we're going to have these AI capabilities at the edge of the network, we will need this more powerful and efficient data processing so that the company could be a real enabler of artificial intelligence. In the cleantech domain, we have who are using geological modeling and exploration techniques to identify subsurface environments where hydrogen is naturally generated. So this overcomes the need to use hydrogen electrolyzers and they're targeting accumulations that could be extracted in a way similar to how we extract natural gas today.

We're exposed to Quantum technologies, of course, which is an area of great excitement at the moment. And Quantum Motion is a London-based spin-out of a combination of University College London and Oxford University that's developing quantum computers in silicon. So it can use a lot of the kind of existing knowledge and infrastructure that we have for developing silicon in classical computers for Quantum, and we think that company has a lot of potential. So watch out for news from them as that develops. Again, going back to the cleantech domain, we have Barakal here who are developing refrigeration and air conditioning materials for refrigeration and air conditioning systems, which could make those systems far more efficient.

And they raised -- they won an award in 2025, the Terra award for which they received $1 million of funding because they were sort of recognized as the best in the sector of improving these cooling technologies. And finally, with CCU, I think we spoke about those at the half year, but because they had just raised a large funding round of $28 million. They have this proprietary process developed at the University of Oxford to capture CO2 and hydrogen and convert that into fuels and for airplanes, sustainable airplane fuel. And their Series B round was a sort of who's who of the industry players that are interested in this -- in developing sustainable aviation fuels, including IAG, which owns British Airways and one of the sort of global leaders in Tier 1s supplying to the aircraft industry. So lots of positive momentum in that pool of assets that sits beneath those most valuable assets that you hear about from us more often. And with that, I will hand back over to David.

Great. Thank you, Mark. Hello, everybody. Yes, this is David Baynes, CFO. sometimes referred to as DB in the course of the presentation, so you know it's the same person. Nice to be with you. I'll just quickly take you through the financial results. So the NAV per share great improved, up from 97.7 this time last year to GBP 110. So that's a result of both having an overall profit of about GBP 67 million and also the result of the share buyback program, which we've talked about, about GBP 45 million we bought back during the year, which was 91 million shares. about $0.09 of total cap, and that's contributed about 4p to that improvement as well.

NAV per share up, as we can see, 13%. Overheads down, I'm glad to see overheads down at 15.9%. We're pleased with that. If you remember, 2 years ago, we started a program, cost has got higher than we wanted at the end of '24. So we started '23, I mean, we started the program of cost reduction and reduced it from about 22.1% now down to our aim is to get to about 16.5%. So 15.9% we're pleased with. That is to be fair a product both of reduced costs, but also achieving greater income. Parkwalk in particular, had a good year and generated extra income. And finally, cash. Cash remains strong. The cash slide, I'll go through in a minute, but it's strong. Balance sheet, funny enough, the balance sheet is similar to last year at about GBP 950 million, just under GBP 1 billion. It's gone up, but then it goes down a little bit because share buyback also reduces the overall size of the balance sheet, if that makes sense. But overall, it is up.

You can see the movement of the portfolio there from about GBP 850 million, up just over GBP 900 million. That was GBP 71 million of investment we talked about, exits of GBP 68 million, which we've also talked about, and I'll tie that into the cash flow in a minute, but also these fair value gains of GBP 64 million, which are a big part of we'll see related to net zero. And I'll talk about that briefly now. Now in the book is about GBP 128 million. clearly a very interesting item for us. Firstly, as Greg has already referred to, this is an obesity drug, a diabetes and obesity drug, a GLP-1 agonist, which has become a bit of a buzzword. It's now been acquired by Pfizer, one of the biggest drug companies in the world and will become, we hope, the mainstay of the obesity franchise.

To understand the reason why people are excited about this drug in short is because it's very long-lasting. So traditional injections are weekly. So you have to inject quite inconvenient. This looks like it will have a monthly clearance. So you actually only need to inject monthly. It also has high levels of efficacy. So it seems to work as well as the current leading drugs in terms of the rate of weight loss that people are seeing. And it also means because of its efficacy, you can have slightly lower doses, which appears to mean less adverse side effects.

So in the earlier trials, Phase I and II, more people stayed on it, which is obviously good news for the patient, but also good news for the business. So you can see why it's generated quite a lot of excitement. For us to value it, it can be a bit confusing because it's gone through a number of different -- each different product has gone through different product code names.

So what I know is MET0097i has changed its name that's been owned by Pfizer. So I won't talk about the code words as such. I'll actually just talk about the products. There are basically 3 lead products. We actually have an interest in about 6 different assets. That's where we own the underlying patents behind these products. The lead one is a monotherapy, meaning a single drug GLP-1 agonist, and that's the one that's gone to a Phase III clinical trial. And you can see that there. And that is in. And that's the one that currently is providing the most value. And that's because it's the one that's got the highest probability of success. And I'll come to how we've done that in a minute. The middle drug, what they call combination therapy. GLP-1 agonist and amylin, which is a combination of similar drug, but hopefully have even greater efficacy. That has just gone into what they call a Phase IIb trial.

Phase I start into a Phase II trial. And the last but not least is an oral drug. So again, based upon similar technology, we have an oral drug in the program, which, of course, people understand could have significant convenience benefits going forward. That's the earliest of the 3 at the moment and is actually in preclinical as we're aware, and therefore, is at least like to be successful. So how have we valued this?

Well, effectively, what we've done is we've looked at the potential market size, and we actually got hold of 6 analyst notes in the sector, and we dropped off the most conservative, the lowest, and we dropped off the most optimistic at the top and then have taken sort of an average, a weighted average of the 4 analyst notes in the middle. You can then look at -- we know it's not publicly known, but we obviously know what percentage interest we have in net sales going forward. We obviously apply that percentage.

We can then -- for each of the key leading programs there, you can then apply the probability of being successful. Now this just comes from established tables, probability of success, POS, they referred to. And at the moment, on a statistical average, the lead program, the one that's now in the Phase III trial, monotherapy has about a 53% chance of being successful, just by historical reference. A drug that's moving from Phase I to II got 25%. And the final clinical trial got 10%. So in, we then just apply those percentages to the potential value. So that's the market size, multiply by our share and then multiply that percentage.

And then last and perhaps not least, you then discount it. if these drugs are successful, they'll be paying sort of royalty streams probably starting in a very small way in '28, but mounting up mid-30s, it will be at their peak sales, hopefully, and then still have some sales in sort of mid-40s as well 44 to 44. But so you discount all those, I think 11.5% that's disclosed in the back of document, you then discount it and then you get a value.

And despite doing all that, well, the value end up with is today about GBP 128 million as today's value. And the reason it's still such a big number is it's such a very sizable market. So the sort of numbers we're using suggest a market of about GBP 100 billion, of which Pfizer might get about 10%. Greg has already referred to it earlier that actually from their own presentation, think it might be a bigger market like GBP 150 million, and they have actually suggested they might get more than 10%.

So I think overall, we feel we're anything sensible. And quite importantly, we've obviously had 2 independent firms at both an external firm looking at valuation process and then also our auditor signing off on it. So I think overall, it's a realistic estimate of what the current value, potential value of these drugs are. What will happen if and if, of course, if these progress successfully, then as they move through, for example, that lead program in '27 is successful and has a successful Phase II clinical trial, that probability will go up, and therefore, the value will go up.

And that will be same for all the other programs. The come the other way. So if all goes according to plan, you will slowly and steadily see the value of asset increase. If there's a setback, then you won't. It depends on what it is. It might be -- there's definitely no certainty that all 3 will make it to market. But it is fair to say that any 1 of the 3 has significant value, very significant value compared to our current market cap is probably fair to say. So moving on to more traditional stuff I've been talking about when we just talk about our results.

We always talk about this slide and we have details in the pack we talk about it. In the past, there's been some concern about the fact we have a relatively large portfolio with about 84 companies, sorry, on our balance sheet and people are often worried about their need for funding. So we always just lay out the funding. And it used to be sort of 1/3, 1/3, it's changed slightly this year, but about 25% of our portfolio is effectively funded and then 22% will fund this year, just near 30% next and about 25% the year after. So as always, it's a fairly familiar pattern. They don't all come up for funding at the same time. There's a decent chunk but all fully funded. And we do find that we manage to obviously fund these companies going forward. You always say don't follow the money if you want to understand the company.

So it's worth just showing a bit of cash flow. The cash has gone from GBP 285 million to GBP 211 million. We've already mentioned pretty much all these numbers. We invested GBP 70 million, obviously an outflow. We realized GBP 68 million in inflow. The share repurchase, as I explained, obviously, using up our cash has gone out. And then I've already talked about the size of the overheads and the other movements, working capital, et cetera, relatively small.

But that's how the cash has moved. It's still a good strong cash balance, puts us in a good position, both for supporting the portfolio in the next year and also, as another share buyback program when we think the time is right. I've talked a bit about overheads already down about 20%. We're pleased with that that level I explained. And obviously, we'll keep a focus on that. They will naturally increase a little bit due to pressures of inflation, but we are clearly focused on costs and are keen to keep that kind of net overhead ratio to 1.6 6% of our total portfolio. So where it is. With that, I'll hand back to Greg.

Thank you Greg. So before we go into questions, quickly step back and summarize the year and what it means for shareholders. So '25 was a year of tangible progress. We delivered that positive NAV per share growth. We generated strong cash exits, and we recognized long-term value through our Pfizer obesity royalty interest.

In fact, I should have moved the slide on before, summarizing that. So you can see that that's the case. I think, as I said at the start, it's definitely worth acknowledging this is a portfolio of venture-like returns. Results are often shaped by a small number of large events. And as I said, last year, '24, that was Featurespace. And this year, it was the Pfizer obesity royalty interest after they bought Metsera following their IPO. And the point I think you take away is that it's not the individual event, but the pattern.

And as the portfolio matures, we're hopefully increasingly seeing these long-held scientific value companies converting into financial outcomes. And as Dave said, the royalty interest is a sensible risk-adjusted assumption-based fair value. It captures what we can see today and what the market can see today and not necessarily what we hope for tomorrow. So that future value will be delivered according to clinical, regulatory and commercial milestones over time.

So we, as shareholders, will participate in that upside, hopefully, over the future and obviously mindful of the downside risks. This slide will hopefully look very familiar because it's the same set of priorities that I outlined literally this time last year and also at the half year results. I just felt it was good form to report back on delivery.

So the first point, that priority for the year was positive NAV per share performance and delivering against it NAV up 13% was very pleasing. Second, on that access to private scale-up capital. We sort of -- we've definitely strengthened our position here and that relationship with Aberdeen is hopefully the first signs of capital in the U.K. starting to flow. Third, on cash exits, we've made good progress against that ambition, that target, generating GBP 68 million, and that enabled us to do buybacks and invest in the maturing businesses in the portfolio.

And then on pipeline growth, we continue to be the most active investor into university spin-outs in the U.K., predominantly through our Parkwalk-managed funds. 2026, the priorities look pretty similar, and that's intentional. We definitely intend to continue delivering positive NAV per share performance, maintaining a high bar for capital deployment into the portfolio and ensuring that we have balance sheet flexibility.

That discipline worked well in full year '25, and it is the right discipline to take into '26. The -- from the private capital side, a key step forward will be making the first investments from our new scale-up vehicle with Aberdeen alongside announcing at least one further private capital partnership. We'll also continue to execute against that ambition of cash exits through to the end of 2027, maintaining that shareholder-focused capital allocation policy. That means reinvesting in the portfolio where returns are compelling and buying back shares where the discount makes better use of capital.

