Good morning, and welcome to the IP Group plc H alf Year Results Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time by the Q&A tab situated in the right-hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives in the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Greg Smith, CEO. Good morning, sir. Thank you, sir, and hello everyone and welcome to IP Group's 2022 half year results presentation. Thank you very much to Mark and the whole team at Investor Meet Company for hosting us again. Of course, thank you to everyone who is online or watching a recording for your time to hear this update from us. This is the third time that we've now used Investor Meet for our results presentation, and this is part of our continuing efforts to dial up our IR activities and get the IP Group story to as many shareholders and potential shareholders as possible. Now, on the call today, I have myself, Greg Smith, I'm the Chief Executive of the company. We have David Baynes with me, who is the Chief Financial and Operations Officer. We'll also be joined later by Sam Williams and Mark Reilly, who are respectively the Managing Partners for our life sciences and our tech business, particularly for the Q&A piece. This morning, David and I are here in our U.K. head offices in King's Cross, and some of you who dialed in or even attended the investor update we gave before our AGM in June, you might remember the story that I told at the time of the fact that the 1996 Channel Tunnel move catalyzed the development of this whole area. We hear now it's sort of, you know, one of the hottest places in the world and people are relocating from Silicon Valley even to be here, and it's known now as London's Knowledge Quarter. Interestingly, this was an initiative that was backed by the U.K. government, by industry, and by long-term capital. I genuinely believe that the wider opportunity for IP Group is to do something similar in our space, and the trigger may well be the recognition of the need for science-based solutions triggered by economic or geopolitical dislocation, or it might be an increasing realization around climate, and certainly from my point of view, the early summer heat waves that have affected the U.K. and Europe in recent weeks have been yet another reminder of the importance of this. What's clear to me is that these events are continuing to shine a real light on our mission to build a better future, to deliver financial returns, impact, and to do so with an inclusive and diverse culture. For our shareholders, for all of you, we're a long-term play on disruptive technologies. Now, the results presentation is up on the IR section of our website, but please note the usual disclaimers here about the nature of this update. In terms of the running order for today, I plan to cover a short overview, an update on how we've delivered over the past five months since I spoke to you for our full year results presentation in March. That will include an update on the three priority companies that I highlighted at the time, as well as the increasing depth of our thematic focus areas. Dave will then run through the results for the year, and then I'll wrap up with a short summary and then answer questions. As the Investor Meet team said, please post questions into the Q&A section and we'll endeavor to cover them all in the time we have available. In terms of the overview, there's three key messages for this half year, and you'll have seen the release this morning, but firstly, I'm pleased to be able to report strong progress in those three priority companies that we highlighted in March. I'll come on to each of them in turn, but overall, these three companies have seen a positive net fair value change in the first half of GBP 71 million. Now, our overall NAV per share at GBP 1.37 is up very slightly from this time last year, and so overall financial results, we've broadly in half one, seen a reversal primarily of Oxford Nanopore's increase in value that happened during half two of last year. The second point is that your company is very well-financed and has strong liquidity. Something that I and we continue to believe is a strategic asset in the current geopolitical and market environment. We've got strong gross and net cash position, and today we announced that we've arranged an additional long-term debt placement, and Dave will give more details of that shortly. Then thirdly, we have a continued commitment to shareholder returns. Now, of course, the primary driver of shareholder value will be capital growth, and that will be fueled by the delivery of returns on NAV through our portfolio, but we do seek to supplement this with cash returns. Our approach, which is realizations-based, is to return a proportion of all realizations in the form of dividends and buybacks. Although we haven't delivered significant realizations in the first half, we'll be making an interim dividend of GBP 0.005 per share, and in total, this will make GBP 57 million of cash returns to shareholders since the start of 2021. Now before I go into the meat of the presentation, I thought it was probably worth just a few comments on what we're seeing here in the markets in which we operate. This won't be new news to the many of you who follow our space, but we are clearly operating in, you know, pretty challenging geopolitical and public market conditions. I guess a few points on this. Firstly. You know, the public and private markets are linked, but they do operate differently due to factors such as funding cycles. The funding data that we've seen to Q2 in the venture market does actually show signs of resilience, and that's in terms of investments, in terms of committed capital. But as we've seen in our own portfolio, there's definitely been a slowdown in realizations and exits. There's often a public to private lag and the sort of pre-IPO and later growth companies are generally affected first in terms of valuation. There's been no significant direct impact on the funding rounds for our companies in this half, and Dave will come on to talk about that. I think that's because commercial progress is often the most relevant factor for fast growth science and technology company valuation. That's very evident in our portfolio. Then from a team point of view, you know, we have an experienced team who have invested across a number of cycles, and so we will, you know, manage our resources appropriately while ensuring that we maximize the opportunity for our leading companies, and we've got evidence of that in the first half. Then finally, this point around, you know, the fact that our progress and our capital discipline means we continue to have a strong financial position. In terms of the opportunity, you know, we still see that fundamental demand will continue for the products and services in life sciences and clean tech and deep tech that our portfolio companies are delivering. I think that Martina, who spoke, who's the CEO of Featurespace, who spoke at our investor update, I think she really clearly exemplified this when she was talking about the demand for her products and services. I think all the history tends to show that those with capital and expertise will have significant opportunities to either create or access tomorrow's best companies during times of downturn. In terms of an update on the strategy. For this full year results back in March, I set out sort of three main areas of our evolving strategy. I guess the key message I'm trying to get across is that, you know, five months later, we're delivering against those. I'll talk a little bit about impact and sustainability later, but in terms of the leading companies, good progress across all of them. We focused larger investments, including GBP 10 million into Istesso, and as announced yesterday, Hysata, one of our sort of emerging companies. That focus on fewer companies also