Operator
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Flow Capital's Q1 2026 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode.
Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be provided at that time.
If anyone has difficulties hearing the conference, you may press *0 for an operator assistance at any time. I would like to remind everyone that today's discussions may contain forward-looking statements that reflect current views with respect to future events.
Any such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. For more information on Flow Capital's risks and uncertainties related to these forward-looking statements, please refer to the YE 2025 company's Management Discussion and Analysis, which is available on SEDAR.
Today's call is being recorded on Tuesday, May 12th, 2026, and I would now like to turn the meeting over to Alex Baluta, Chief Executive Officer of Flow Capital. Please go ahead.
Alex Baluta
Thank you, Operator. One clarification, this is our Q1 2026, although, as the operator said, you can find our results for all prior quarters filed on SEDAR or on our website.
Thank you, everybody, for joining. I expect this will be a very short call.
Happy to announce continued growth in Q1 2026. Highlights include a 21% revenue increase to $3.5 million, up from $2.9; a 4% increase in recurring free cash flow to just under $900,000, up from $850,000 a year ago; an 8% increase in recurring free cash flow per share to 3 cents a share; a 27% increase in total investment assets, to $80.3 million, that's up from $63.4 a year ago and up from $73.5 in December; and a 6% increase in book value from a year ago, now at a dollar -- $1.29 versus $1.22 a year ago, and also up from $1.275 in December.
Additionally, during the quarter, we made $6.5 million of new investments, which compares to $3.2 million a year ago. All in all, it was another strong quarter.
We're well into our sixth year of profitability of every quarter, free cash flow hitting almost $900,000 in the quarter, and things continue to be on track for us. I do want to make a couple of comments on the environment.
I made some of these comments in our Q4 call about a month ago, and I encourage everybody to listen to that call as well. We have seen over the past couple of years increasing competition, which has led to tighter competition on deal flow, but also decreases in pricing, in particular around headline interest rates.
That was driven, if you go back into the early 2020s, there were high valuations in the '21, '22, '23 timeframe. Then you also saw a lot of capital flow into private credit in the '23, '24, and '25 timeframe.
That, in particular, you saw that at the very large end of the market. We've seen some announcements in that timeframe of almost a doubling of capital access available for private credit.
Broadly speaking, we're very much in the growth segment of smaller companies, but in the growth segment of private credit, non-asset-backed, high-growth companies. That's what we do.
We did see a trickle-down effect, even in terms of pricing pressures that came down from the bigger players, slowly down into our space. Now, it's been a challenge, in particular on keeping our discipline, but I'll talk about that in a minute.
The good news is, I think we're starting to see a reversal of that trend. In particular, a lot of the larger players, there's lots and lots of news stories out there about redemptions, about concerns at investor levels, about gating of funds.
To be very clear, that has nothing to do with us. We're not in that scenario, although we know several people are.
With the gating of those funds, that trickle-down effect of excess capital is starting, in my opinion, to reverse. We're seeing pricing stabilize, if not increase a little bit.
Broadly speaking, we're seeing SaaS valuations stabilize, if not recover. Even in our own portfolio, we're seeing the businesses stabilize in terms of their own growth rates.
I think I mentioned this on the prior call, but I'll say it again, I feel that our portfolio is probably in the best condition it's been for a long, long time. It's in very strong health.
That's not to say it was bad before. Let me just say, perception, the portfolio is in very good shape.
We have a unique business model that again I've highlighted before in that we're essentially an evergreen model. When money is often paid back to a fund, sometimes they can pay that back to their limited partners, but often they have to redeploy it.
We're in a unique model where we can pay back our lenders at both levels of our cap stack, and then redraw, and particularly on our senior line of credit, to redeploy capital. What that means in practice is that we are not pressured to make decisions or investments that might not meet our very high economic thresholds of risk-return.
We've been cautious and judicious deployers of capital over the last couple of quarters, and that's served us well. We've also started to see some of our portfolio companies, as they've continued to improve, either get refinanced, new equity rounds, or in some cases, M&A transactions.
In fact, we announced one such M&A transaction in Q2, not in Q1, that of [TVision?] .
It was a good exit for the company. It was an excellent exit for us.
That investment had a 25% IRR for us, and there was over a $1 million gain to book value for us that'll hit in Q2. It does show the strength and resilience of our model, and we wish them well in their future endeavors for the acquirer, and that was an excellent outcome, and that's what we hope to see in all of our deals.
While there's been pricing pressures, we've been very cautious and very conservative. Our portfolio health is good.
The one maybe unfortunate aspect is that we've deployed less capital than I'd hoped, although we continue to deploy capital. In fact, as I mentioned in my preliminary comments, our investment assets on our balance sheets is actually up to $80.3 million, up from $73.5 million at the end of Q4.
The impact though has been slower deployments, and that will have some impact on our growth here in the short term. We continue to grow, but you'll notice that our growth in the quarter was down below the growth that we had last year.
We do continue to grow our book value per share, and our alignment as management, who own a significant stake in the equity of the company, is alignment with shareholders and shareholders' return. All that to say is it was a good quarter.
We remain very selective. We're seeing an easing of pricing pressures.
We're actually seeing an increase in good deals in our pipeline. We're seeing some of our more direct competitors feeling challenged, and we will continue to invest in our business, and we'll continue to seek out excellent investment opportunities on a risk-adjusted basis.
With that, I'm going to pause and see if there's any questions.
Operator
Thank you, Alex. Ladies and gentlemen, should you have a question, please press * followed by 1 on your touch-tone phone.
You will hear a prompt that your hand has been raised, and should you wish to remove your hand from the queue, please press * followed by 2. If you're using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys.
Just a moment, please, while we tabulate the Q&A. It looks like there are no questions currently in the queue.
I'll turn the call back over to you, Alex Baluta.
Alex Baluta
Thank you very much, Marissa. Thank you, everybody, for listening to the recording of this call, and I look forward to speaking to you after Q2.
Thank you very much.
Operator
This concludes today's conference call. We thank you so much for your participation.
You may now disconnect.
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