So I think the message is simple. We're not changing course. We are building on what has been shown to work over the last 12 months. And I'll just reflect finally on the platform. This year marks our 25th anniversary. Over that period as a group, we've invested about GBP 1.7 billion. That's across the balance sheet and the private capital that we manage. We've helped to form and support more than 600 companies, many as the first investor and forming businesses, as you heard with Zihipp, and that's led to the creation of over 15,000 jobs that we can identify. And this reflects a consistent commitment to this sort of patient science-led investing approach and building an organization with capabilities that can support companies from spin out through to global scale.

And I think what excites me and the management team is that the next phase of that journey could be even more impactful. The portfolio is maturing, the routes to liquidity, as we've said, with the GBP 250 million realization target are clearer. And I think that strategic and institutional interest in U.K. science and tech is increasing. We've sharpened and become a more focused business, particularly over the last couple of years, refine that investment strategy, taking our learnings from that last 25 years. As Dave said, we're more disciplined on costs.

We're deliberate in our capital allocation. And I think we're increasingly recognized as a bridge from science to global scale. So as we look forward into the future, the ambition is straightforward. We continue converting that world-class science into financial outcomes while playing a meaningful role in shaping a healthier and more sustainable and hopefully, a more productive future. So thank you, shareholders, for your continued support, and we'll be very happy to now take some questions. And we have a few.

We do. Jake, if that's all right. I think you say something. [Operator Instructions]

A copy of the presentation, a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed via your investor dashboard. David, so if I may now just hand over to you to chair the Q&A with the team. And if I pick up from you at the end, that would be great. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Jake. Pleasure. Yes, I think if I can, what have we got here? 25 questions at the moment. Look, as we always say at this stage, we will try and endeavor to answer all the ones we can. We quite understand not all of you will be able to stay on. So we will -- I apologize, we will overrun the hour and there, we often find this can take half an hour to answer all the questions.

But obviously, that's only for those that want to participate. Anyway, so I'll dive straight in. Mark, so you know it's coming your way. I think the first one is probably to you. And this is from David B. We have another one. Hello, Please, can you give some commentary on the market background for Hydro given the Bramble administration. Can you just briefly comment on that, Mark?

Yes, that was a sad outcome with Bramble because we think they've got really compelling technology and the customers we're excited by it as well. But that was a symptom of sort of an absence of sufficient co-investment capital. They had difficulty raising money.

And I think that highlights how sort of capital intensity, higher interest rates and pressures on the sort of the availability of capital for these early-stage hydrogen businesses is a challenge for them. And I think the whole sector is still in this sort of build-out phase. It remains infrastructure heavy.

You've got these long time lines to scale up production of hydrogen and distribution to ramp up end-use adoption. And so you're seeing sort of well-capitalized players that have got differentiated technology continuing to attract funding, but it is sort of challenging for some of these smaller players.

I think the policy support still is robust as governments in the U.K. and across Europe and globally are see hydrogen as critical to address these hard-to-abate sectors. But clearly, cost reduction remains the key to sort of unlock this, and that's why we're excited about Hysata with their much more efficient electrolyzer, if you can make the economics that much more compelling, then we see that as an opportunity to sort of overcome these challenges in terms of the availability of capital in the short term. But our approach, therefore, remains just to focus on the sort of differentiated capital-efficient businesses that are innovating in the space.

Thanks, Mark. I appreciate that. Again, a second question from David B. Probably I've covered most just, I think. So on the net zero potential royalty, I just see all of the inputs in the DCF. But do you consider this combines with a sensible valuation? -- in short, yes, I do. And I spent quite a time talking to you all about it.

Hopefully, you can see why. We have tried to take both sensible probability of success numbers. We've also tried to discount appropriately. I think we've been entirely realistic actually. And in fact, funny enough, if you look at the amount that Pfizer paid to the drug of about GBP 10 billion, that would suggest that actually our valuation is sensible given the kind of the amount that we will own in that ultimate product. So I think we do feel comfortable. I think also the sort of market that Greg referred to at the beginning, that the CEO referred to, we suggest that our number is possibly slightly conservative against that measure. But yes, we do feel comfortable. Next question, I'm going to give this to Greg because it's a tough -- tougher but fair to be fair. When are we actually going to make a return on our investment? It's great that NAV is increasing, but the share price remains supporting. -- if you'd like to comment on that?

Yes. Thanks, Keith, and share your frustration with the share price. We are I mean, I think some of the actions we've taken during 2025 and indeed 2024 with the cost reductions, et cetera, and the priorities around delivering cash returns and then using a proportion of those proceeds to buy back stock is all part of us trying to narrow that discount. It does -- you're absolutely right.

It remains very frustrating, frustrating for me as a shareholder. And so it's clearly something that we're trying to address. And the share price had performed reasonably well up until the recent geopolitical tensions that we saw in the Middle East from a low of 35, 38 in about this time last year. So we were making some good progress on that front.

Hopefully, a confident set of results and line of sight on future value will will reverse back to positive territory. But I agree, it is very frustrating, and we're trying to take all the practical steps that we can to realize value and close that gap.

I'm going to pass this your way as well, Greg. Nigel, thank you for your question. Congratulations on an excellent set of results. At 53p, the discount to NAV is well over 50% now. Please indicate we will engage in another large-scale buyback to narrow the gap. I know you already commented on this, but you made, I guess, confirm that.

Yes. So we haven't put a specific date on the buyback start today. But I can say the Board remains very committed to the policy and to using buybacks as that primary mechanism for returning capital while the discount to NAV remains elevated. We also mentioned that we sort of accumulated about GBP 30 million worth, part of which is half of the realizations from 2025 and part of which reflects the fact that we've made some realizations already in 2026. So we will update on that timing in due course.

Another one I'll pass to this is from Malcolm R. Might there not be more scope for returns from the expanded IP pipeline, I guess, investment rather than from just buybacks?

Yes. I mean again, it's a great question. And maybe there's another question a little bit further on that I think is quite similar around -- let me just quickly find it. There's another question from Akshay that I think is probably worth maybe the other side of that argument sort of thing. Akshay, thanks for the question, just to read it out. So I'd like to connect 3 themes you touched on. First, the U.K.'s undeniable strength in innovation and scientific capability; second, persistent challenges U.K. companies face. Third, our own shares trading at a discount.

Is there a common thread here and a gap between scientific thence and commercial common sense, both at a national level and within our company within IP Group. More specifically, how should investors think about your decision to allocate incremental capital to new projects when the market is effectively valuing your existing assets at a greater than 50% discount to NAV, what's the hurdle or rationale that makes that capital allocation compelling relative to buying back your own shares?

I think that's the sort of the other side of that same question about should we be investing more. So I mean, I think it's a very thoughtful way of connecting those themes, and I definitely agree there's a common thread. I'd describe it a little bit differently. So the U.K.'s challenge isn't so much scientific excellence. We are really world-class at that, and it's more about translating that excellent into scaled commercial outcomes.

And too often that capital is sort of unavailable at the right moment or it's applied with a short-term lens that doesn't fit that kind of long-term science. And so what we're trying to do is sit at that juncture and apply that commercial judgment and price risk properly be patient where we need to be, but also be disciplined about capital allocation where that's not.

And so we're obviously doing that on the balance sheet. And when the shares trade at a big discount to NAV, obviously, we're going to be using buybacks. And you've seen us act pretty decisively on that this year. We've retired almost 10% of the company's shares in issue last year. And that means as shareholders, you should take away that buybacks set a very high hurdle. So obviously, when we've got a big discount like that, it's equivalent to almost like acquiring the existing portfolio at half price. So any new investment has to be demonstrably better than that.

And I think a good way of maybe describing that of roughly GBP 70 million we invested from the balance sheet last year, more than 90% went into existing holdings, only about GBP 5 million went into brand-new opportunities.

So it's a very small amount of capital going to new projects. So in practice, we are investing incremental capital where it can unlock disproportionate value. So that could be protecting our position against the dilutive financing round. It could be accelerating the company through an inflection point or it could be crowding in high-quality third-party capital like we did with Oxa. And if opportunities don't clear that, then they don't get funded.

So I guess this is -- there's a hierarchy between investing in buybacks and only investments that clear the hurdle are pursued. So that's, I guess, that's sort of how we think about capital allocation.

A comprehensive answer and also save me a very long question. So thank you for that. Malcolm, the second question, which I'll read out, it's more of a statement, great presentation. Thank you, Malcolm. I make the point of reading that one out. I appreciate it very much., what -- I'll answer this. What was the average sales price for Hinge? The average price was $473 interested. Total investment in that was about GBP 870,000, and we took out GBP 46 million. I think it's about 53x our money. We don't get them every day of the week. So nice to have it when we got it.

Moving on down to question 11, which I not preread. James W. You obviously still like Oxford Nanopore and will be reluctant to sell it. But given your own discount, have you considered spinning out the holding to shareholders so they can make their own decisions on whether they want to own it? You might argue that smaller holders might find it inconvenient, but I'm sure it will be outweighed by the higher value created. I'll pass that to you, Greg.

Yes. No, no, it's a very fair question. Thank you. And it's definitely not one we dismiss slightly. I guess, as always, when we've got a valuable quoted holding and our own shares trade at a discount to NAV, things like spinouts or distributions are something that we consider as a Board all the time. And we have looked at this a lot in terms of the mechanism to do so efficiently to shareholders, and there is no tax-efficient mechanism to do it.

If we do something which works for institutions, which are about 80% of our shareholder base, then it has a negative impact on individuals because often it is done as a dividend, and so therefore, carries quite a lot of tax. And similarly, if we were to do it in that form, it doesn't necessarily work for institutions. I think what you should expect to see is like we have done with Hinge, we traded out of that over a relatively short period of time. I think the runway for Nanopore is longer given the stage the company is at versus the valuation that is at versus its current trading. We've got a new CEO in place. But I think you should expect to see that capital discipline and routine exits from that company become a feature over the near term.

Next question from Kane, which I suspect is our favorite South African analyst. Thanks for being here, Kane. I'll go to you again, Greg. When is the next clinical catalyst for?

Yes. So we put in the back of the presentation, as usual, that summary of our clinical stage companies. In fact, given we -- I think I can probably do this let's just skip through so people know what I'm talking about. So you can refer to this again on the website.

This shows the clinical stage portfolio, the various holdings that we've got. You can see Meta in there. You can see Istesso. The next announcement we're anticipating will be the formal start or the first dosing of patients in that Phase II trial, which we -- which Mark mentioned is the follow-on to the Phase IIb that they did.

That will be an investigational study that will read out in 2027. I'm actually anticipating quite a bit of news flow from the company this year on some preclinical data and other things and could be quite an exciting year in terms of some of the -- adding some clinical weight to those interesting factors about the development compounds that Mark mentioned, things like impact on muscle and impact on other bits of the body. So yes, there should be some good news flow from Istesso this year.

I, this is one for you, Mark, actually. Are you seeing the volume of new AI investment opportunities possibly crowding out more mainstream investments in terms of both funds, talented staff and investor time?

Thanks. It's a good question. It's certainly true that AI is attracting a disproportionate share of attention and capital at the moment. I don't necessarily see it as sort of crowding out other areas. It's reallocating focus towards a certain technology. I think there's clearly a concentration of capital into AI, particularly the infrastructure and foundation model there, but many of the problems that AI is addressing like computer efficiency processing, automation are linked to our existing themes. So we kind of -- it's not a separate vertical for us that AI cuts across deep tech, across cleantech and across life sciences. So it's often complementary rather than competing.