presents an opportunity for private capital partnering, and I'll talk about that briefly too. Then in terms of deeper thematic focus, I mean the fundamental reason for us to have that is to have deep capability. That means in our sectors, in the sectors that we operate in, we have talented and experienced partners and investment professionals who have worked through economic cycles, who are experts in their fields, and who are thought leaders in their ecosystems. And I believe that this will be important and allowing us to claim win in our chosen sectors. I talked about our plans to accelerate our track record in sustainable future, which is one of our three thematic areas. I talked about that at the full year and at the investor update, and as planned, we launched our first evergreen venture investment platform focused on clean tech and owned and funded by IP Group. We made good progress against those strategic focus areas. In terms of sector expertise, I don't want to spend a long time on this, but in terms of sort of trying to exemplify the sector capability that we've built, I just wanted to include a few pieces of evidence to support that. In terms of recent highlights, this is over the last year or two. Of course, people will be probably most aware of Ceres Power and of Nanopore. But also, in 2021 we saw the exit sale of Inivata to NeoGenomics. This is a liquid biopsy business, and that was for almost $400 million, which netted about GBP 64 million of cash to IP Group. Also, WaveOptics in the Tech-enriched space, and that was sold to Snap for around $550 million. That, we believe, is one of the largest VC-backed deep tech exits in Europe ever. The track record is broadening out, and it's becoming wider. In terms of the people who we co-invest with, we really have a high-quality list of co-investors globally, and they include both sector specialist investors, but also broader long-term investors from our ecosystem. Finally, just to sort of underline this point about realization, since 2020, we've made nearly GBP 400 million of realizations. Now, of course, that slowed in 2022 in the first half. I think importantly from an overall portfolio delivery point of view, less than half of 2021's realizations came from Oxford Nanopore. I talked about this theme of deep sector expertise, and I mentioned our plans to accelerate our track record in the sustainable future space. I highlighted the fact that we plan to launch this new initiative, and I was delighted to announce that we formed this new clean tech platform called Kiko Ventures. We believe this is the first evergreen venture investment platform that's focused on clean tech. It's wholly owned and funded by IP Group. Those who joined us for the investor event or watched it online afterwards will have heard one of the three highly experienced partners we have in that space, Rob, who talked about the opportunities that we see in this space, and also a bit about the portfolio that we're building. Our plan there is to invest GBP 200 million over 5 years, and that includes companies such as Bramble that we invested GBP 10 million into during the first half and Hysata that I'll come on to talk about shortly. As part of the strategy, I talked about this sort of increased focus, fewer conviction companies. The idea really here is that the business is trying to create meaningful category leading businesses that have at least billion-dollar company value potential. Partly in response to feedback from shareholders who are trying to get a better understanding of the value drivers in the future for the group's returns, we committed to setting out the opportunity and also the value creation milestones for these leading companies. At the year-end, I highlighted three. That was Istesso, Featurespace, and First Light. I wanted to just provide a brief update on progress in each of those three. We'll take each in turn. Firstly, Istesso. As a reminder, this is pretty emerging science. The whole field in which Istesso operates has only had a name for 7-8 years. We have the most advanced clinical stage asset in this field, and the plan is for that to go into phase 2b shortly. The company itself has more than 30 consultants. We run it as a virtual model, but an incredibly experienced team, more than 680 years of combined experience. They've overseen the launch of 4 marketed products in their history. Now the big opportunity here is that about 5%-10% of the world's population suffers from various immune conditions. Rheumatoid arthritis is one where the body's immune system attacks part of the body in its joints, and it creates a massive reduction in the quality of life. It's a huge problem to be addressed. What we have in Istesso, and we own about 56% of this company, into which we invested about GBP 10 million during the period, is a first-in-class therapeutic. This is really interesting. The next milestone for it is this phase 2b trial. Anyone who's interested can see the details. There's a public disclosure of this on a site called ClinicalTrials.gov. This is a trial that will be dosing 224 patients. They'll have sort of moderate rheumatoid arthritis. It'll be about 18 months in duration, so we expect this to read out in early 2024. We're looking for a classic endpoint in this space, but we're also looking for side effect profile. I hope to be able to give you update on that by the time we get to the full year. Good progress there. Secondly, Featurespace. As I mentioned, those of you who dialed into our investor update will have heard Martina talking about both the opportunity and the progress for this business. This is one where Dave will come on and talk about the valuations that we've done during the period, but Featurespace is a Cambridge spin-out, and they are applying machine learning and neural networks to be able to combat fraud and financial crime. Huge opportunity. In terms of the investment story, it's relatively simple. This is all about recurring revenue growth, and Martina talked very confidently and clearly about their progress to date in delivering against their objective to outgrow a very fast-paced market. The market is growing at sort of 30%-50% per annum, according to all of the analyst reports. The market Featurespace is seeking to achieve ahead of that. Great progress at Featurespace. Then finally, for those three, First Light. You know, of course, for those in England, those in the U.K., we had a world first only last week when England's women won the European Championship. Our world first was at First Light, and they were the first company to achieve a fusion reaction using what's called projectile-driven inertial confinement. There's a couple of different ways that you can approach fusion, but ours was successfully delivered, and this was validated by the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority. Now, the interesting thing here from a IP Group shareholder point of view is that I think it really exemplifies the model well. We understood the potential of the hydrodynamic simulation tools that the company had developed in the University of Oxford about 10 years ago, and we backed the company all the way since then. The interesting thing is the ability of that company to model the system has allowed them to identify a route to practical fusion using projectiles. The idea is you use projectiles to compress down a fuel pellet, and you generate fusion plasma. This is more efficient, and it enables simpler hardware to be used, such as a gas gun. Now, demonstrating with fusion with this approach is, you know, an incredible achievement from a top-rated scientific team, and it's happened at a fraction of the cost of other fusion programs. Fusion is really difficult to achieve. It's very risky, but the goal is enormous. Compared to other fusion approaches, this is a much lower cost. The company in total has raised about GBP 80 