Great Elm Capital Corp.

Greetings and welcome to the Great Elm Capital Corp First Quarter 2025 Financial Results Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. Should anyone require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Peter Skusa, a representative of the company. Thank you. You may begin.

Hello, and thank you everyone for joining us for Great Elm Capital Corp's first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. If you'd like to be added to our distribution list, you can email investorrelations at greatelmcap.com, or you can sign up for alerts directly on our website, www.greatelmcc.com. I'd like to note the slide presentation posted on our website accompanying today's call. The slide presentation can be found on our website under Events and Presentations. On our website, you can also find our earnings release and SEC filings. I'd like to call your attention to the customary safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking information. Also, please note that nothing in today's call constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of offers to purchase our securities. Today's conference call includes forward-looking statements, and we ask that you refer to Great Elm Capital Corp's filings with the SEC for important factors that could cause actual results that differ materially from these statements. Great Elm Capital Corp does not undertake updates, forward-looking statements, unless required by law. To obtain copies of SEC filings, please visit Great Elm Capital Corp's website under Financials, SEC Filings, or visit the SEC's website. Hosting the call today is Matt Kaplan, Great Elm Capital Corp's Chief Executive Officer. He'll be joined by Chief Financial Officer, Kerry Davis, Chief Compliance Officer and General Counsel, Adam Kleinman, and Mike Keller, President of Great Elm Specialty Finance. We'll now turn the call over to GECC's CEO, Matt Kaplan.

Thanks, Peter. And thank you all for joining us today. We are pleased to start 2025 with a record-setting quarter, achieving the highest total investment income in the company's history at $12.5 million. Notably, the first quarter was also our highest ever cash income quarter, a testament to the strategic portfolio enhancements undertaken over the past few years. This 37% increase in TII from last quarter and more than 40% year-over-year growth was driven by the success of our CLOJV as well as from income generated by new investments in the quarter. NII per share doubled to $0.40 per share from $0.20 in the prior quarter, largely attributable to the increase in total investment income and the ramping contributions from investments. Our NII more than covered the increased first quarter distribution of $0.37 per share, a 5.7% increase from the prior quarter's $0.35 per share distribution. This marks our commitment to delivering growing income to shareholders, supported by solid underlying portfolio performance. As we move through the second quarter, we are well positioned to further execute on our long-term growth strategy and navigate the dynamic macro environment. Based on current expectations, we anticipate that second quarter NII will exceed first quarter levels. As we discussed on our last call, we anticipated an increase in cash distributions from the CLOJV this quarter. That CLO distribution patterns are typically uneven in their early stages. For example, we received $3.8 million of cash distributions from the CLOJV in the first quarter of 2025 as compared to half a million dollars in the fourth quarter of 2024 which was a step down from the $3.2 million in the third quarter of 2024. Additionally, in the second quarter to date, we have received $4.3 million of cash distributions from the JV. We do expect these fluctuations will dampen over time as we fund additional CLO investments and continue to leverage our increased scale. For these reasons, and considering our ongoing capital raising and deployment initiatives, we'd like to reiterate that it is best to review GECC on a four-quarter basis, opposed to benchmarking the company quarter to quarter. Moving on to our portfolio's performance, while our NII generation was strong, we did see a modest step down in NAV per share as outlined on slide eight, driven by unrealized losses on portfolio investments. We began to see volatility in the market's pickup in the middle of the quarter, which led to markdowns on positions at quarter end. Specifically, our CLO-JV equity and our investments in CW Opportunity 2 LP, a vehicle which was created to hold convertible preferred equity in CoreWeave and AI Hyperscaler, which went public at the end of March. We remain confident in these investments and our portfolio and expect these unrealized losses to reverse over time as market conditions stabilize. Additionally, we recently filed prospectus supplement for a $100 million at-the-market equity program to issue shares at NAV or better. We believe this new tool will provide us with additional capital flexibility as we seek to continue scaling the ECC. We remain well-positioned to cover our dividend over the course of 2025, and our portfolio is set up to weather the uncertain macroenvironment. With our strength and foundation, we remain confident in our ability to generate sustainable returns and deliver increasing value to our shareholders in the years ahead. With that, I'd like to hand the call over to Carrie Davis to discuss our first quarter 2025 performance.