And some of the most compelling opportunities sit at that intersection of AI and other sectors. So if anything, it kind of -- this creates these periods of intense focus in certain parts of the market can create better entry points elsewhere and opportunities for us where high-quality companies are receiving less attention. So it's kind of clearly a major theme for us. We're allocating our resource accordingly. But our approach remains unchanged that we back differentiated science and strong teams where we can see pathways to value creation, whether that sits within AI or enabling it or enabled by it.

Sam, also analyst following us, a health analyst. Good to have you there, Sam. So I'll give you a few Greg first. Would your preference be to hold the net zero license through to commercialization or look to sell it at some stage to a pharmaceutical royalty buyer perhaps?

Yes. Great question, Sam. Our -- I guess, where the starting point is we're very fortunate to have a choice. And I guess that's sort of valuable in its own right. The licenses give us exposure to hopefully long-dated, high-quality royalty streams on assets now being developed by one of the world's best resourced pharma companies. So we're not under any pressure to sell or fund development or take binary risk. That's very attractive. But in principle, we are open to both paths, holding through to commercialization could deliver really attractive long-term cash flows with no capital requirement from us.

Equally, as you probably are alluding to, there's a well-established market for high-quality pharma royalties. And at the right point and at the right price, we could look to monetize some or all of that right. For us, it will definitely come down to comparative value. Does it -- will it be better for us to crystallize value today at a better price given the discount NAV, et cetera, et cetera, create a better outcome for shareholders? Or is it better to hold it. So we are, as you probably expect, exploring that actively. And yes, it's definitely a nice position to be in to have the choice.

Sorry if you had that brief interruption the conference going on in the background, I apologize. A question from Kriti. So are you saying there's 47% chance of losing GBP 100 million on the Eastern Truck? Well, Kriti, perhaps there's some truth in that, not quite that much. It is saying that's 47% chance that actually that lead program won't be successful, and that's what I said in the sort of 70 million or well under 100 million. And that is true if that failed, then yes, you would have a downside.

I think it is worth making the point that there are 3 programs. So just because that one fails, it doesn't mean that actually they've all failed. So actually, the chance of everything failing is lower than that actually, it's more like about 30% in our numbers anyway. However, generally, and I'm not -- obviously, I'm on the finance side. I think it is reasonable to say that there's quite a lot of confidence in this drug. Obviously, Pfizer paid $10 billion for it. And it's a drug that obviously, they're fairly common GLP-1 drugs.

Obviously, they've been used widely. So there's quite a lot of data on it. The clinical trials to date have been relatively sizable. So I think it's quite unlikely you get a very serious adverse effect on these trials in this remaining Phase III trial. But statistically, and I think rightly, we based it on the statistics, probabilities of success of the drug at this stage, you have got a 47% chance of that lead program not working.

I hope that makes sense. But I think generally, we and obviously, Pfizer feel more confident about that. And then you do have to take into account the our program. So that doesn't mean that it all fails. But it is absolutely right to identify that these drugs are not yet in the market, and there is a possibility of them not making it. Certainly, what we'll hopefully see is over the next 1 or 2 years, in particular, that lead program go through a Phase III and hopefully reads out in '27, that we'll start getting more and more confidence and you'll hopefully see the value going up. I'm just going to go back, jumped on the right.

So next question from Robin M. When do we get the next news on PS394II, which is the lead program? When will full Phase III trial be concluded? I think as I just said, Robin, realizing I was answering the next question, at the moment, that looks like it's going to start reading out in '27.

It's actually Pfizer, obviously being an extremely well-healed organization, haven't just taken us into a single Phase III trial. They're planning on 10 Phase III trials. So they're committing very serious money to this. But the first trials we've been told have started this year. So we would expect some readout on some, if not all of those trials during the course of next year. This is probably one for you, Greg, from Sam again. Could you provide some more color on the Aberdeen partnership you announced post period end? And what benefits the tie-up bring?

Yes. Yes, very happy to expand on that to the extent that I can at this stage. So I guess it's a good example of that strategy we've been talking about using us as a bridge between the U.K.'s innovation base and hopefully, these large pools of long-term U.K. institutional capital.

In practical terms, we're working with them to create a U.K. venture portfolio built from our science-led ecosystem, bringing long-term institutional capital in alongside our balance sheet. For shareholders, the benefits are threefold.

One, it scales our capital without increasing the balance sheet risk, particularly mindful of that earlier comment and discussion around the buybacks versus investment in the portfolio. The second is that it provides a credible route for later stage and secondary funding into the portfolio.

And third, it reinforces hopefully, our position as an institutional-grade platform. And we're trying to design these things to be repeatable and scalable and hopefully directly address that structural funding gap in the U.K. So hopefully, we can add some real value there. I can't give numbers on quantum, et cetera, but obviously, we'll do so as the partnership scales.

Thank you, Greg. And I think, hopefully, Rob and, your next question, you will feel you've just answered that. Can you give more detail on the Aberdeen tie-up? Okay. David B, back on. Saba has been buying a significant volume of shares. Given you have large institutional holders already, Sabre is unlikely to gain control. So are they content with your current strategy?

Well, I think -- there's a couple of questions on that front. And I think it's fair to say, look, as a listed company, I don't think it's really appropriate for us to comment on what any individual shareholder might want to do or sort of give further information than what we've already disclosed.

We give regular updates on holdings. You can see those also summarized at the end of Feb in the appendices in the back of the results. I mean, I guess, like any other shareholder, we engage regularly and constructively with -- hopefully, as you can see from these sorts of calls, that ranges from retail right the way through to institutions, and we definitely welcome that engagement where we speak to any shareholder, we are trying to explain the strategy, our capital allocation framework, our capabilities as a business.

We're not an investment trust, our capabilities as a business and the long-term value opportunity. So ultimately, our role is to run the business in the best interest of all shareholders and deliver that NAV per share growth and disciplined capital returns over time.

Thank you. There was one other fab of question. If you don't mind, I'll keep that as wrapped up in that same answer. Nick came back, good to have you back. What's -- probably one for you, Mark. What's the latest on First Light Fusion? Is there a funding on the card? Do you want to say anything about that?

Yes. So First Light, of course, hopefully, you've seen towards the end of last year, they announced their flare concept, which is the world's first commercially viable reactor compatible pathway to high gain inertial fusion as in they're the first to sort of set out a pathway using their technology to how we could actually have a nuclear reactor that's generating energy for useful purposes for public consumption.

And in addition to that, just this past week, there was -- perhaps you saw it a large splash across the Sunday Times showcasing the government's nuclear fusion strategy in which it said that Britain's thriving fusion sector is to get public money to wean us off foreign energy, citing this GBP 2.5 billion figure of investment to chase the holy grail of nuclear fusion. So sort of lots of kind of positive wider industry development for First Light and this CLI concept that they published has generated a lot of excitement amongst those who are in the fusion industry because it potentially enables a lot of people's approaches to Fusion to be enhanced and to give them a better chance of generating useful nuclear fusion. Is there a funding round I think? I don't want to give away things that the company might not want me to give away or indeed jinx anything, but we are quite advanced with that. We have a cornerstone term sheet from a cornerstone investor. So I think I'm optimistic about that coming together.

Thanks, Mark. Actually, I'm going to give the linked question from Russell H, which is a couple down stack. But do you have any preliminary thoughts on the announcement yesterday by U.K. government as to Britain to lead Fusion Energy Waste to deliver energy security in the future. There was a big piece in Sunday Times as well on our portfolio company First Light. Do you want to comment on that?

Well, that's a lovely setup, isn't it prompt to say a positive thing that clearly, that puts our nuclear fusion efforts at the center of sort of sovereign capability. We're definitely seeing that at first sight. There's a lot of kind of engagement on that with the public sector. And so I think that's entirely positive for us and a great development.

Brilliant. Thank you, Mark, you're still on. You're staying in the spotlight. Mil, another analyst. M, thanks for joining us. Can you please give us some details on Oxa's competitive advantages in the autonomy stack versus hyperscalers, OEMs and robotic platforms?

Yes. So this is a short question with a long answer, given that you've sort of cited lots of different domains of semi overlapping notional competitors, not all of them are direct competitors. In fact, once you sort of get into the detail. But Oxa is building this kind of full autonomy stack that is very deliberately focused on industrial and commercial use cases. So a lot of these kind of hyper efforts are oriented very differently. They're focused on autonomy in complex urban environments, whereas Oxa's advantage is focused on these being deployable in sort of quite different environmental settings that have specific needs like ports and airports where a lot of the considerations that apply on roads don't apply, but you have a whole lot of new consideration, different ones.

And Oxa's not just a company that is capable of building these vehicles that can operate entirely autonomously, but they can also integrate into the management systems of the ports. They can integrate, they can take in requirements for positioning of containers and certain types of container needs to be in certain places that you can program all of that into their system.

They have a lot of intelligence around how you sort of dock these vehicles so they can be charged and how they can interact with the human control of the port. So there's a lot of kind of complexity that's specific to these industrial environments that Oxa has a lot of data that these people who are on-road stuff don't have that gives them real differentiation. But there's -- then there's the kind of differentiation versus OEMs where they have a different type of objectives and they're developing for sort of existing vehicle platforms, whereas Oxa's differentiation there is there are vehicle agnostic. And so you can apply it to whatever the cheapest vehicle you want to purchase for your particular application is.

So it's sort of quite complex and involved depending on which sector you're comparing them to or which competitor you're comparing them to. But this sort of full stack autonomy with the capability to be deployed on any vehicular platform is the core of the differentiation.

Thank you, Mark. You're staying on spotlight. M is hitting up to another one. Can you please update us on the time lines for the commissioning of HSA 100-kilowatt demonstration system and running a field trial in Saudi Arabia?

Yes. So this is going well, but the company is not keen for lots of public information to be pushed out there. So I'm very cautious about how much we do say publicly on this. I've just texted the chap who's on the Board of K for me and for us, and he sort of discouraged me from being too specific on any statements if the company wants to make its own announcements.

But look, I'm not saying that to hide anything. It's not going badly. It is going well. They're developing well. I'd like to sort of leave it at that, if that's okay.

Thank you very much. I'm going to move on to question 28. We're getting near the end, but not quite. This is Mike T. I assume that's our mic, is welcome, Mike. Can you update on the Chairman situation?

Yes, of course. So we announced -- well, last year in the AGM and the nominations report, we said we were going to be commencing a succession process for the Chair first because we've got a number of nonexecs who are coming up to their full term of independence over the next couple of years. As we announced earlier this year, Douglas will step down as Chair at the conclusion of the AGM in June. So in a few months' time, he's made a great contribution to IP Group during the last almost 8 years.

I'm very grateful for his support and particularly access to some of those long-term institutions here in the U.K. where he's got some really senior relationships has been -- we've been very grateful for that support and introductions. As you'd expect, we've got an active succession process underway. We're focused on appointing a Chair that has the right blend, I would say, of capital markets, investment experience and of course, all the usual sort of wisdom, strategic judgment, et cetera, that are appropriate for a Chair. We'll update the market in due course, obviously, but it's definitely progressing well, and we've got a number of really good conversations.

Brilliant. I think we probably covered this, but I'm going to do it anyway, Greg. Can you guide a range on how large Aberdeen relationship could be? You can, really.

I mean I guess the only thing I'll say by way of comparison, we started with relatively small sums with Hostplus, another effectively a DC fund, a defined contribution pension fund in Australia, and that grew over time as they allocated successive amounts of capital to us. So I'll give more information on that as we make sort of first investments, et cetera, but that's maybe that's a comp you could think about.