million and spent about GBP 40-45 million, and others require sort of super low temperatures or magnets or special materials. During the period, off the back of that result, we doubled our valuation, and as some may have seen in the press, the company plans to raise additional capital to go on the next stage of its journey, and deliver and build this gain reactor machine over the course of the coming years. That's really strong progress in each of those three companies. What I thought I would do now is just give you an insight into a company, and we announced the series A funding round for this company. It's an Australian business, Hysata. You know, it's too early for us to be able to talk about timeframes to commercial scale and potential billion-dollar valuation, but it's a really interesting company. I really wanted to highlight this as a, you know, potential company of the future. I've set out here some of the milestones and the progress. The mass manufacturable stack we would be planning to have demonstrated that during 2023 and complete field trials during 2024. I thought no better way to exemplify this than to hear from the company's CEO, Paul. The video will be available as usual on our website. I'll ask the team at Investor Meet Company to run the videos. The unfolding climate crisis shows the pressing need for transformative technologies to help put us back on a path to net zero emissions. Hysata's mission is to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels by delivering the world's most efficient, simple and reliable electrolyzer. Green hydrogen is a must-have for reaching net zero emissions. It's the key energy carrier we need to decarbonize the hard to electrify sectors such as steel, chemicals, industrial heat and heavy transport. Green hydrogen will grow to the size of today's natural gas industry, delivering 15% of emissions reductions we need to get to net zero. This presents a challenge, but also a huge opportunity. Electrolyzers are the key technology needed for producing green hydrogen. These are devices that use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. When powered by renewables, the hydrogen produced is green, sustainable and emissions free. Existing electrolyzers are complex and expensive and are at best around 75% efficient. Hysata's commercializing an entirely new category of electrolyzer, capillary fed electrolysis. We have a simple and elegant mass manufacturable design, delivering ultra-high system efficiency of 95% or 41.5 kWh per kg. This is a giant leap in performance against incumbent technologies. Electricity makes up most of the cost of green hydrogen, so the efficiency boost translates to much cheaper green hydrogen. Additionally, our high efficiency enables us to drastically simplify the balance of plant, reducing the capital cost. With its ultra-high system efficiency and low CapEx, Hysata will deliver the world's lowest cost green hydrogen. For a 1 million ton per annum green hydrogen production facility, our electrolyzers will save producers around $3 billion in renewables CapEx. These transformational economics are really resonating with the gigascale customers we're talking to. There's nothing else in their supply chains that unlocks these kinds of savings. Hysata's electrolyzer is built off game-changing technology developed at the University of Wollongong. This transformative advance in electrolysis was recognized in early 2022 in top-tier peer-reviewed scientific journal, Nature Communications. Our technology's performance is truly groundbreaking, already meeting the International Renewable Energy Agency's 2050 electrolyzer efficiency target. Hysata has assembled a world-class engineering team to build a modular mass-manufacturable stack and a dramatically simplified balance of plant. Efficiency, designed for manufacturability and quality and reliability, are core to everything we do at Hysata. Our people and culture are central to our success, and we've created a home for exceptional talent. We're incredibly proud of what we've achieved to date. It's great to be part of a values-driven company with such a strong culture and mission to transform the global green hydrogen industry. IP Group has had a profound impact on the success of the company to date, partnering with us from inception, bringing a blend of technical expertise, market knowledge, global relationships and capital to the table. We really couldn't have done this without them. Based off outstanding engineering and commercial progress, we are now thrilled to announce we have closed the GBP 42.5 million Series A investment round with incredible investment partners. Virescent Ventures led this round with participation from Kiko Ventures, IP Group Australia, Vestas Ventures, Hostplus and BlueScope. We look forward to continuing to partner with our investors and customers to get this game-changing technology to market. With our disruptive economics, Hysata will transform the green hydrogen industry and become the world's leading electrolyzer manufacturer and an era-defining company. We're on a clear path to multi-gigawatt manufacturing capacity, which will make a major impact on reducing global emissions. We're excited by what the future holds. Thanks very much to Paul and hopefully we'll be able to report against delivery on that exciting future. It's clearly a huge opportunity and one in which, you know, Kiko and the team have spent a significant part focusing on, and this was a really interesting opportunity that we identified alongside the Australia team. Hopefully gives you an idea of some of the interesting things that are coming through in the pipeline. Just a couple more slides from me before I hand over to Dave to talk about the financial results and the two other areas of strategic focus. Another area that I spoke about was this idea to make impact a more explicit part of the business and the portfolio, and of course, a lot has been written in market commentary recently about ESG and impact investing and impact investing trends, and some of this is definitely less than complimentary. I mean, from our point of view, we think that strong ESG is really table stakes for a main market quoted company, and we continue to maintain that position. But the really interesting area, and this is something that we continue to embed in our investment processes, including through our ethical investment framework, which you can see on our website if you're interested, is this ability to measure, to drive, and to report against actual impact, genuine real-world impact. I hope that I will be able to exemplify this numerically, as part of our full year results. But that's certainly a big drive for us. Further information in this whole area is set out in our most recent sustainability report. Again, that's available on our website. Then just finally this, I talked about this idea of A as having a strong financial position, and B focusing more on some priority portfolio companies. Of course, a lot of that is around capital and access to capital. Capital has always been a fundamental resource for our business, and we have always maintained access to diverse sources of capital, be that PLC equity, be that debt, be that a strong network of co-investors. This is an area where I continue to see a really great opportunity now and, in the future, to grow our third-party private capital partnerships. We've been looking at sourcing and growing and ultimately exiting companies, including our complementary funds. We've been developing real expertise and track record in this space, and that includes sourcing an early growth fund. That's funds such as Parkwalk, who are the leading manager in the U.K. of growth and EIS funds. It also includes growth investors, later stage investors such as Hostplus. We've had a mandate for two or three years with Hostplus to invest internationally across