SuRo Capital Corp.

Good day and welcome to the Soro Capital's first quarter 2023 earnings call. Today's conference is being recorded. I will now hand you over to your Willie Lee to begin today's conference. Thank you.

Thank you for joining us on today's call. I'm joined today by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Soro Capital, Mark Klein, and Chief Financial Officer, Alison Green. Please note that a slide presentation corresponding to today's prepared remarks by management is available on our website at www.cerocap.com under investor relations, events, and presentations. Today's call is being recorded and broadcast live on our website, www.cerocap.com. Replay information is included in our press release issued today. This call is the property of Suro Capital and the unauthorized reproduction of this call in any form is strictly prohibited. I would also like to call your attention to customary disclosures in today's earnings press release regarding forward-looking information. Statements made in today's conference call and webcast may constitute forward-looking statements which relate to future events or our future performance or financial condition. These statements are not guaranteed of our future performance or future financial condition or results. It involves a number of risks, estimates, and uncertainties, including the impact of any market volatility that may be detrimental to our business, our portfolio companies, our industry, and the global economy. That could cause actual results to differ materially from the plans, intentions, and expectations reflected in or suggested by the forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors, including but not limited to those described from time to time in the company's filings with SEC. Management does not undertake to update such forward-looking statements unless required to do so. To obtain copies of Serocapital's latest SEC filings, visit our website at www.serocap.com or the SEC's website at sec.gov. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Mark Lyons.