Great. Andrew, I'm sorry, my phone might be interrupting slightly. Andre, back to you, Andrew, nice to have you with us as always. Question is, are all the U.S. interest now held under the umbrella of North American University Innovations. In short, yes, they are. So we do have some American listed entities, for example, like Centessa. But generally, what we used to a long time be owners kind of IP Group U.S. is now all held underneath that one umbrella.

Yes. And there's a portfolio of interesting companies, but they are relatively early stage still in the States. Johnny, I think really making a point, which is a fair point, what's the current discount on listed portfolio once you strip out cash and credit holdings.

Clearly, it's bigger than the current one. I haven't actually seen the price this morning. But clearly, given we're now at GBP 1.10 NAV per share, the discount is quite significant at the moment and sort of well over 50% I just jumped to see if I've got any more. I'm nearly at the end, update on HSA and stack. I think we've done that. So if you don't mind, thanks very much.

Yes. Lucas, nice to hear from you. As always, I think we're seeing you soon. I'll probably get -- Greg, you probably want to comment on this one. IP Group's third largest investment in '25 was into a biotech company called RAGE Biotech. Please, can you share some insight on your conviction to deploy capital here?

Happy to pick that up or Mark, portfolio probably very happy to do it.

Yes. So the -- our conviction is grounded in the quality of the science and the team. But it's addressing this sort of underserved biological pathway. We're not backing speculative biology. We see some things that sort of strong mechanistic rationale.

And the other thing that really was quite compelling was the level of -- unusually high level of sort of engagement and interest from the pharma sector in this innovation. And that really sort of awakened us to the opportunity here on a scale much more so than other opportunities we see at this stage because it's quite unusual to see this level of interest in an asset at this stage of its life.

Brilliant. And the last one is just to come to Lucas again, great presentation, by the way. Thank you, Lucas. I look forward to meeting you next week, and we look forward to seeing you as always when you're in the U.K. I think now that is us. I think we have 36 questions covered and exactly 1.5 hours, which isn't too bad. So Jake, if you are happy, we'll hand back to you to do the honors.

Perfect, guys. That's great. And thank you very much for being so gent of your time and addressing all of those questions that came in from investors this morning. And of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended. But Greg, perhaps before really now just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company. If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, that would be great.

Of course. Well, hopefully, you've got the message that full year '25 was a year of really tangible progress for the group. We delivered that positive NAV per share growth, which was our #1 priority for the year. We generated strong cash exits, which enabled us to reinvest into the maturing portfolio. As I said earlier, about 93% of the money we invest in the portfolio went into existing companies as they scale.

But also we were able to retire about 10% of our shares in issue through our buyback program. And the most significant event in the year was that long-term value through our Pfizer obesity royalty interest. So we look forward with confidence. We appreciate shareholders' support. I know it's frustrating the share price at times. I'm equally frustrated, but we look forward to updating everyone on progress during the course of the year, and thank you all for your time.

Perfect, Greg. That's great. And thank you once again for updating investors this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback. On behalf of the management team of IP Group Plc, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. So good morning to you all.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the IP Group Plc Half Year Results Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions]

The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and we'll publish their responses where it's appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet Company platform. Before we begin, as usual, we would just like to submit the following poll. And if you'd give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. And I would now like to hand you over to the executive management team from IP Group Plc. Greg, good morning, sir.

Good morning, and thank you to Jake. And as always, thanks to everyone at Investor Meet Company for again hosting our half year results webinar. I was reflecting -- I was reading my FT on Saturday, and I almost choked my yogurt, I guess, these days, I've sort of had to move on from corn flakes for longevity reasons. But I saw the headline, the U.S. market for IPOs has exploded back to life with the busiest week for 4 years, and that's not something I've seen for a few years, I guess, maybe obviously based on the cycle.

But it was an interesting reflection that the public markets have had quite a positive impact on the portfolio in more ways than one so far in 2025. And hopefully, there is more opportunity that arises for us in future as a result. I'm Greg Smith. And as CEO, I have the honor of leading IP Group and our excellent team on our mission to accelerate the power of science for a better future.

And with me on today's call, we have our managing partner, Mark Reilly; and our CFO, Dave Baynes, both in the room really and virtually. As usual, this presentation will be uploaded on to the IR section of our website with a few appendices. Before we start, please note all the usual disclaimers and you can read that in the time I'm going to spend on the slide and good luck, but this covers all the information, particularly any forward-looking statements that we may make during the course of the next hour or so.

So in terms of what we're going to cover, I'll provide an overview of the Group's performance in the first half, then I'll pass on to Mark, and he'll give an update on a number of our key balance sheet holdings and then some other notable development actually. And then Dave is going to run us through a summary of the numbers, and then we'll head into Q&A.

As Jake said, as always, please post your questions up in the Q&A section. And as always, we'll endeavor to cover them all either live in the session or afterwards by platform as we run out of time. So for the half year, I think the main message is, overall, we made strong progress in the first half. We saw a number of encouraging developments in the portfolio. And indeed, the pipeline of significant milestones remains good through to the end of 2027.

The public markets were more of a contributor in terms of fair value. And then there were a number of other positive developments in the private portfolio. That public side included the successful IPO of Hinge Health in May and strong half year results from Oxford Nanopore who beat city expectations. We recorded total cash proceeds of GBP 30 million. That's 9x what we saw in the first half of '24.

And as a reminder, I said at the full year that we were targeting GBP 250 million of exits by the end of 2027. So what we've seen year-to-date means that we remain confident in achieving that target. And we had a small overall loss for the first 6 months. However, NAV per share essentially stabilized in the reporting period and has subsequently increased since the period end to about GBP 1 a share.

We continue to be in a strong balance sheet position and have good liquidity, and we still got gross cash of GBP 237 million. And obviously, that's significantly up from this time last year when we had the Featurespace exit and others during the period. And then a final note is we are seeing increasing momentum in our efforts to add to our private scale-up capital under management. And the market hasn't necessarily moved as quickly as we hoped or expected on this front. However, we have good confidence of securing at least one new mandate by the time that I talked to you at the time of our full year results.

So on the portfolio, coming into the year, 4 out of our top 5 holdings have seen encouraging developments in the year-to-date. As Mark and DB will cover briefly later, the fifth Oxa, while it's making encouraging underlying progress, is yet to close its latest funding round. And so our revised valuation has been pegged back to reflect that position.

On Hinge, we were delighted for Dan and Gabe and the team to have the opportunities to ring the New York Stock Exchange opening bell on May 22. PitchBook described their successful IPO as a pivotal moment for digital health, signaling the reopening of the health tech public markets after a 3-year drought, and Mark will cover more on this shortly.

But in summary, the company has traded very well since IPO is up about 80% off the back of strong Q2 numbers. Oxford Nanopore, they delivered a strong first half of trading. They beat analyst expectations on both revenue and on a lower EBIT loss. I think our observation was that growth was strong across all sectors and geographies. So by customer category, they grew in academic and in all of the 3 sort of applied sectors. And then by regions, even despite the sort of some of the headwinds in America, Americas was up, APAC was up, EMEA was up. So we're confident in the outlook for that company.

By way of context, we are now the second largest holder behind EIT, The Ellison Institute of Technology, which is backed by Larry Ellison, as many of you will know. Of course, Larry recently became briefly the world's richest man, and he obviously has quite an incredible track record of delivering value through Oracle. I thought it was quite interesting that the U.K. press has started to pick up more recently on EIT and its Oxford Ambitions. And Nanopore is very relevant.

If you go to the website, you can see how relevant it is to their focus on 2 of their big themes. One around health, medical science and generative biology and the other around food security and sustainable agriculture. In terms of our position, as a reminder, we invested about GBP 80 million into the company over time. We've realized about GBP 110 million to date. So we've already covered our costs in full. And as you'll have seen in our portfolio data for this year and last year, we've taken a small amount of liquidity on a couple of occasions. And as you'd expect, we continue to very actively monitor the company against where we consider fair value to be at any given time.

But as I said, we remain really confident in the medium-term outlook for the business. And we -- our feeling was that the full year '25 guidance was maybe a bit conservative given the strong first half update. So we're confident in our holding. We look forward to further commercial updates from the company. There's clearly a number of interesting commercial relationships brewing there in biopharma and in clinical and also the deeper dive on their refined commercial strategy, which will be coming out in Q4, particularly around how they intend to exploit the sort of $13 billion to $14 billion of TAM that they've identified in what they call the higher priority segments.

And then on Istesso, following the news that the -- their most recent trial didn't meet its primary endpoint back in February, the management team has worked hard to progress that program through to value. And the company published a peer-reviewed paper in The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, JPET, to its friends, and that was outlining the impact of its compounds on various chronic diseases where tissue damage occurs. So rheumatoid arthritis, as you know, but also things like osteoporosis, fibrosis and interestingly, sarcopenia or muscle loss.

And that last bit, I think, led to the paper being picked up by some of the longevity publications because muscle loss is particularly relevant at the moment around the weight loss drugs very common side effects of some of the GLP-1s. And during the period, the company also added a very experienced nonexec, Dr. Mike Owen, delighted to have Dr. Owen joined the Board. And he -- you might recognize the name. He was a co-founder of Kymab, which sold to Sanofi back in 2021 for -- I think it was a GBP 1.1 billion upfront. And when he joined, he said Istesso's old approach to reversing tissue damage could fundamentally change the treatment paradigm for chronic diseases and therefore, holds enormous clinical and commercial potential.

As I mentioned a few months ago at the full year results, the company has got funding to carry out a further trial and the location and design of which is well underway, and we anticipate that will commence before the end of the year.

On exits, we had a good period for cash realizations. We set an internal target of GBP 50 million for full year '25 coming into the year and the momentum into half 2 and I guess, a more elevated level of inbound interest in the portfolio gives us a high degree of confidence that we'll achieve that and likely exceed it.

Of the examples shown here, 2 companies were outright company acquisitions and one Centessa was a partial realization. For our remaining holding in Centessa, the company recently gave a positive update at the Morgan Stanley Global Healthcare Conference. And we anticipate the readout of the Phase II in narcolepsy is pretty imminent, and that will be the next catalyst for our remaining holding.

In addition to these examples, also worth mentioning, we realized a small amount of our Hinge holding at the time of the IPO. And as I mentioned, the balance has gone up by around 80%. So our lockup expires on that in November. On what we've done with that cash, as a reminder, our policy is a commitment to deliver cash returns to supplement capital growth using a proportion of the exits that we make in any given year.

At the moment, we are using buybacks, and we said that we'll do that until the discount gets to a lower level than 20% and given that persistent discount at the time of our full year results back in March, we announced the intention to use a greater proportion of our realizations in 2025, and we will again review that towards the end of this year based on our capital forecast for going into 2026.

The current program is GBP 75 million, and that includes GBP 20 million that we announced in June. At today's date, as of yesterday, we've got about GBP 9 million left to run on that program. And so as we make further realizations, we'll look to add to that total. I think it's worth noting the acceleration this year has been quite significant.

In fact, yesterday, I was looking at the numbers, our share count fell below 900 million shares for the first time, which means that we've now retired 15% of our capital in issue. We focused lots of our capital in the last couple of years on the buyback and on existing portfolio and getting those with the highest value potential through to their milestones and value realization.

And I've -- we're starting to see as sort of performance and market appetite continues to return, we'll start to selectively add a few more new holdings to the balance sheet portfolio, including from Parkwalk and the wider ecosystem.

But before I hand on to Mark, I just want to sort of briefly look forward quickly a reminder of the IP Group investment case, 3 things to believe. The first is that there is significant value potential in U.K. science and technology. I've talked about this and exemplified this at our Capital Markets Day back in June. The second is that IP Group is well positioned to exploit this given the team, the track record, the sourcing and the portfolio and that this represents an attractive shareholder opportunity, particularly given the discount to NAV against which we currently trade.