our portfolio. There's also opportunities for growth in geographic expansion, and we're primarily doing that through our partnership with China Everbright, and we plan to launch that fund later this year. Of course, the fees that are generated by these assets under management contribute to reducing our net cost base, which is clearly important. I often say to institutional partners that we speak to, you know, we really are opportunity rich and capital poor. We invested about GBP 70 million during 2020 out of about GBP 1 billion across the whole portfolio and about GBP 100 million out of GBP 2 billion during 2021. During the first half, you'll see in our results, we were about GBP 50 million out of about GBP 350 million raised by the portfolio. There remains a huge opportunity for us to do more in this space, and we continue to work on that opportunity. With that, I will hand over to Dave, and he will give you an update on the financials for the period. Yeah. Thank you, Greg. As Greg said at the beginning, I'm David Baynes. I'm the Chief Financial and Operations Officer of the group. I'm in fairly quick order, about 5-7 minutes, I'll quickly take you through the group's finances for the period. For those of you who have watched before, despite being a complicated business in terms of all the investments we make and all the exciting things we do, the finances are relatively straightforward. Hopefully, in this fairly short period, I can give you a pretty good idea of all the key points to note about our finances. The first point, but I think you've probably got the idea, we're financially strong. Gross cash of GBP 236 million, net of GBP 192 million as we stand today. Second point is our NAV. Now, those of you who obviously were here at the year-end, you'll remember actually NAV got up to GBP 1.7 billion, and we're back at GBP 1.4 billion. That's because of a loss in the period of GBP 310 million, which I'll come to in a minute. Most of that really relates to just movements in the public share price of Nanopore, which actually it's performed very well in the period, having had 4 uplifts in its estimates since its IPO. But it's obviously been subject to market conditions and has actually fallen in value by 60% in the period. We'll touch in a minute how much of that loss relates to that. What's really happened, one way of looking at it is we've pretty much gone back to exactly where we were this time last year. We had about GBP 1.4 billion this time last year. We had net assets per share of GBP 1.36. Today we're GBP 1.37. We went up in the second half, we came back down again. As you'll see in a minute, most of that does actually relate to Nanopore, which itself is a very strong asset, and in which we have a great belief, and we believe much of that, all of that and more will be recovered in the years to come. In fact, as you can see from this slide here, if we take out a Nanopore performance, we've actually made a profit in the period of about GBP 36 million. Going to the next slide there, you know, this repeats, you can see there Nanopore down about 60%. I think at the end of the year it was GBP 6.98, and at the period ended, it had fallen to GBP 2.76. That's a 60% loss. As I said also already, we hope that will reverse in time as the markets recover. Actually, ignoring that, as I say, or the actual performance of most of the rest of the portfolio has been good. I mean, you can see down the bottom, most of the negatives have actually been in the public market side. You can see the total public market is about GBP 395 million reduction value, while the private portfolio has actually gone up by GBP 100 million, which reflects how well some of our priority companies have performed. If you can see over here, in the diagram, you can see that one of those, of course, is First Light Fusion, had its fantastic success in fusion. We've actually marked that very conservatively at the moment. It was a doubling in value in the period to about GBP 114 million on our books, but that's still well towards the bottom end of the range of the valuations we've been suggesting, both by looking at comps, also by third-party valuations. Featurespace has also had an uplift because as you've heard, its performance has been very strong. Just based on funding rounds, both Nexeon and Hysata have also had both those uplifts. We've actually had very strong performance in the private portfolio, and it's really been those public companies such as Diurnal and Nanopore really accounting for nearly all of that GBP 395 million reduction in the portfolio. Now that might in turn lead to a question about our valuation process. I would understand there might be some cynicism how our public companies have fallen, our private ones they seem to have done so much. What I would say on that is, we've always been very prudent about valuing our companies. Again, those that joined us at the year-end will remember that traditionally, in fact for the last two years, we've exited companies. We've exited for considerably more than we've carried them in the books at the prior year-end. I think last year, GBP 191 million of exits have been carried at the beginning of the year, and about GBP 123 million. That had been repeated the year before. That sort of demonstrates in fact that we tend to be relatively conservative. When you look at actually our rounds this year, our private rounds, we found that over half were actually up, and that's 58%, very similar to last year. Similar number were flat, 33%, and actually only 8% were down rounds. Now we have double evidence for that because, of course, Parkwalk's investment team making investments mostly in different assets, some crossovers, but mostly different assets. They made 12 investments in the period. And of that, nine were up, two were flat, one was down round. We are seeing. Remember, those are based upon valuation of third-party funding rounds. We are seeing relatively consistent valuations in our group, actually, for the private portfolio. The last point I'll just make up on that pie chart at the top is this. Actually, quite a lot of our portfolio has also been very recently validated as well, either because they're public companies or because we've had external valuations. Top five companies, we all did external valuations on the top five private companies to make sure we have updated valuations. About 10% of the portfolio actually is funding rounds in the period. There's a number of reasons why we remain confident in those private portfolio valuations. Moving on very quickly again. Again, you'll remember from the year-end, very simple balance sheet made up basically of a portfolio of assets of companies. About 1.2 million of them and some cash, as you heard, net about GBP 190 million, very small amount of liabilities. Quite easy to see. As I've already explained, a movement of GBP 300 million over the period due to that movement in the public portfolio, slightly mitigated by private portfolio. Interesting next slide, that GBP 1.37 per share, those numbers there are how much each pence each company contributes. If you look at that, something like Nanopore, for example, is GBP 0.20 of that value. You can see there, if you add it up, nearly a pound of our value, GBP 0.98, is actually in the top 20 companies, Nanopore and cash. All the rest of it is kind of in the valuation for nothing when we're trading it for GBP 0.80-odd p, and some more. You've got nearly GBP 1 in it just in those companies. It is kind of quite hard to explain why we're at such a discount. Clearly, there's a lot of substance justifying our valuation in that. Again, I'll go through this slide relatively quickly. It's just similar information. This just gives us an idea of how, you know, different areas fit over the portfolio. That total GBP 1.2 billion of assets. At the year-end, Oxford Nanopore was actually a very good