Mark Lyons Thank you, Willie. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. We would like to share the results of Suro Capital's first quarter, 2023. The first quarter of 2023 saw continued volatility in the public equity markets as a result of continued inflation, coupled with decelerating GDP and extended stress in the banking sector. Recently, however, the NASDAQ composite index and the technology stocks, in particular, appear to have shown signs of stabilization. Despite the volatility, the IPO markets have shown cautious signs of near-term opening. For example, last week, Johnson & Johnson's consumer health spinoff, Kenview, debuted in the public markets, raising $3.8 billion. According to Bloomberg, this was the largest U.S. listing since 2021. Additionally, according to the information, in the wake of its failed SPAC merger, leading online ticket platform SeatGeek filed confidentially for an IPO last month. Further, according to the Wall Street Journal, marketing automation company Klaviyo hired bankers in April for an upcoming IPO, with sources saying the listing could take place as early as September. Finally, according to Bloomberg, British computing firm Arm filed for a U.S. IPO with plans to raise between $8 and $10 billion. The listing of Arm, one of the largest U.S. IPOs of the last decade. These listings and headlines demonstrate cautious optimism for a rebound in the latter half of 2023. We are also seeing positive trends emerge in the private secondary markets. In its April 2023 private markets update, Forge reported that the median bid-ask spread on new indications of interest compressed in March, down from the platform's all-time high in Q3 of 2022. Consistent with prior quarters, Forge has also reported that in the first quarter, secondary transactions were closed at an approximately 50% discount to a company's last primary financing. While still relatively expensive compared to public comparables, this discount, coupled with increasing secondary trade volumes, may indicate that the market is finding a level where investors will transact. Given these conditions, we continue to see numerous opportunities in the private markets. In fact, in 2023 to date, we evaluated more potential than any other prior period. However, given public and private valuations are still converging, we have been cautious about deploying capital. With over $120 million of investable capital at quarter end, we remain poised to continue investing in both primary and secondary opportunities for later stage high growth companies at what we will believe will be compelling valuations. Current market conditions present us with opportunities to explore prospects as late stage businesses seek to go public soon after market conditions improve. We believe we will see increasingly promising opportunities to deploy capital this year as pricing in the private and public markets gradually converge. We ended the first quarter with a net asset value of $215 million or $7.59 per share. This NAV per share is a net asset value of $7.39 per share at year end and $12.22 a share in Q1 of 2022. Allison will discuss our first quarter results, including investment activity during the quarter and the results of our modified Dutch auction tender offer that we began during the quarter and executed subsequent to quarter end. Please turn to slide four. Turning to our top five positions, I first want to highlight our cash position. As of quarter end, our cash and short-term U.S. Treasury balance totaled over $124 million, representing 43% of our growth assets. As we have previously discussed, we believe having cash in this environment advantageously positions us to continue to seek out new opportunities emerging from current market conditions. Cerro Capital's top five positions as of March 31st were Lernio, Columbia Sponsor, Blink Health, Locust Robotics, and Architect Capital Payjoy SPV. These positions accounted for approximately 59% of the investment portfolio at fair value. Further, as of March 31st, our top 10 positions accounted for approximately 78% of the investment portfolio at fair value. As you may recall, in December 2022, Course Hero announced its rebranding to Learnio in order to better reflect the company's evolution from a business model to a robust platform of education technology companies. According to PitchBook, Learnio has raised approximately $500 million. Most recently, the December 2021 $380 million fundraise specifically targeted to fuel an acquisition strategy to broaden and diversify from the original course hero business and create a major leader in the ed tech space. For example, among Learnio's six recent acquisitions is Quillbot, an artificial intelligence powered writing platform that paraphrases, summarizes, grammar checks, and reviews large sums of text. According to a press release at the time of the acquisition in August 2021, Quillbot had 7 million active monthly users. Since the acquisition, Quillbot has shown tremendous growth, surpassing 30 million monthly active users in March of 2023. Additionally, in the same month, Quillbot reached its highest web traffic to date of approximately 78.5 million website visits as reported on SimilarWeb. According to SimilarWeb, this is nearly equal to Grammarly's approximately 79.8 million visits during the same month. Another of Learnio's acquisitions was Symbolab, an AI-powered math solver business that helps students solve complex math problems. Announced by Learnio in October 2021, the time of the acquisition, Symbolab had already been used by over 50 million students to work through 1 billion questions and explanations in 2020 alone. According to SimilarWeb, Symbolab had approximately 21 million websites visits in March of 2023. On April 5th, Learnio announced its most recent acquisition, LanguageTool. German-based language tool is a multilingual grammar, style, and spell checker powered by AI. The acquisition bolsters Lernio's AI-driven writing tools and supports Lernio's international expansion, giving language tools broad reach of B2C and B2B customers around the world. Lernio's acquisitions of Quillbot, Symbolab, Language Tools, LitChart, Scribbr, and CliffNotes has successfully created a robust and diversified platform of education technology companies that we believe position the company well for the rise of AI in the EdTech universe. In addition to their successful acquisition strategy, Learnio has remained profitable on a cash basis since TechCrunch originally reported on its profitability in 2020. As of March 31st, 2023, Learnio had more cash on its balance sheet than it did when it completed its last fundraise. In fiscal year 2022, Learnio was considered to be a Rule of 40 company, a term used to describe companies whose sum of revenue rate and adjusted EBITDA margin exceed 40%. Given Learnio's progress and path forward, we believe Learnio is well positioned to continue to make accretive acquisitions thus cementing the company as a major player in the AI-based edtech universe. Despite significant slowdowns in SPAC transactions, we are pleased to share the following recent update on one of our SPAC investments. On April 7th, Columbia Acquisition and Public Square completed their S4 filing in connection with a proposed merger with Public Square and eCommerce Marketplace. If the merger between Columbia Acquisition and Public Square is completed, Cerro Capital's position in the new company should be worth more than $20 million. Transitioning to our public investments. As previously stated, it is our objective to sell our public positions when lockup restrictions expire and there is relative stability given public positions trading. In line with this approach, we continue to monetize several of our public unrestricted positions over the course of the quarter, During the first quarter, we fully exited our positions in Kahoot and Rent the Runway and reduced our holdings in New Lake Capital Partners. Finally, I would like to reiterate CERO's commitment to initiatives that enhance shareholder value. Given the discount our stock has traded at compared to net asset value per share, we believe our recent modified Dutch auction tender offer was an efficient and accretive deployment of capital. Alison will discuss the results of the tender offer in her prepared remarks. Thank you for your attention, and with that, I'd like to hand it over to Alison Green, our Chief Financial Officer.