To reiterate again, this is something that I've covered in the past few updates. This in a single slide, I guess, depicts the capital strategy that we are following to be able to exploit that opportunity. From the perspective of a developing science and technology business, we're one of the few investors that can support development from the very earliest stages to relative maturity at the sort of venture growth end of the journey.

And complementary private funds are strategically important in terms of pipeline, particularly in the case of Parkwalk, but also development capital for our businesses, and they also contribute fees to mitigate our net overheads. In terms of scale and ambition, Parkwalk, we're aiming to maintain around GBP 0.5 billion of assets there, successful exits of balancing off against new subscriptions. On the balance sheet, we're focused on NAV per share delivery, and that obviously includes that GBP 140 million of cash that we've returned to shareholders over the last couple of years and is appropriate for where we are in the cycle.

And then on the scale-up fund side, under which you'll remember Hostplus increased their commitment by a further GBP 125 million last year. And that's where there is a real growth opportunity to scale available capital to ensure strong returns from our balance sheet and our sources of -- for our various investors.

On the first bit of that, just a quick update on our differentiated U.K. sourcing platform, Parkwalk. The business here, as you'll see from the numbers, as I mentioned, has about GBP 0.5 billion of assets under management there, which are all EIS tax advantage capital, and we partner with many of the U.K.'s leading universities to source new spin-out opportunities.

I'll just pull a couple of highlights out from the first half. And so one, in addition to the alumni funds that we have with Oxford and Cambridge and Imperial and Bristol, we were very pleased to add a new fund in collaboration with Northern Gritstone, which covers Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield. And then similar to the theme that we're seeing on the balance sheet side, last week, we were delighted to announce the acquisition of one of our portfolio companies in the funds, [ Cytora ], which gave a good return to our EIS investors. And for our Plc shareholders, that generates additional fund management fees that contribute to lowering our net overheads.

And then at the other end of the -- of that sort of capital strategy is our objective to add further scale up capital. I mean the context here continues to move in our favor. Our overall observation is that the public and private sectors are starting to align in terms of their policy and their approach. And during the first half, there have been quite a lot of important points of progress and those things like updated mandates and increased funding for the British Business Bank and the National Wealth Fund, which you can see there on the left-hand side.

And a lot of that is highly aligned with the industrial strategy in the U.K. and the sectors that we focus on in turn, aligned with those. The pensions bill is currently passing through and the commons, how long that's quite going to take, but that removes some of the widely cited barriers to pension funds and similar long-term capital investing more in private productive assets in the U.K.

And the Mansion House Accord, which is about 17 of the largest workplace pension providers in the U.K. committed to a voluntary commitment to have 10% of their default schemes in private markets by 2030, including half of that capital going into the U.K. So there's been quite a lot of sort of sector activity.

Our experience and probably that of the wider market when you look at mandates is that there hasn't been very many VC commitments, perhaps with the notable exception of the Phoenix, Schroders joint venture future growth capital. But there's not been much that's really at scale. And our view is ultimately, that's what's needed and where the big opportunity lies. I would say encouragingly, the number and the stage of conversations with potential funders has seen quite an increase since the time of the Match House Accord, and we've added some additional experienced resource to our team to help exploit that.

As I said at the start, we've got a good degree of confidence in securing at least one new mandate by the time I next talk to you for the full year results. And then quickly before I hand on to Mark, I thought I'd just cover a few of the companies or trail a few of the companies that we are excited about and particularly those that have either presented or are going to present at our events this year. So OXCCU, our sustainable airline fuel business. Mark is going to talk about that one shortly. Andrew, the Co-Founder and CEO, will be at our flagship scale-up event in October. Intrinsic, you might remember that the Co-Founder and CTO of Adnan presented at our Capital Markets event. There's a video on our YouTube channel. If you like a lot of technical detail, that's quite a technical one. They are producing the world's smallest nonvolatile memory, and they have a sort of tape-out coming towards the back end of this year.

That does have very significant commercial potential given the company is initially targeting a segment of the memory market that's worth more than GBP 50 billion. And then genomics at the Capital Markets Day back in June again, David Thornton, who is the President there, gave a very compelling overview of the technology and its commercial applications. You also say right till the end to update everyone that revenues will grow by more than 100% this year and will do so again in 2026, taking them to $70 million, $80 million. He said they'll be EBITDA positive by the end of this year. So that's another of our top 20 companies to watch.

And then on the therapeutics, our current clinical stage portfolio is worth about 23p per share, and there's a good number of clinical milestones coming up between now and the end of '27. Again, Mark is going to cover a couple of those shortly. And then just one other quick thing to mention just briefly on our licensing portfolio. We don't speak much about this. We have a licensing portfolio of IP predominantly from Imperial, and that contributes a few hundred thousand to our net overheads. There are 3 main projects in that portfolio. But I mentioned at the start that the public markets have contributed in more ways than one this period.

And back in January, Metsera, Therapeutics business IPO-ed in the U.S. and actually, we licensed the core IP to Metsera. Now of course, it's early days, but if successful, there could be quite a meaningful source of royalty income over time. So we'll keep you updated on that one. So with that, I will hand on to Mark to talk a bit more about the portfolio.

Thank you, Greg. Good morning, everybody. So there have been a few notable events over the course of the first half, perhaps arguably the standout one certainly for me personally having sort of witnessed the whole journey of Hinge Health. I recall, I think it was 2012, 2013 when its founder, Dan Perez who remains the Chief Executive of Hinge Health, walked into our office and very confidently said I'm going to make you guys a lot of money.

And I think you can say that some confidence that, that was accurate now with a 50x overall return on our investment so far on to -- that asset. So the company, of course, we were the first investor when Dan was still a PhD student in the University of Oxford. It went on to raise substantial sums in -- from some of the top Silicon Valley investors, underwent very impressive growth and had that successful IPO in May of this year. We were able to sell a small amount at the IPO, and we did sell a larger chunk of our holding prior to that at a very good valuation in the private markets 2 or 3 years ago.

But we still have a remaining holding that was worth just under $40 million at the half year and some share price continues to trend upward since then, which is good news. So that holding is locked in now until end of November, but we still have that holding [indiscernible] in the company has since put out some announcements of its latest results, its Q2 announcement and again, exceeded expectations, did very well.

Revenue reported is increasing at 55% year-over-year, and they're now at $140 million of revenue in that period, and they're projecting 40% of the year-on-year growth going forward. So still very strong commercial progress there.

I saw there was a question in the Q&A. The first question that came in, in the Q&A was why sell Hinge Health when there are lots of other smaller holdings in the portfolio that are -- that were described as nonlisted and nonrelevant in the question. So I would, first of all, highlight that Hinge was one of those nonrelevant nonlisted holdings until relatively recently. And so we think there is value in holding stuff that has potential that could hit that inflection curve.

I think also the reason why you as investors have us holding shares on your behalf that there are some rationale for doing that, which is that we have this technical expertise internally that we can kind of arbitrage technical risk. We can judge that better than others. We have influence on these companies. We have extra visibility of a lot of these companies that others don't. And when those things become less true as the companies mature, that's less of a kind of rationale for us to hold them and so where that liquidity exists. That's where we start to consider divesting those positions.

So just running through some of the other -- the top firm assets by value in the portfolio, just to update you on what's been happening at some of those assets. Greg spoke quite a bit about Nanopore, so I won't spend too long on that one other than to reiterate the fact that it continues to outperform its peers. They had a positive set of results that beat the market expectations, 28% rise in revenue, up to GBP 105 million now.

And the key thing that we were looking for in those results was a diversification of revenue, a demonstration that they're moving into applied markets into clinical markets as well as this strong base of research revenue that they've already demonstrated over the past several years. And we really saw that this time. The revenue grew by over 50% in the clinical domain and 27% in the applied domain. So that's really showing that they're moving into those big market opportunities, and that's very encouraging.

On [indiscernible] as Greg said, this was frustrating that they missed this endpoint in the first Phase II trial, but frustrating because it also demonstrated there's so much potential in this drug. And as Greg said, there was some data from that trial published in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics that demonstrated that this ability to elicit tissue repair, not just sort of preventing degrading the tissue, but actually showing that it's repairing the tissue, which has a lot of implications, but it showed these improvements in bone erosion and disability and fatigue.

And so that has a lot of implications for sort of slowing aging and to slow the progress and even reverse the progress of some of these really detrimental conditions that people suffer from like this, their focus is currently on rheumatoid arthritis. So that publication certainly increased market confidence that there's a mechanism of action here that's really interesting. The efficacy of this drug is real that there's a range of clinical indications and diseases where it could be used. So we're sort of frustrating because of this potential.

And unfortunately, that benefit didn't manifest in particular primary endpoint chosen over the time scale and over the cohort of this first trial. But we've learned a lot from that. They're going to do another trial now that implements those learnings and focuses on the things that they think they can really create a difference with, and they're well-funded to do that trial. So that's positive in that respect. So I remain optimistic about the sort of long-term prospects of that company.

And finally, on this side, amongst our most valuable assets, Pulmocide. So they -- not a huge amount to report there because things are going well. The trial is on track. That's progressing according to plan. This is developing these respiratory treatments [indiscernible] inhaled treatments for respiratory infections like invasive pulmonary aspergillosis is a very nasty thing that you get wrong with your lungs and sort of mold infection in the lungs. And the trial is recruited well. And so we're still expecting that to read out in sort of H2 of '26 and have some results from that next year.

Finally, not on this slide, but Greg also mentioned Oxa. So Oxa, we have taken this impairment on the holding there. It continues to make good technical progress. We've got very encouraging commercial progress. The company is doing well. It has been harder than we hope to raise money for the company, a bit frustrating because we have sort of the building blocks around, but it's -- we're just not quite over the line with that yet, but we are quite advanced now in discussions with some major potential cornerstone and I hope to have some good news on that asset soon. So that's sort of the higher-value stuff in the portfolio. That's the kind of top end.

But another -- just picked out another handful of assets to mention because of some exciting developments in those assets. So Artios you may recall, is a company that's developing DNA damage response-based cancer therapies, and they are focused on hard-to-treat solid tumors. It's now public that they're targeting pancreatic and colorectal cancers, both of which have a huge, unfortunately, unmet clinical need. So a big market opportunity for the company, a big commercial opportunity.

They did publish some of the sort of early data from the current trial, the Phase II trial at the American Association for Cancer Research Conference, and that data was very well received. They're funded to continue that trial and to explore the indications that they're seeing. And so we expect to see results from that end of next year, sort of early 2027 is the most likely time [indiscernible] I have to sort of qualify all of these clinical trial expectations that there are always things that can go off track and it can be delayed. But at the moment, as far as we know [indiscernible] both on track and expecting the same time scales that we've already guided.

Then finally, there's 2 assets to mention in our Cleantech portfolio. So OXCCU, I don't know we maybe haven't spoken a huge amount about this company in the last few presentations, but this is a company in Oxford that spin out of Oxford University that's developing the world's lowest cost, lowest emission methods of making sustainable aviation fuel. So you use sort of waste carbon, and you turn it into fuel for airplanes and it's a good news for those of us who would like to continue traveling without, I think, quite the impact on the environment that it currently has.

So that company raised GBP 28 million in a Series B round during the period. And the exciting thing about that is the sort of incredibly impressive list of strategic investors who came in to really validate the proposition that OXCCU is working on. So it was -- round was led by Safran, which is the world's second largest aircraft equipment manufacturer.