proportion, but because it's gone down by 60%, it's gone from about 32%-33% of its own portfolio to a more sort of manageable 18%. Life Sciences at 33%, Deep Tech at 18%. Clean Tech's grown quite a lot. Now obviously owned by Kiko Ventures, has grown quite a lot to 16% because of the great successes it had in the period on Hysata and also on First Light Fusion. It does actually look a more balanced portfolio at the moment. To some extent, we hope it will be less balanced when hopefully Nanopore recovers and that will take up a bigger proportion of the pie chart. Worth also noting that of all the companies, people often focus on the number of companies we have, which is very much part of the model. Actually, 70% of all our value is in that top 20. You can see it's actually a very focused portfolio. One of the last two slides kind of just is really messaging about cash. I thought it'd make sense just to explain where our cash has gone, so people understand that. These are growth cash positions. We started GBP 320 million of cash. Biggest area with investment, as everyone would want it to be. About GBP 52 million has gone into our portfolio during the period. I guess about GBP 350 million total raised by our companies. That probably in the second half will do a similar amount, maybe fractionally more than that in the second half. It is worth noting that is down on what we anticipated doing at the beginning of the year. Clearly, as markets turned, and our expected exits reduced, we have modified the amount we're planning to invest as you would expect, quite frankly. The realizations are very low so far, only GBP 2.1 million. We do expect more realizations in the second half. Some have occurred already, but they will be well down on prior years. Again, I don't think that's any surprise. We wouldn't really want to be selling much in the current market, and actually because of our financial strength, we don't have to. The third key thing to note really is around the dividends. This is the remainder of the share buyback. We finished about GBP 7.2 million of that position the first month and a bit of the year, and also the dividends we paid. As we said, commitment to shareholders, we've made about GBP 50 million being paid back to them. The last thing worth mentioning, really, the last number is that GBP 11.1 million on overheads is pretty much flat year-on-year. Actually, when you look at it looks slightly up. That's because the income's very slightly down. Actually, the overheads at the moment are about flat year-on-year. They're really the main points I'd make about cash and our cash patterns. I'll move on to the last thing that we've announced today. This is to really increase our liquidity and put us in an even stronger position. We've traditionally looked to have about 10% of our net assets in net. As a company of our type, that seems an eminently sensible amount to have. Of course, it hopefully means we have more efficient returns to shareholders, allows us to access more money to make into investments. We're delighted that we've managed to secure an extra GBP 120 million in a private placement through a leading public insurance company and a small number of other investors. It's at 5.25% fixed interest rate. We plan to do is pay down a little bit of the remaining GBP 44 million we have with the European Investment Bank, pay about GBP 50 million of that down now, and then to effectively increase our position by GBP 105 million over the period. It's being drawn down on a couple of tranches. We don't need it today, we don't need to pay interest on it today, so we'll draw half of it, about GBP 60 million towards the end of this year, and half in about a year's time. It's on five-, six- and seven-year repayment periods. It'll be paid back 2027, 2028 and 2029. It compares very favorably to the EIB debt that we traditionally had, which was on, you know, as one can imagine, very good terms. These are on very similar terms. We're very pleased we've been able to secure this facility at this time. It allows us both to keep investing at a time when obviously a lot of opportunity for us, but it also takes pressure off the need to realize exits until we have to. It gives us even more flexibility about we maximize our return on investment. With that, I'll hand back to Greg. Thank you very much, sir. Two slides quickly in summary. The first was just a reminder on the investment case for you all as shareholders, myself as shareholder, and this is crucial. Obviously, we can't have the impact that we want to have on the world if we don't deliver returns for shareholders. The shareholder value proposition has three main components, and I guess the three I'd pull out are firstly, this differentiated access to impactful deal flow in companies. You know, I talked earlier about the sector capability that we've discussed. It's about wider capability and processes. That includes our legal team, our IP support, fundraising. Part of my legacy for IP Group as CEO is to build on and scale and leverage that professional capability. Secondly, you know, as our model is primarily based on identifying early stage science with significant potential for value and impact, and that would obviously mean that it would take some time for our portfolio to mature. Having been doing this for the best part of 20 years, we now have five to ten more maturing companies that we believe will be fast followers to Nanopore and Ceres over the next two to five years. We expect our overall returns to improve. We have, you know, we have an ambition to deliver 20% returns per annum. Now, of course, overall market conditions will be a factor in achieving this, and we'll be judged against the wider VC market over that time, but we have that as an ambition. We discuss this regularly with our institutional shareholders. I'm fully aware of the discount to NAV. There's been some improvement recently. It remains frustrating for me as a fellow shareholder, for you all, and of course we know that some performance is linked to the wider markets. We and others in our sector have a high correlation to the tech and the biotech industries. There are three main ways that we are dealing with this. In the shorter term, that's around increased IR, and in the longer term, that's around, you know, developing and executing against our sustainable capital allocation policy, and also obviously delivering returns against our NAV. We know that cash returns are a helpful component of the overall return, so we've set out this sustainable long-term policy, and the idea is to take a realizations-based approach and return a proportion of all realizations that we make to shareholders by way of cash returns. There is a continued commitment to do that, and as Dave said, we haven't seen significant realizations in the first half, but we are maintaining the small dividend. The idea is that the dividend is a small but regular cash return, and then as we make realizations in excess, then those will be used for other mechanisms which are, you know, probably more capital efficient, particularly at the moment, in the form of share buybacks. The primary driver of long-term growth is this ability to source and to grow specific companies, and we give access to shareholders on a diversified basis to those companies. If anything, we anticipate and see more opportunity in the current environment, and we've been prioritizing investments in our businesses. The overall summary to come back to where we started, you know, clearly the context is this, you know, sort of volatile and uncertain geopolitical environment and markets. I mean, as a group, we make long-term investment decisions, and this sort of short-term volatility is particularly uncomfortable for our business. This is where our experience, our deep sector expertise, our hands-on approach to managing our portfolio companies and