Great Elm Capital Corp.

Greetings and welcome to the Great Elm Capital Second Quarter 2025 Financial Results. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star then zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Peter Skiesel, a representative of the company. Please go ahead.

Hello, and thank you, everyone, for joining us for Great Elm Capital Corp's second 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 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 to differ materially from these statements. Great Elm Capital Corp. does not undertake to update its forward-looking statements unless required by law. To obtain copies of the 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. We'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 CEO, Matt Kaplan.

Thanks, Peter, and thank you all for joining us today. We had a tremendous quarter, delivering the highest total investment income in the company's history at $14.3 million and NAV growing over $0.60 per share from the prior quarter to $12.10 per share as of June 30th. The second quarter of 2025 was GECC's highest ever cash-generative quarter with cash TII comprising approximately 90% of our total investment income. A 14% increase in TII from last quarter, as well as TII growth of nearly 50% year over year, was primarily driven by the success of our growing CLO platform, as well as income from other cash-generating investments in the quarter. All of this is a continued testament to the strategic portfolio enhancements we've undertaken over the past few years upgrade portfolio quality and focus on cash income generation in addition net investment income once again exceeded our quarterly distribution and was up approximately 29 percent sequentially nii per share was 51 cents compared to 40 cents in the prior quarter nii growth was largely attributable to a timely cash distribution on preference shares of an insurance related investment as well as $4.3 million of cash distributions from our CLOJV, up from $3.8 million last quarter. We remain committed to delivering growing income to shareholders over the long term, supported by solid underlying portfolio performance. Moving through the second half of the year, we anticipate third quarter NII per share to step down similarly to what we experienced in the fourth quarter of 2024. This is driven by the uneven cadence of cash flows from our growing CLO platform at these still early stages, as we have touched on before. Nevertheless, we anticipate fourth quarter NII will rebound significantly from the third quarter, and we remain confident that we are well positioned to cover our base distributions for the full year as we continue to execute on our long-term growth strategy. As previously discussed, We expect quarterly fluctuations in income to dampen over time as we fund additional CLO investments and continue to leverage our increased scale. As we scale the platform and deploy capital into additional investments, both in CLOs and across our strategies more broadly, we continue to believe that it makes more sense to evaluate GECC on an annual basis as opposed to benchmarking our performance quarter to quarter. On that note, if you look at our trailing 12-month performance, GECC has demonstrated continued momentum in both top-line and bottom-line results. Total investment income for the trailing 12-month period increased by 29%, and net investment income grew even more meaningfully over the same period, rising by 32% in each case compared to the same period one year ago. This growth underscores the enhanced income-producing capability of our portfolio, driven by strong asset performance and disciplined capital deployment. It's worth noting that our share count has also increased over the past year as a result of our capital raising programs, which have successfully led to GECC issuing shares at NAV, a premium to market. These capital raises have led to short-term cash drag impacts and have modestly offset our absolute NII growth, resulting in a relatively flat NII per share on a trailing 12-month basis. Our trailing 12-month NII of $1.50 per share demonstrates our earnings power through this rapid growth, with NII more than covering the base dividends paid over the same period, reinforcing our commitment to sustainable shareholder returns backed by solid income generation. As we look into the second half of 2025, we believe we are well-positioned for full-year 25 NII per share to exceed 2024 levels, supported by our diversified portfolio of cash-generating investments and more than cover our recently increased distribution rate of $1.48 per share on an annualized basis. Moving on to portfolio performance, alongside strong NAI generation, we also meaningfully improved our NAV per share as outlined on slide A. This increase in NAV was primarily driven by unrealized gains on our investment in CW Opportunity II LP, a vehicle created to hold convertible preferred equity in Corweave, an AI hyperscaler that IPO-ed earlier this year and has seen strong post-IPO equity performance. In addition, our NII outpaced our quarterly distribution by approximately 38%, leading to a NAV benefit in the quarter of approximately 14 cents. Looking ahead, we believe our portfolio, underpinned by a diversified book of senior secured investments, is increasingly well-positioned to weather the dynamic macro environment. With our strengthened foundation, we remain confident in our ability to generate sustainable returns and deliver increasing value to our shareholders. With that, I'd like to hand the call over to Carrie Davis to discuss our second quarter 2025 performance.