The energy company Olin came into the round. IAG, which is the parent company of British Airways, came into that round. So a real kind of validation of their proposition based on the strategic interest that they've had in strategic financial support that they've got. They've built a demonstration plant. It sat on the top of my head there in Oxford Airport that's kicking out jet fuel. It's working. It's producing jet fuel now, and they started the process to develop a full-scale commercial project in the U.K. So that will be the sort of next scale up of their project.

And finally, Hysata, we've talked about Hysata in these presentations before, a very compelling proposition. They have a hydrogen electrolyzer, a machine that produces hydrogen at 95% efficiency, which is well above anything that you will achieve if you buy a hydrogen electrolyzer off the shelf today. So their 100-kilowatt system, it is slightly delayed, but we anticipated there was a possibility that there will be a delay on this 100-kilowatt system. So that's built into their funding road map with the money that we raised with them last time. So they're still fund to produce that system, and we're still expecting it to be commissioned during Q3 as in this quarter of this year.

They've also got a field trial going on a [indiscernible] machine running on a customer premises in Saudi Arabia. So this is not set in Hysata facility it's halfway around the world, and that is working, and it's -- they've reproduced that world-leading efficiency at that customer site. So they've demonstrated the ability to put machine in different places probably that [ where we need ] efficiency.

And with that, I will hand back to David now.

Thank you very much. Thanks, Mark. Yes, financial results, nice to review again as always. I'm going to go through this fairly quickly. It pretty much just pulls together all the things we've been talking about.

Overall, cash, very strong again, GBP 237 million cash, that's actually up 47% from this time last year, and that's because of a very successful exit Featurespace at the end of last year, which of course, has generated significant amount of cash. We are, of course, slightly down from the year-end if we make investments, and I'll give you the cash flow in a minute to talk you through that. There was a small loss in the period, that 1.5% to about GBP 43 million loss. It is worth making the point as you've already heard that since the year-end, all of that has reversed actually for improvements in Nanopore and Hinge, about GBP 35 million of that's come back.

And it means combined with share buyback, actually our NAV per share is now actually up. So it was briefly down at the half year from 97 to 96. We're now about GBP 1 a share. So that's, as I say, a combination of the improvement since year-end and also the share buyback which improves the NAV per share as we go along. And net overhead is down about 14% period-on-period. I'll do a slide on those in a minute and talk you through it.

This next slide could be long, could be short. I'm certainly going for the short option increase and as disclosed in the interim results. There's a number of kind of uplifts over 5 or 6 companies and a number of write-downs over a similar number of companies and a foreign exchange loss of GBP 14 million, which relates to the pound being strong when we convert some of our American-denominated assets in particular, that may or may not reverse at some stage, depending on currency.

But those elements just eliminate, quite frankly. And then you've got really just to do with 2 funding rounds really, Artios and Oxa, where actually, as you've already heard, the company is performing well, but actually, we've not either completed or have started a full funding. And as such, we have no choice but to actually make some kind of provision against both. And those -- that accounts for sort of GBP 9 million of that. So pretty much that is the story of the half.

But just adjusting for those 2 assets in that small loss, but that loss has now been eliminated between the year-end and today. That's why when we now look at the assets here, assets are down a small amount from about GBP 1 billion to GBP 900 million, those are rounded, it's actually down about GBP 60 million. So it's a combination of that small loss and also shares we bought back because, of course, the buyback does actually balance sheet slightly smaller as we buy back shares.

The concentration hasn't changed. So that next bit of the slide telling you there's no news. It was about exactly 56% of the top 10 at the year-end, and it is now. It's pretty much the same sort of ratio of how the portfolio looks. And actually, the next slide is also no change. This is a slide I always do but talks about how well the portfolio itself is funded because of course, that's very important.

And actually, we've increasingly seeing this pattern whereby it's about 1/3 that is funded to profitability. You don't need to worry about that. And then there's about 1/3, which over the next year, 1.5 years need funding and then another 1/3 that doesn't need funding until '27 and beyond. So much of the portfolio is pretty well funded, but there will always be funding challenges and companies requiring funding at any point in time. So that kind of 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 rule is beginning to come pretty well solid as a rule.

And now this just pulls it all together. So here's the cash of what's happened, and you've heard, I think, all of these numbers now. We've invested GBP 35 million in the period. It occurred over a number of assets. Most in current assets, only about 12% of that total investment into new assets as a single new company in the period. Realizations, we've talked about at length, GBP 30 million. Share repurchases, GBP 25 million. It almost exactly what we realized we've used on buybacks. That's actually a coincidence.

But we are this year committed to 50% of our realizations to be done in the form of buybacks. It just so happens that some of the buybacks we've done relate to last year. It doesn't quite work out the math. But in short, we will be during the course of the year, I think 50% of our realizations and buybacks. Overhead is down, as we've heard, the net debt, actually, we generated about GBP 2.6 million net income on interest, but we've made some repayments on the debt in the period, which means the actual total move just a small reduction overall. And then there's a relatively large working capital movement. That relates to the licensing, which we just started talking about a bit. What happens on the licensing, we own certain licensing assets on Imperial College.

We're responsible for them. We often collect in the proceeds and then actually we keep some, some need to distribute to other parties, it's Imperial College itself. And that means you sometimes have these working capital movements where we're paying out money in receipt on behalf of others. And that's why you get a relatively large movement. But that's the story of the cash, cash still very, very strong.

And overheads, I'm very glad to say pretty much exactly what we said they'd be. So that 15% this time compared with this time last year, but we're going to do what we said we'd do. When we did the cost reduction in the second half last year, we said we'd reduced the '23 number, which was about GBP 22.5 million net to about GBP 16.5 million net. That's what we're going to do, 23% reduction. That still looks like what we'll achieve at the year-end. So I think without further ado, I'll pass back to Greg.

Thank you, Dave. So leaving some good time for questions. So a summary of the half year results. So we made good progress in the first half. We saw a number of encouraging developments in the portfolio, many of which Mark has touched on, the public markets were a particular fair value contributor, including that Hinge Health IPO and Oxford Nanopore's strong trading. We made good progress on exits of GBP 30 million, and that momentum into half 2 means we remain confident of our target of achieving GBP 250 million of exits by the end of 2027.

As Dave just mentioned, our NAV per share essentially stabilized over the period and has subsequently increased since the period end to GBP 1 a share -- about GBP 1 a share. And on the scale of capital and expanding our resources as a group, our capital resources as a group, we continue to see a big opportunity. And while the market hasn't necessarily moved as quickly as we hoped or expected, good confidence of securing at least one new mandate by the time we next see you all on the IMC platform for our full year results.

I'll just quickly remind you, looking forward, our investment case is based on these 3 sort of hypotheses. The first is that there's significant value in U.K. science and technology, given our world-leading position there. And the IP Group is one of the pioneers in this space and with a long track record is well positioned to exploit that and that we hope we've set out an attractive shareholder opportunity in the next 6 months and indeed out to 2027.

And then just because I think this is a good form, these were the priorities and future areas of focus that I set out at the full year, which we are aiming to achieve over the course of the time between now and the end of the year in 2027 on the exits. And I think on all of those, we're making good progress. So I won't go through them each in turn, and I'll cover them all off when we report to you our full year results. So thank you, everyone, for listening, and we will now turn to questions.

Great. Thank you very much. Well, that's gone well so far. We said we'd be 40 minutes, and we're 38. So we've got quite a lot of questions, maybe not quite as many as normal. So we may get through this now. Laurent Tess, if you don't mind, I think we've answered yours, you had a question about why you're selling Hinge and keeping some of the smaller positions. I think Mark answered that while he was presenting. So I'll move on to next.

Kane, nice to have you, analyst from Deutsche. Nice to have you here, Kane. You've got 3 questions. I'm going to do them one at a time. Mark, I'll do the first one with you. Might the adverse uncertain conditions research in the U.S. for example, funding like the NIH create opportunities in the U.K.

Maybe. And there are headwinds as well and some pharma investments being withdrawn from the U.K. newspaper a couple of week or so ago. So I think we frequently see -- remember a few years ago, this question was about Brexit and the time before that, it was about the recession. And so there are lots of these kind of ebbs and flows of funding. I think it takes time to have an impact on us because it takes time to then filter through to the funding of the science, and that takes time to filter through to the commercialization that's coming out of those research lab, I would say not in the short term, but maybe in the long term.

Kane, your second question, I'm going to point out to you, Greg. Why do you think Larry Ellison is so keen on LNG?

I think looking at the time the question came in, it might have been before I said why I think he's keen. I mean I think the commercial answer is that the technology is incredibly well suited to 2 of those big themes that they're trying to solve the big global challenges they're trying to solve through the Ellison Institute of Technology, particularly around sort of human health and genetics, but also on the sort of sources of food and agriculture.

Clearly, they're building a significant position there, which is interesting. So I haven't spoken to them directly. So I couldn't say definitively, but it's a good sign if you -- he's had such an incredible track record, like 40 years of delivering value through being able to not necessarily be ahead of the curve on technology adoption but certainly delivering real cash value. So I think it's a good sign, but also, it's one to watch.

Yes. I'm going to point the next one to you, Mark, we know it's coming. Hinge Health up strongly post period end. Will you be inclined to take some profits?

Well, we're locked in at the moment, and we did take some of the IPO. Then as I said earlier, it's an evaluation of the liquidity and the value available to us at any given time also.

Thank you very much.

And as you'd expect, obviously, we don't want to tell you about our intentions on our quoted companies because there's smart people out there that can do things with that information. But yes, we're pleased with that holding, and it's a good source of liquidity over time.

The next one, Sam. Nice to have you here. Another analyst at Berenberg, good to have you here, Sam. I'm mentioning this because people in the past have said, can you make it clear when someone is an analyst and when they're not, so I'm doing that. I'm going to split this question. I'll do the first bit, Mark, and then maybe give you the second, if that's all right.

First, one sentence, but would you be able to provide more detail on your IP licensing portfolio? And then separately, and therapeutic programs, when do you expect licensing income to ramp up? I'll perhaps do a little bit on the licensing. Licensing traditionally has been a relatively small part of our business. We inherited the licensing as part of the acquisition when we bought Touchstone. They, as part of their remit used to do the licensing for Imperial College.

A very large number of patents, some of what we call active, ones that actually we had an agreement around them and some of the ones that was just exploratory and still waiting for maybe some of the license. And we retained all of those active licenses. So there's a relatively big portfolio about 80 different licenses.

The actual strengthen that's what question is. The actual strengthen is relatively small traditionally, we'd be recognizing something like GBP 500,000, GBP 700,000 income a year. That tends to be the patent licenses you have to have a large number, most of them generate relatively small amounts. And then from time to time, you can sometimes get some really big licenses, a single license can do 95%, 99% sometimes of your license income.

We have kind of 3 licenses out there. Greg has already referred to the Net Zero one. It's early. It's early. We're not going to start making claims about their value. And we're not recognizing in the books. Actually, in accordance to accounting standards, it's unlikely we will recognize in the books until such time as actual license income is recognized. So you can't kind of recognize it like a potential intangible or something.

But any of the top 3 have the potential to, in time, generate significant revenues. Net Zero are now about a GBP 3.8 billion company, a GLP-1 agonist and it looks promising at the end of a Phase II trial. There are some notes out there. If that got to a Phase III trial, if that then became a successful drug, there may in time be some decent license income that come to us and something we would be also shared with Imperial College. So that's probably what I can say at the moment.

At the moment, no impact on the financials, no significant impact on the financials. But maybe in time, maybe -- and I'm thinking maybe 2 to 3 years' time, you may start seeing if some of the things go well, some decent licensing income, and we'll talk about that at the time. It's a bit of a wide one to talk about all therapeutic programs. Is anything you want to touch on, Mark, where we might treat that question as dealt. I don't know there's anything over and above what we've already talked about there.