our capital resources and capital discipline will be most valuable in aiming to identify and to build and to back the best opportunities that will contribute to a healthier and more sustainable or a tech-enriched future. I'm really pleased to be able to report strong progress in those three priority companies. You know, it's really important that your company is well-financed, that we have GBP 192 million of net cash at the moment, and we have put in place a facility that will give us flexibility over the next two, three, four, five years. Thirdly, this points around a continued commitment to shareholder returns and the fact that we've returned about GBP 57 million to shareholders since the beginning of 2021. With that, I will conclude today's presentation, and we will turn to the questions. If you have. Lots of people have asked. If you haven't, please do so, and we'll endeavor to take those in turn. Dave, maybe you could compare for us, please. I will compare, and some I'll have to answer as well. Yes, very good wealth of questions. We'll start away. I'll try and do all of them, try not to duck any. First one from Lacey M., thank you. Is your investment thesis still solely based on backing companies with IP from universities? Or given the rapidly widening opportunity set is it now a wider arena? I think that's really one for you, Greg. I'd say to start with. Yeah. The investment thesis is heavily focused around backing science and technology innovation and much of what we do, the vast majority of what we do has historically, and I think will continue to be IP from universities. You've seen that in the examples of new companies that we formed during the period and indeed during last year. There is a widening opportunity set. This is particularly in the clean tech space, but you should think of this as primarily focusing on IP-rich businesses and that have a particular technology advantage. Our advantage as a business is to be able to understand and price that technology risk and then help to build and develop companies based around that understanding. Thank you. Second one, perhaps I'll answer this one, shall I? Would you set a dividend policy of, say, a percent, say 3% of NAV, from David D. Well, I think as Greg has just kind of explained, we're really looking at both the share buyback and also the dividends as kind of one package related to, among other things, the exit committee. We expect to keep paying a dividend almost come what may. We expect to probably increase it a relatively small amount each year. It's a relatively small increase annually is what we're looking at the moment. Probably it'll be more overall dividends and share buybacks and probably a ratio of really the value of exits we get. I think if you look back last year, some sort of GBP 100 million, maybe GBP 200 million of exits, we did buybacks of something in the region of about GBP 35-40 million in total. That gives you a kind of guide for that kind of ratio that we've got in mind. Next one perhaps. This is a lot of good questions here from Paul C. Again, perhaps I'll do the first one because it's a capital allocation one, but then there's some trickier ones. There's one for Sam coming up. Capital allocation, should we expect increasing weighting to deep tech and clean tech themes versus life sciences? Could timelines for key catalysts be shorter? Perhaps I'll start, and Greg, I'm sure, will have a view. I think from my side, we've got no sort of predetermined view on this. You don't just say, "That division will get that amount." It's about, as a group, where the best opportunities are for returns that we can achieve. We're evaluating our capital allocations all the time. Formerly meetings quarterly, now we're meeting monthly as well, looking at capital allocation. Clearly overall, we'll be looking at where we think money is best invested. Obviously we've been seeing sort of where it's at like that. I don't know if you want to add to that at all, Greg, or. No, I think that's absolutely right. You know, the intention is to look for and build and scale opportunities that generate returns and impact. We, you know, we look for huge market opportunity and huge societal need, and then we overlay that with our skill sets, our deep technical expertise. It tends to lend itself to those three thematic areas. The deep tech area is really quite interesting in this space because you've got some quite obvious application areas, things like cybersecurity, like Featurespace, which is very clearly aligned to positive impact on the world and reducing financial crime. There are other areas like quantum computing, for example, neuromorphic computing, and that's about really lifting other technologies through those platforms that we'll develop. One of the things I think the industry is going to have to try and get its head around is how do you try to articulate the impact that something like quantum computing has on the world? That's work that we're doing. We know it's a sort of a tricky area, but that's definitely the intention. The next one is specifically an Istesso question. I'm delighted you're online, Sam, I have to say. Also from Paul C. What's the logic for methotrexate refractory RA patients while still dosing alongside methotrexate? Yeah. Can you hear me? Yeah, we got you. Yeah. That's in reference to the MBS2320 Phase 2b study. Good question, Paul. That is the standard study, the minimum study, and the very typical study in methotrexate refractory patients. You keep them on the methotrexate because it would be unethical to take them off. They're inadequately responding to methotrexate, but they haven't totally failed therapy. When you've got a new investigational drug, it would be unethical to take them off current standard of care and switch them onto your drug. There is an argument, of course, for comparing doing a study, for example, in a TNF or biologic DMARD failures. Paul, you know what I'm talking about. Those are the slightly more advanced current drugs. That is something we would explore, and we are looking at in supplementary phase 2 studies. At the minimum, we need to do the standard study that everyone does in phase 2. Hope that answers your question, but email me if not. Excellent. Thanks, Sam. Appreciate that. Then there's a last one from Paul. A question specifically around the new debt facility loans. Scope to invest in current portfolio. How well does life science score on ESG? Well, the answer is, you're right, it doesn't entirely. Really the definition of supporting this institution's Sustainable Development Goals is more wide-reaching than just, for example, the clean tech portfolio. It does actually map quite well to quite a lot of our portfolio. In some instances, it does also map to the life science division as well, though not always. We're very comfortable, very happy to support their sustainable investment aims and have more than enough opportunities for us to invest the sums of money involved. There's no real restriction on that side, I'd say. Next one, Phil N. A good nasty question, so I'll give that to you, Greg. In respect of the share price, a huge discount to NAV, could you consider some alignment of management incentives and ordinary shareholders' interests before awarding bonuses? The present system does seem to ignore share price performance. Yeah. Phil, that's a great question. Hopefully, those who will have seen at the AGM, we've been through a significant consultation exercise with all of our major shareholders about how should the senior leadership team at IP Group be remunerated, and we settled on, I guess, a slightly unconventional on the main market where we reduced actually the level of cash bonus that could be paid to the executives. I think mine is now the lowest or one of the lowest bonus opportunities on the FTSE and certainly FTSE 250. What the idea was to create even greater