Silver Spike Investment Corp.

Good morning, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Silver Spike Investment Corp. second 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 will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising you your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, 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 go ahead.

Thank you, Catherine. Good morning, everyone. 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 the Silver Spikes earnings conference call and live webcast for the second quarter of 2023. Silver Spikes financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2023, were released yesterday and can be accessed from our website at ssic.silverspikecap.com. A replay of the call will also be available on Silver Spikes website. Before we begin, I would 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 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, August 11, 2023. Therefore, your advice that time-sensitive information may no longer be accurate at the time of any replay or transcript reading. That said, Good morning again and thank you all for joining early in the morning today. We released our earnings yesterday and there is also a earnings slide deck attached to the 8K that was filed with the results. Those who have joined us on this earnings webcast should see it live. I'll refer to the slides by numbers just for your reference. Turning to page three of the presentation, financial highlights for the second quarter of 2023. Gross investment income of 2.9 million, up from 2.5 million in the first quarter of 2023. Expenses of approximately 1 million. Net investment income of 1.9 million, up from 1.4 million last quarter. Net investment income per share of 31 cents, versus 22 cents last quarter, net assets of 90 million, and net asset value per share is at $14.49. The increase in the gross investment income reflects the steady ramp up in our investment portfolio. We made one new investment during this quarter. The gross investment income reflects the interest we earned on that investment, as well as the increase in the base rate for all of our floating rate loans. We'll discuss the portfolio in more detail in subsequent slides. Also, we're pleased to announce that our board has approved a cash dividend of 63 cents per share consisting of a regular quarterly dividend of 23 cents per share and a special dividend of 40 cents. These dividends will be payable on September 29 to stockholders of record on September 15. The company also expects to pay another special dividend during the last quarter of this year. We'll talk more about the dividend announcement in subsequent slides, but to expand more on the Silver Spike story and the market opportunity, I'll turn it over to Scott Gordon, our CEO. Scott?

Thank you, Mesh. Good morning, everyone. Turning to slide four, please, just briefly in terms of an overview of Silver Spike Capital, Silver Spike Investment Corp, the BDC, is externally managed by Silver Spike Capital. Silver Spike Capital is an SEC registered investment advisor that works with its clients to originate, underwrite, and deploy firstly finger-secured fixed and floating rate debt to the cannabis industry's most established operators. The investment team is seasoned with decades of experience across various market cycles and complex legal regulatory frameworks and credit special situations, equities, distressed, and emerging market debt. We have raised over $600 million in public and private capital since inception, and we are the first and the only publicly traded cannabis-focused business development corp. Just jumping... to the market opportunity slide on page seven and just an update here in terms of what we're seeing in the broad market. The secular growth story in Canada continues intact, albeit at a much more subdued pace than in previous years. New states continue to come on stream. Generally speaking, though, the rollout has been slower than had hoped for. The state and local regulatory frameworks get through growing pains of early adoption and commercialization. Progress at the federal level remains stalled. Expectations of a passage of the SAFE Act continue. continue to get rolled back. We don't really have a strong view in terms of what the timetable will look like for any meaningful reform at the federal level and are not generally optimistic that we'll see much progress this year. Capital market conditions within the sector continue to be very tight. Equity market activity for public companies with respect to IPOs, secondaries and follow-ons is virtually non-existent. Debt capital is also scarce, but more available and has become the funding source of choice for most companies in the space. The net result of that is a deepening of the trend toward very favorable conditions for lenders such as ourselves to command attractive terms, structure, and pricing, which drives compelling risk-adjusted returns for us. Jumping forward to slide nine, just briefly on sourcing and origination, and then I'll pass it back to Amesh. We continue to have a significant pipeline of potential debt investments. We've reviewed over $7.8 billion in transactions across 368 different deals. Our active pipeline today is just shy of 600 million, representing about 25 different transactions. With that, I'll pass it back to Mesh to talk more specifics about the current activity within the portfolio. Mesh?