I wonder whether that was at 10:18 as well as we have couple...

Yes, I think that is.

It's worth saying in the appendices in our results presentation, we do a sort of a summary of the main holdings and where they are in their clinical development and our valuation. And so what we're sort of -- what we're seeing as milestones coming up. So that's sort of a ready reckoner and I'm very happy to talk about in more detail than any of the others we haven't covered when we next see you, Sam.

I've got another one for you, Sam, you split yours. I'll give it to you, Greg. I mean, given the current cash position and potential exits over the next couple of years, is there any change in your thinking around buybacks?

Well, we hope we've got a pretty clear policy out there. While the discount is greater than 20%, the proportion of cash that we allocate to returning to shareholders is being done by way of a buyback. We think that's most accretive way to do that at the moment.

And at the moment, for this year, we're doing -- we're using 50% of our realizations to that end. We will, as always, look at that number for next year. Historically, it's been around 20% of realizations that we've returned, which we see as sort of a more sustainable steady state.

But obviously, we'll look at the relative opportunities for buybacks of our own shares versus portfolio opportunities and some small number of new opportunities. So no real change in the policy. The application changes each year based on circumstances.

Next, Josh L, not an analyst, of which I'm aware. I'll probably take this. How has there been no First Light Fusion fair value movement despite a complete change of strategy during the period? There has been a significant change in strategy and actually some very promising technical developments, which I won't try to talk to. You can ask Mark about those if you're interested. But actually, reviewing the valuation, one of the main considerations which is like the probability of funding, the likely valuation of funding. And when we reviewed it, we came to conclusion that actually the kind of value we carry it at looks pretty robust around what we'd expect to value that.

Myr recollection is that the new strategy was fairly well advanced at the time of the full year valuation. So that was...

Pretty much factored in, yes, exactly. And at the moment, I think from where I'm sitting in terms of technical side of valuing it, I think that actually we carry it where we sort of think it may be valued. We may be wrong, but we will see. But we -- after quite a lot of discussion, we felt it was fairly valued and the movement in its actual carrying value is that just related to money we've invested in the business. So it's gone from. So that [indiscernible] So next, who would this be? From MV, hi IP Group team, nice momentum in portfolio. Thank you.

Any plans on a partial full sell down on Nanopore, particularly given the IT initiatives? Well, Greg has already mentioned unlikely to comment on that. I don't know if you want to say anything further, but we're unlikely to comment on ourselves to public companies. Maybe you want to add to that Greg [indiscernible]

I don't think anything to add to what we've said on that front. We do look at it all the time. It's not -- I've said in the past; it's not our strategy to have big holdings in large, quoted liquid companies that our shareholders can access directly. So it's a matter of time, but we're very -- we're a happy holder given the progress in the portfolio, and we always look at liquidity.

Next question from Bill H. Probably, Mark, is about you, what is the role of IP Group's managing partner? If you'd like to...

Well, to deliver shareholder value to increase the value of our existing portfolio and to make exciting new investments into companies that will be future well-changing company. So I have responsibility across the portfolio. I'm the person that chairs our investment committee. So I sure that the decision-making is sound and as good as it can be. And I see all the decisions around transactions of investments and exits.

Thank you. Again, I think one for you, Mark, how much you want to talk about this. Can you -- this is Milosz, another analyst, Edison this time. Milosz, nice to have you. Can you give us an update on the monetization of Ultraleap patents and what you're able to talk about on that, Mark, I think.

I can. I wasn't sure if I could, but I [indiscernible] text the CEO and he told that they did a LinkedIn post on Monday actually on this that the transaction, you might recall, we had an agreement to sell the patent portfolio to a company called [indiscernible] specialist in monetizing patent portfolios. And we were way to close that transaction when we last spoke publicly about this.

That transaction has now closed. And so that's very positive. And the company has received the proceeds for that initial part of the transaction. There is an earn-out agreement. So as [indiscernible] monetize that portfolio, funds flow to [indiscernible] very positive. We really believe in the value of that portfolio. There's a lot of places where we think those patents are valuable. So we're optimistic about future fund flows from...

Thank you. Next one, there's more questions coming in actually. Questions are picking up page. Robin M, I'll give this to you, Greg. I think maybe you can talk a little bit about cash raise from private markets secondary sales, both in the past and going forward. Is this becoming an easier way to raise capital? I think possibly referring to the small deal we did last year. I'll let you...

Yes, so yes, we did do a small secondary last year. I think there's another question further down that asked about how are the assets marked and all that sort of stuff. And I think at the time, we said that on average across the various holdings on the balance sheet, it was a slight premium. It was about NAV, maybe a tiny premium to NAV on the balance sheet, and it was across -- it was a secondary that was across a few companies on the [indiscernible] funds and a few companies on the balance sheet side.

There was -- the exact total was around GBP 23 million, I think, across the 2 pools. And we also said that there were things like preemption rights and all that sort of stuff, which we -- which meant we couldn't complete the full transfers that we planned to. I think we did just over 2/3 of the GBP 23 million, I think that transaction is all played through. And we do look at other options like that. We've explored all the time that I've been at IP Group, which is sort of 15-plus years, we've always looked at are their ways that we can accelerate value through these sort of structured transactions.

I think the secondary markets are interesting at the moment. And they're interesting potentially -- for us potentially as we think about how we access scale up capital and build some strategic relationships. But also the secondary market is quite interesting because we have a permanent balance sheet and our liquidity position is reasonably strong, relatively speaking. There is clearly an opportunity where in companies that we're existing shareholders of that we particularly like or even potentially companies that we've tracked over the last few years that have made significant developments, but perhaps the cap table isn't as strong as it could be, then clearly, there's secondary opportunities for us. So yes, we look at it on both sides, and we'll always consider those opportunities.

Next one, I'll point towards you, Mark, from Milosz again. And it's one that probably just give a general feedback on. But what appetite for M&A and licensing deals do you see across the life science sector at present? It's quite a wide-reaching question.

I mean it seems good. My context is perhaps lacking a bit because I wasn't responsible for life sciences until a year or so ago, but I don't have a full history of staying close to this market in a way that others might, but it's -- that we've had quite a lot of interest in particularly one of our portfolio companies, there's been some inbound interest from potential sort of license acquirers. So in the small sample set that we have, it's maybe not representative, but it seems positive.

I'll have a next one. Congratulations. This is David R. Congratulations on a good set of results. Thank you for that. On what basis is the optimistic view of exits of GBP 250 million for the period through to '27?

Well, it's basically on our internal projections. So you can imagine we're running the sort of capital allocation process all the time. So I'm always updating estimates of how much we need to invest, how much we think we're going to realize, therefore, what's the closing cash balance is going to be. And in that process, we're always running out 3-year projections what our realization is going to be.

And we do feel relatively optimistic in the period at the end of '27, we will generate that level of realizations. And to be clear, that doesn't include Oxford Nanopore. There's no plan for selling that. Nanopore is not in that. So one would hope Nanopore itself, that's the number they're talking about, could easily grow to a GBP 200 million asset on its own share at least by that time. So that's separate.

We do think looking -- particularly there's a number of the therapeutic programs, which we think will come through in that timeline reporting both in '26 and '27, which we feel if they are successful, could generate really quite sizable realizations for us. So when you look at our numbers, I mean too much detail. When you look at our estimates for what we think we're going to realize, we have weighted probabilities, all types of complexity to try and estimate it.

But we're increasingly finding we're relatively accurate at it. Although it's sort of a balancing day with 10% probability of that and 40% probability of that actually, it seems to work out relatively well, which is why we've been able to manage our cash relatively well.

So in short, it's based upon our current expectations of the portfolio as it stands, and there are quite a number of, as you can see, look at therapeutic readout, therapeutic quite big programs reading out, which if any one of those work could make a serious dent in that number.

And we are certainly, as we've already said, on target to do the number we plan to this year already. Next one, Haran, I hope you don't think I'm ignoring you. I think this is a question around the secondary we did last year, which Greg referred to, and I think we've answered.

So I'll have a next question, which could answer the last one I haven't read, but I will read it out. We'll see what we've got. This is from David R. Your ambition is simply to increase NAV rather than achieve a more typical target of, say, 15%, which might be expected for VC investing. Should shareholders assume either that you're very cautious or simply don't believe you can create typical value on this risk or asset class in the U.K. Greg, how about you have that one?

We all have a view on that.

Yes. We go for that.

We've got to be realistic with the current environment that we're operating in. However, it's fair to say that our ambition or our objective is to deliver compelling financial returns that are consistent with that risk profile. And certainly, when the IC needs to consider any investment in a portfolio company, we're not looking at will we keep this holding flat. We're looking at VC type multiples and VC type IRRs.

And so the objective is to have more of those successful returns, and we focused the investment strategy more into those areas where we've seen that those success returns in the past, but also importantly, where we think there is returns to be had in the future in delivering against the sort of science-back investing environment. I don't know, Mark, if you'd add anything particular to that.

No, that's all.

Hopefully, we're moving into a period where that the environment is a bit more accommodative, and we're seeing good pickup in M&A interest. I wouldn't say it's sort of like a wall of M&A interest, but certainly compared to the last couple of years, there's quite a marked increase in inquiries. So that's obviously what -- it's the sort of cash-on-cash returns ultimately, which are important.

And I think if you look at the track record of things we've had, including feature space recently and others, the cash-on-cash record there is very good. It's sort of 5x, 6x and in the sort of 20%, 30% IRR. So that's what we're targeting. The NAV gives you an idea of how it's going over time. But sometimes we have NAV setbacks and that doesn't necessarily mean that the company is not going to deliver strong cash-on-cash returns in the future.

I agree. I also -- but I think 15% is something we can certainly can achieve. And certainly when you look at some of the areas we now focus on, as Greg said, actually mathematically, you can see the past, no proof of the future, but you can see investing in those areas in the past, we have achieved those sort of returns. So it's certainly a number we have part to and believe we will achieve.

Andrew M, next, talking about the fall in value of Oxa, which has been partially explained by Greg. Could we -- he has mentioned there's some good technical progress. Could we perhaps, Mark, a little bit more about how we feel the technical progress despite the fall in value.

Yes. Yes, I get an e-mail from the CTO once every couple of weeks talking about some of the exciting technical progress in the -- most of it's in the context of deployment on actual vehicles in real-world applications. They're doing a lot of work. Some areas I don't want to go into too much detail of because this is sort of commercially sensitive information, but they're doing a lot of work deploying their software on to real-world vehicles.

One is in Jacksonville in the U.S., where I got an e-mail from the CTO the other day saying they're now 1,000 journeys and over 4,000 kilometers traveled autonomously. And I believe all those passengers survived the experience. So that seems to be going very well. And the sort of equivalent proof point in the off-road domain currently fitting out the trucks that transport big containers around ports. And the CTO has been sending me videos of these trucks. Look, we've now got 2 of these things and they can drive around without driving into each other.

And so its very rapid progress being made of deploying this software on unusual vehicles accommodating all the parameters of those vehicles and the different requirements of their environment and operating effectively in those environments. So yes, I think from a technical perspective, they move at a great pace at Oxford and it's very impressive.

Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Going to the next one, Haran again. You do get your question at this time. There were reports in the press reg Hinge Health that some shareholders sold shares at the time of their most recent results. Could IP Group have sold at the time?

Yes. I think that may refer to the staff sale I guess there was a provision which allowed them to sell in that period, which other shareholders couldn't. I'm in contact with the bankers and with the company pretty regularly. I spoke to them a couple of times around that time that the staff sales occurred. So...