alignment between the executive directors and shareholders by making the significant components of our long-term rewards in the form of restricted stock. When we made those first awards, the RemCo decided that given share price performance over the last year we should not award at the maximum level. We actually reduced it by 25%. The idea is over time that I will build up 3.5x my salary in IP Group shares, and so I will be wholly aligned with shareholders in delivering against share price performance. That will be very evidently and clearly the top priority for me. Although the amounts are relatively small, I bought shares when I took over as chief exec, and I bought shares again following the AGM. You know, I continue to believe that IP Group shares are a compelling opportunity, so I was entirely comfortable with having that shift in remuneration towards long-term ownership and alignment of IP Group stock. I think that's the way that you know, senior executives should be rewarded in a business, particularly a long-term one like this. Thank you. Moving on to Bill H. I'll try and answer this one. Would there be any advantages in transforming IP Group into an investment trust? It might then be better placed to highlight its high-tech strengths compared with successful private equity trusts such as HgCapital. Well, the answer to that is, we do look at these regularly. We look at them all the time. We're looking at group structure. At the moment, we have no plan to change. I mean, our current group structure, we do think it serves us very well. We do think that the way we're currently structured with that, but a permanent capital base in particular has really been unique to us and allowed us to do the things we've done. For example, Nanopore and Ceres Power, these companies we've held for a long time. I wouldn't say never. We never say never, and we will definitely look at structures. Really, I think that's part of our job, try and make sure we maximize shareholder returns wherever possible. Not saying never, we will consider, but at the moment, whenever we've considered these sort of things, we've remained with the structure we've currently got. Next one, David D. I'm afraid it's me again. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hog. That is all right. Why are you offering a scrip dividend which entails issuing new shares at a discount to NAV and diluting the NAV per share of all other shareholders? You could settle dividends in shares either bought in the market or from treasury. The dividend reinvestment scheme which would not dilute the NAV per share of other shareholders. The answer to this, it's a quirk. There's a quirk of the Companies Act 2006 whereby actually we can't pay the interim dividend using shares we already have. So, we have to issue new shares. Now, the amount involved is not enormous. It's why we decided to carry on offering the scrip. We've offered it before, we didn't want to change it. The number of shares that people actually take up in the scrip aren't enormous. At the year-end, the final dividend, we will be able to use shares that we've already bought back, so it won't dilute it. These ones we can't. One, it's a small number. Two, we wanted to keep paying the dividend and again on offering these terms as we have before. Three, because we're committed to further buybacks at the right time, we can truly compensate for that small impact at that time. That was our thinking. We will look at neutralizing that scrip. That's something we can do. You might not be able to technically use the shares in treasury, but equally we could use our capital to buy sufficient shares sort of concurrent with it to effectively neutralize that small amount of dilution. It's a fair point. It's a good technical point. One we discussed around this table only last night. Oh, Andy, it's you. Great. Okay, good time for you to have some. If focus is growth, why have a dividend policy? Is it not better a return on capital focus funds on growing opportunities? Yeah. No, you're quite right, Andy. It's again a great question, one we debate all the time. I hope I've answered that in the way that we think about our capital allocation. You know, the primary use of our capital, be it realizations or capital that we've raised over history, is around investing into companies that will generate organic growth and hopefully be very attractive financial returns. The intention for the dividend was to have a small amount, a small but growing component of cash, but it was meant to be a small consistent part, and then also to have the ability to use some of our returns, where we have in excess of that to buy back shares. This is something we seek to balance all the time. We speak to our major shareholders about it. You know, we continue to review it all the time. You're right, and this is the essence of that sort of capital allocation approach. Next one, I'm afraid it's me again, Robert M. Are the private company valuations fundamentally discounted cash flow based? Are you and your co-investors having to change your thinking on appropriate discount rates given the movement to longer-term dated bond rates? Well, without being too dull, I can give you pretty precise answers on this in terms of how we value our companies. About 23% of our portfolio at this period ending were actually public, so they're market. 23%, so gives you a total of about half of our portfolio. We have another 23% were recent fundings, less than 9 months. And then another 10% were actually less than 12 months, oh, just over 12 months, I mean. Over 12, but still recent enough that we stay with them. We have a certain amount, about 21% based upon adjusted recent financials, and really discount cash flow revenue multiples only about 16x. Give you an idea. But on those, generally, yeah, of course, we're looking at those discount rates all the time, and also, they're factored also into the valuations that third-party valuers are using when third-party valuers are looking at our portfolio and deciding what appropriate rate to use. So, we aren't ignoring them, that is true. How did the external valuations of the 5 companies compare to your own previous valuations for those 5? They were actually very close. We had, I think a couple were small downs, and one was up, if I remember correctly. So, they were pretty close. They weren't significant, but where there were adjustments to be made, we did make those adjustments to the portfolio and made small write-downs as would be appropriate. We do tend to try and take conservative approach to our valuations. We have at year-end three valuation committees, at the half year two, and we do sit and go through every company. If we think it's appropriate, we mark them down. I can safely say that all the ones we've had valuations, we've never marked anything above the mid-range. If you get a range, we're never at the top. We're never better than the mid-range for any of them. Where appropriate, we have marked them down, as I think two out of those five, we did today. Right. Somebody said, "Thanks, guys, that's brilliant." I assume they're leaving. Okay. Again, I'll probably go to either you, Greg, I think. How much competition is there for access to university IP? Are there any of your university partners we get first chance to exploit the university IP? God, Bill, that's a good question and a really long answer. I'll try and do it relatively simply. It varies by sector and by geography. There are some examples like in Australia, where we get first chance to exploit the university IP. Sometimes if the university has an existing like university-managed seed fund, they come in alongside us, have the opportunity to, whereas in the U.S., there are just letters of intent where we have no first rights. Then in the U.K., which is probably where this market has developed the most in recent years, we've seen