Silver Spike Investment Corp.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Silver Spike Investment Corporation's first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To remove yourself from the queue, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Umesh Mahajan, Chief Financial Officer. Please begin, sir.

Thank you, Norma. Good morning. This is Umesh Mahajan, CFO of Silver Spike Investment Corp. With me here today is Scott Gordon, CEO of Silver Spike Investment Corp. Welcome to Silver Spike's earnings conference call and live webcast for the first quarter of 2023. Silver Spike's financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2023, when it released yesterday. and can be accessed from our website at ssic.silverspikecap.com. A replay of this call will also be available on our website. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that certain statements that are not based on historical facts made during this call, including any statements related to financial guidance, may be deemed forward-looking statements under the federal securities laws. Because these forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, There are important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. We encourage you to refer to our most recent SEC filings for information on some of these risk factors. Silver Spike assumes no obligation or responsibility to update any forward-looking statements. Please note that the information reported on this call speaks only as of today, May 12, 2023. Therefore, your advice that time-sensitive information may no longer be accurate at the time of any replay or transcript reading. So with that said, good morning again, and thank you all for joining. We released our earnings results yesterday, and there's a management presentation deck attached to the earnings release as well. Those who have joined us on this earnings webcast should be able to access this presentation live, and you'll find the link to the deck and the 8K also that was filed yesterday or this morning. We may refer to the slides by numbers just for your reference as we go through the presentation. So turning to page three of the presentation, financial highlights for the first quarter 2023. As you can see, the first column, we had a gross investment income of $2.5 million, expenses of approximately $1.1 million. gives us net investment income of $1.4 million, net investment income per share of $0.22 for this quarter, net assets at the end of the period of $88.8 million versus $86.5 million at the end of last quarter, and the net asset value per share at the end of the period was $14.29 versus $13.91 at the end of last quarter. The increase in gross investment income reflects the ramp up in our portfolio. We made one new investment during this quarter, and the gross investment income reflects the interest we have earned in that investment for this quarter. We'll discuss the portfolio and the pipeline in more detail in subsequent slides. But before I do that, to expand a little bit more on the Silver Spike story and the market opportunity, I'll turn it over to Scott Gordon, our CEO.

Thank you, Amesh. Good morning, everyone. So just to remind folks, we are a BDC focused on lending to the cannabis sector, predominantly in the U.S. market. We believe that lending to cannabis companies is a compelling investment opportunity with attractive yields and limited competition. We also feel that lending to cannabis requires intense focus and specialization given the myriad of regulatory, legal, and operating complexities that exist in the space. At Silver Spike, we have a team of experienced professionals with extensive backgrounds in both credit and cannabis to execute on our mandate. We continue to benefit from an excellent vintage of lending to the cannabis sector currently. Previous vintages of cannabis loans did not afford the same opportunity that we are seeing today with respect to pricing, terms, and overall structure. We remain focused on finding the very best operators in the industry in every jurisdiction and provide them with growth capital. We structure our investments appropriately and carefully and do not take or rely on any equity sweeteners to obtain our returns. Our loans are typically made to borrowers with very low leverage. And lastly, our objective is to create a diversified portfolio of investments offering high-quality risk and an attractive yield to our shareholders. With that, I will pass it back to Umesh. Thank you.