Yes. No, we can confidently say we couldn't have done no. We're aware that we've tested the market. We know what we can and can't do and we couldn't know. Next one, Andrew M, where GBP 5 million investment in First Light go, I think [indiscernible] effectively bridge funding, a standard way we often fund our companies. I don't know if...

Yes, on this operating capital, it's paying the salaries of the people that are continuing the research, developing this product that they're selling to the people who are pursuing the nuclear fusion and the people who are selling that product.

I should warn everybody, by the way, but we are exactly at 11:00. So those of you only have on that, we won't be offended if you leave, but we're going to carry on. I think I've got about 5 more questions, so we will carry on. So for those that are engaged, stay with us. I've been guessing about another 10 minutes.

But thank you for those who have to leave. I'm going to hand this to you, Greg, slightly unusual, but interesting question. Which competitors do you use as internal benchmarks. Well, are there any public or private funding vehicles you view as best-in-class that you draw inspiration from? It's a good question.

It's a good question. Competitors or comparators in the U.K. I mean there's a reasonably well-developed market in the U.K. for certainly the early-stage bit of commercializing U.K. science. And a lot of the comparators, and we don't really compete with them significantly more often because there's more opportunities in capital generally at the moment.

And you're often looking to collaborate rather than compete. We do compete if it's competitive deal. So on the U.K. side, there's Oxford Sciences Enterprise, we've got a small holding in that. We were a founder, shareholder in setting that business up, same with Cambridge Innovation Capital, Northern Gritstone, we work reasonably closely with, and we just launched that fund I was talking about for early-stage EIS investing alongside them in the portfolio.

We also work some of the other well-known VCs in the U.K., Amadeus. And then I suppose some of the people that I have looked up to in terms of scale of business, I guess it's businesses like ICG, who very successfully used their flagship credit product to build out a very scaled asset management business bringing in private capital to support their existing portfolio and indeed to then build that out.

So I often look at those comparators as sort of ambitious directions of travel for the group because certainly, it does feel that there is a large amount of capital that wants to allocate to this space. And so clearly, being in a position where we're a public listed entity, we've got the professional valuations and the systems and the reporting and the track record puts us in hopefully in an attractive position for those partners who are looking sort of reputationally at working with people that have been around for a period of time.

So yes, there's probably those sorts of businesses. And of course, there are some world-leading VCs who are focused in particular areas, and we look at those for best practice and various of the team have the sort of their favorite bloggers in VC space that we track their thought leadership. They're very well resourced on VCs on the West Coast, some of whom they're increasingly moving into the deep tech space where we are. And so looking at their pronouncements and how they're seeing the world is all useful information for us.

Thank you. I'm going to move on to Ian. I'm going to point this from your direction, Mark, if that's all right. It's a question we sort of get from time to time. How are you finding the U.K. universities at present? Are their funding issues making much difference to the way they're approaching tech transfer? And sort of separately, but connected, are any of the government-funded schemes being impacted by budget constraints and has this affected you at all?

I would say yes, but I would say that's been the case for the past 15 years. I mean, they've always had these constraints on budgets and that has always manifested in their approach to tech transfer, and it sort of varies by university based on recent success or lack of in the domain of commercializing innovation. I think some of the universities that have had one standout success are much more kind of ready to invest in the area of tech transfer than others who have their fingers burned by it.

So I wouldn't say that I've observed a huge sort of sea change or big fluctuation in the last period, but there is definitely always a budgeting pressure on tech transfer activities. And any of the government-funded schemes being impacted by budget constraints. Again, we're a little bit to us and there is definitely -- you will hear that if you walk the corridors of universities that budget constraints are impacting the research. But I think in some of the exciting areas that we're focused on in areas like quantum computing and emerging AI research work, there is still good money flowing into those areas, and we've done some really exciting research. And U.K. has always done a lot with a little. We've always done good research with limited results.

I'll go on next. I think I'll probably take this one. It looks like my direction of it. Andrew M, thank you for this. Is it really accurate share buyback program has accelerated? It's up compared to '24, pretty stable in '25. I mean, I guess the answer is yes and yes to that. It certainly accelerated compared with what it did historically.

I mean certainly, the amount we bought about 75 million shares just in the last year compared with sort of GBP 88 million, I think, ever. So it has, yes, accelerated. But it's a fair point within the year, it has been buying back at a relatively constant rate. During the year, why can our program be increased further?

Well, it could, obviously. But that's the correct balance. I think we feel if we think we're buying at about the right rate and using about the right proportion of our proceeds on that buyback program. We feel it's been relatively successful. Ironically helped by a very low share price and then we bought quite a large amount of shares in the first half year at an average of about 47p.

So we think we've got the balance right. We've already made this commitment we're doing half of the proceeds this year. So I think we feel that we've got the balance about right. Of course, one could always do more. There are some people that are saying, why don't you do less. So it is about trying to get a balance really.

Next one, I'll probably do that as well, [indiscernible] doesn't it from Haran. The cash generated in half 1 from sales, what was the cash value relative to the holding value. Well, ironically, they were all actually. There's about 5 sales over the period, and they're pretty much all public company -- public company.

So in terms of we haven't talked about what was an up or down because it was just the market price at the time. And a number of them went, I think, in for example, went for about double. That was the main one. I think we got about GBP 8.8 million. I think at the year-end, that was got in books at about GBP 4.4 million. So we haven't -- it doesn't really make sense to talk about whether we sold them up or down at the time because they were public market shares in any case.

Let's have a quick look at the next one, sorry, coming down, Phil N. I think we've had this before, Phil N, if you don't mind, you're asking a question about whether we could sell Hinge or not. I think we've answered that fairly comprehensively. Okay, this one is always a tricky one. I'll ask Phil. I mean probably I'll point this to you, Greg. Always difficult, but for the shares to ride, you need happy existing shareholders and new buyer's summary.

So who are the people who are selling? Is there a pattern, a trend or what? And is there an excess being dribbled out by a certain style of owners? Yes, quite a lot in that question. Do you have another go at there?

Yes. Well, the overall backdrop probably you'll have seen the same sort of data that we see around net flows in and out of U.K.-focused equities, which continues to be negative and quite significantly negative global equities, actually, the flows have started to become negative overall, but particularly the U.K. has been negative.

So there has been certainly in my experience over the last 10, 15 years, the number of humans that we go and talk to in the U.K. who are managing small mid-cap capital has definitely decreased and the number of funds has definitely decreased. When you look at the -- we get a monthly register analysis each month, and we go through that and try and get some clues as to who's buying and selling.

Often there's changes period-to-period on the tracker funds. And sometimes from month-to-month, you get some of the larger or middle-sized holdings either reducing the position a bit or increasing the position a bit. There's not really a huge pattern that I could talk to, if I'm honest. Our job is to deliver on the strategy to be able to communicate that strategy, and we seek to do that as actively as we can.

We've got a number of capital markets events we've done over the course of the year to attract new investors. And Dave, maybe you just want to talk a little bit about the efforts we've done with brokers this year and the other sort of -- given the U.K. has been more net reduction in capital available with the other relationships we've been.

Yes. Yes, we're very proactive actually. I mean we have quite a wide range of brokers. I say our primary brokers is extreme supportive and very good. Numis and Berenberg, but we do also get some help. There's an asset called [ TKDY ] in New York, a small team of 5, who have been -- they've kind of identified about 200 American investors who are interested in U.K. stocks. And they've been getting us meetings. I probably have a meeting on average about once a week on them. And if they're interested enough, then Greg joins me, and we do a joint meeting.

We think we -- it's often actually hard to tell. I know it sounds funny. We get a full shareholder register every month and you're paying down and trying to analyze. Sometimes you can't immediately identify who is what because they get through nominees, for example. But we think some of those American presentations are beginning to bear fruit. Cantors have also been helping us as well. We're finding some meetings both in America, and we've got some roadshows in Europe coming up. [indiscernible] have helped us. They took on a roadshow in Switzerland recently.

So we're actually extremely active. And you will find by the end of the year our Head of Global Capital [indiscernible] some presentations in the Middle East and also in the Far East. So it's definitely not due to a lack of energy, and we are trying to get out and see people. And we think that is begun to pay dividends. We think and that partly reflects in the share price that we are getting people to find out how interesting the story is and find out how extraordinary discount is and what the opportunity is, is pretty much what we're telling people.

Next one is from Lucas, a shareholder from Switzerland. Lucas, good to have you there with us. A new written -- just thinking out loud, you're giving an additional GBP 200 million in exits in private holdings until 2027. So you add that on to sort of Nanopore, which sort of hopefully by then, something like GBP 170 million.

Are you saying that there's nearly 70% to 80% of current market cap might be achieved? I think the answer is yes. That was pretty much what I said earlier. Yes, that is about right. Obviously, there's a lot ifs in that. But if we achieve that, which we believe we will on the sort of non-nanopore holding. If Nanopore still performs as it should, we believe it will, yes, there's something between GBP 150 million to GBP 200 million Nanopore on top of that number, we will hope we will see.

Last one, David B. Always nice talking [indiscernible] Why are you so good on someone. David B, this is for you, Mark. Do you think the start of U.S. drug pricing and tariffs by the U.S. administration is affecting pricing in the biotech market but ultimately successful innovation? If so, does that mean the model needs to be revisited so it is sufficiently profitable given the huge development costs? It's repeat your question.

Question -- danger of being a political question, yes. So from our perspective, yes, I think we've got to assume that there has an impact something that is an impact. It's something that the team is factoring into the valuation work that we do every time we make a transaction in the portfolio. And so with the sense of the model needing to be revised. I think it's about making sure that we're putting money in at the right price to reflect the ultimate terminal value of the company.

And so that's -- you described it as a revision of the model on a macro basis, we're doing it from the ground up of the looking at these transactions and the value is there to be delivered in the context of the current market. The other thing I said, I don't think we're really seeing this in the conversations we're having with pharma in the portfolio yet. I don't think I haven't heard that we've had pharma coming to us and saying we can possibly engage with you on this or pay this much for this company on the basis that the ground has shifted beneath us, but that might be going.

And the last question is not a question, thank you, Filip N. Thank you, everybody, who stayed with us this long, and thank you all the questions. That's a 29th and last question, Jake.

Perfect, guys. That's great. And thank you, as usual, for being so generous of your time then addressing all of those questions that came in from investors this morning. And of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you after the presentation.

But Greg, perhaps before really now just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company. If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, that would be great.

Thanks, Jake. Yes, so to summarize, again, we've made strong progress in 2025 year-to-date, good progress on cash proceeds, and that gives us good confidence around that GBP 250 million of exit target to the end of 2027. I think the standout in performance for the first half or standout transaction was that successful Hinge Health IPO, which we're very pleased to see and delighted for the team and of course, for our financial returns, and that's helped NAV per share now get up to about GBP 1 a share, and hopefully, we go up from here.

And then on the share price, we've done -- continue to do 2 things that we think we can to close the discount, convert more portfolio into cash and return that excess capital with discipline at today's price. We still think that buybacks are an accretive tool. And so we've been using that tool more aggressively that year, and as David said, to good effect, and we'll continue to weigh buybacks against new investments strictly on a returns basis.

And so we are one of the world's most experienced university science investors. And so we remain uniquely positioned to capitalize on the sort of the fiscal reform that we're seeing and hopefully, this rising demand for high-growth innovation. So thank you all for listening and look forward to updating you on progress for the rest of the year and into 2026.

Perfect, Greg. That's great. And thank you once again for updating investors this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it will be greatly valued by the company.

On behalf of the management team of IP Group Plc, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. So good morning to you all.