the early part of IP Group's history back in sort of the early 2000s was built around exclusive partnerships. We found that wasn't the most efficient way, both from the university's point of view or from our point of view, and so they evolved into various different guises. Ways that we access IP in the U.K. now tend to come through examples such as Parkwalk, who manage the alumni seed funds for each of Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial, but also through our networks and our relationships with the key thought leaders and researchers in those areas in which we seek to operate. In some cases, we get first refusal, in other cases, we don't. The idea is to have that sort of blended, differentiated access to IP. Um- I think that was sort of a short summary. No, that's okay. Long answer. There's three more questions to go. We should be fairly close to the one hour mark. Perhaps I'll quickly deal with this. How did Hysata's valuation change after latest funding round? Well, there was a decent uplift. You can see in the presentation that GBP 8.4 million uplift we've taken to the books, we recognized at the period end. We haven't at the moment, and you'll see if you look at the announcements, actually given the specifics. Company was particularly sensitive to actually people working out exactly what the pre-money and post-money were. We haven't actually publicized those. I can say they had a decent valuation uplift. We are very confident if it achieves the sort of milestones that they hope to achieve over the next 12-18 months, there could be considerably more sizable uplifts at that time. We will see. It's fair to say that we own about half the business, isn't it? Yeah, we do. 4 point. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's fair. That's about half what we take in the debt in the equity replacement. It's a significant shareholding in accordance with our kind of model. Second to last question, I think to you, Greg, probably. Yeah. What can you tell us about your thoughts on how long you will maintain the Oxford Nanopore shareholding? Yeah, well, obviously, Nanopore is a significant part of the company, huge part of our history, and I think it will be a big part of our future. I guess the things I'd say on Nanopore, I mean, this is an expression of our strategy from cradle to maturity. We were the first investor, and we have a really great relationship with Gordon and the team. We saw them at London Calling. Actually, the whole board were up, we saw them in Oxford just a few weeks ago. We were the largest holder pre-IPO, and as a board, we discussed and approved an overall approach to realizing the value, and that led us to realize 20% of our holding at IPO. We obviously were locked up until April on the rest. Our view in the short term certainly is, you know, in the current market environment, world equity markets seem to be dislocated. This isn't the optimal time to sell, and we don't fortunately have to sell at this point. As they've said, we're delighted with the progress in the underlying business, numerous upgrades, technology improvements, and the company is very well-financed, so they have about GBP 600+ million of cash. They announced a refinancing of their offices lately. They're still talking about breaking even in 2026, I think it is. We don't expect them to need additional equity. All of those things are positives. All that being said, the purpose of IP Group isn't to be a long-term holder of significant positions in large cap public equity. Over time, there's a plan for us to reduce that position as a percentage of NAV, and part of that will be from delivering in the other companies, and part of that will be reducing our position. Of course, we plan consistent with the capital allocation policy to reinvest the majority of that and return some cash to shareholders. I can't give you an exact time, but don't expect IP Group to be a significant holder of you know, public equity, as part of our business model over the sort of medium to long term. Excellent. Another question's joined, so I've actually got two left. I misread you. I've got two left. One to Mark, I think one to Sam. Mark has a disadvantage. He can't see these questions, so it's coming to you blind, Mark. Is Hysata going to disrupt my holding at ITM Power through undercutting green hydrogen generation costs? That's if you're there, Mark. Potentially it will disrupt the entire hydrogen energy market. It's a real breakthrough technology has totally different economics to its competitors, and it does have that potential. You know, it's an early stage technology, but as you can see, a lot of people have invested in it on the basis of its credence as a promising technology. We think, you know, if you start to see the development milestones as they occur in the next two years, then it really does threaten that market and there's a great opportunity there. Thank you, Mark. Thanks, Chris for the easy question. Last one, Gummy B. This is to you, Sam, if you're still there. You haven't spoken much about Hinge Health. Is the competition changing here? Yeah, again, Hinge Health's been a phenomenal success. It's been a great one for us. It's our second biggest holding in life science, a third after ONT and Istesso. No, I don't think the company is any. I mean, obviously based on the success of Hinge, other people would like to get into that market, but they announced recently that they had added more customers this year than they have added in every other single year of their existence. They are growing extremely rapidly. I can't give you revenue numbers because those are confidential, but I can tell you that the expectations this year are also very strong. We see no slowdown in Hinge at all. Thank you, Sam. That's great. I think that is the last of our questions. I'm going to say they've all gone, Mike. Probably hand you back to Greg. Yeah. Yeah. Greg, David, thank you very much. I think you've actually managed to address all those questions from investors and of course the company will review all questions submitted today and will publish their responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide their feedback, which is particularly important to you both, Greg, could I just ask you for a few closing comments? Of course. First closing comment. Thank you everyone for dialing in and listening for an hour and a bit to the updated story at the half year. I hope the three key messages that people have taken away are that we are making strong progress in the companies that we highlighted at beginning of the year, well, in March, so over the first five months, and we're confident in the progress of those companies over the course of the next six months and beyond. Secondly, the key message is that your company is very well-financed, and we've acted to ensure that that continues and that we have flexibility in the current geopolitical and market environment. Thirdly, you know, we continue to have this commitment to delivering shareholder returns. We've changed our remuneration structure. We've continued to work on our capital allocation policy. This is something which is very important in the long-term sustainable future of the business. With that, I thank you all and I look forward to updating you in due course. We plan a couple of capital markets events in October, specific thematic ones, and to look out for news of those on our website in due course. You can listen and hear more about some of the themes and the portfolio companies. Otherwise, I will see you all again hopefully in early 2023 and we'll report hopefully on further great progress. Thanks all and speak soon. Great. David, thanks once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few minutes to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team at IP Group plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you all.