SuRo Capital Corp.

Hello and welcome to Thorough Capital's third quarter 2024 earnings call. My name is Melissa and I will be your coordinator for today's event. Please note this conference is being recorded and for the duration of the call, your lines will be on listen only. However, you will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation. This can be done by pressing star followed by one on your keypad to register your question. If you require assistance at any point, please press star zero to be connected to an operator. I'll turn the call over to Willie Lee. Please go ahead.

Awesome. Thank you. Thank you for joining us on today's call. I'm joined today by the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Cero Capital, Mark Klein, and Chief Financial Officer, Allison 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.serocap.com. Display information is provided in our press release issued today. This call is the property of Sero 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 guarantees of our future performance or future financial condition or results and involve 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 by law. To obtain copies of Suro Capital's latest SEC filings, please visit our website at www.surocap.com or the SEC's website at sec.gov. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Mark Pline. Mark Pline Thank you, Willie.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. We would like to share the results of Suro Capital's third quarter of 2024. Before discussing the exciting events that have occurred in the past few months, I would like to take a step back and share this thorough capital vision and discuss a bit about what differentiates our firm from other investment alternatives. Please turn to slides three, four, and five. From inception, our goal has been to democratize curated access to venture capital opportunities. Over the last 14 years, we have invested in and exited from investments in companies like Facebook, Twitter, Lyft, Spotify, Dropbox, Coursera, and Palantir. We believe our ability to access these opportunities provides our shareholders with access to an asset class that is typically excluded from the average investor. Presently, we are confident that we have redeployed capital into the next wave of exciting private companies with investments in market-leading businesses like OpenAI, CoreWeave, Canva, Service Titan, Whoop, and Liquid Death, to name a few. Between our ability to access attractive opportunities, our rigorous analysis and investment process, and our continued commitment to shareholder value, we are confident we are providing unique value in the market that others may not. Fostering this differentiation is important given the alternatives investors have. Fast forwarding to today, the last few months have been among the most exciting for our firm in our history. With the exponential growth of AI, a new crop of some of the world's most valuable companies has emerged. We have identified and invested significant capital in a few of the market's leading players. Just in the second half of 2024, we've invested approximately $65 million into some of the largest and most sought after private companies globally. Of that amount, we've invested approximately $55 million into artificial intelligent companies. AI investments now represent a significant portion of our portfolio, comprising 18% of our gross assets at the quarter's end. Inclusive of the $17 million of investments we have made into AI companies subsequent to Quarters End, including VAST, the percentage of gross assets allocated to AI is approximately 23% of our portfolio. Outside of our portfolio, AI has attracted tremendous venture capital interest. According to Crunchbase, funding into AI startups made up 31% of the third quarter's total global venture funding. Including OpenAI's $6.6 billion financing, which closed subsequent to the quarter's end, AI's share of total funding amounted to nearly 40%. According to the same source, to give those figures some context, fintech accounted for about 20% of all venture funding in 2021, while crypto never reached more than 6% of venture funding, even at its peak. During the surge in demand for AI investment, we believe we are highly differentiated on the basis of our AI investment criteria. Unlike many other investors, we have taken a thoroughly intentional approach that prioritizes the industry-agnostic picks and shovels infrastructure with proven traction and scale over the industry-specific applications with unproven product market fit. Of our AI portfolio companies, our AI portfolio companies are later stage businesses that have multi-billion dollar enterprise customers or already have massive consumer adoption. Looking at the broader portfolio, we have several portfolio companies that are well positioned to drive shareholder value upon the reopening of the IPO market. We believe our late stage portfolio companies, such as Service Titan, Canva, Whoop, and Liquid Death, among others, along with our AI portfolio companies, create a balanced portfolio offering our shareholders access to some of the most exciting private technology companies ahead of their potential IPO. Additionally, many of these portfolio companies have even publicly discussed their IPO plans or have been the subjects of recent reports about their upcoming IPOs. According to Bloomberg, CoreWeave has hired Morgan Stanley Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan to lead its planned IPO next year. This follows the information report that CoreWeave is aiming to file confidentially next month. Additionally, according to the information, Service Titan may go public as soon as next month after generating approximately $360 million of revenue in the first half of this year. According to the Times, Lime's CEO, Wayne Ting, said the company is ready for an IPO under the right market conditions and noted that Lime's bookings grew by 32% to approximately $600 million last year. I would now like to discuss our recent investments in more detail. We are pleased to announce our significant new and follow-on investments into some of the largest and most compelling AI companies. During the quarter, we made a $17.5 million investment in OpenAI, one of the largest developers of generative AI models for consumers and businesses, through the Class A interest of ARC Type 1 Deep Ventures Fund, LLC, a fund whose sole portfolio asset is the convertible equity of OpenAI. During the quarter and subsequent to quarter's end, we increased our position in CoreWeave a leading cloud computing provider, viewing a follow-on secondary investments totaling $10 million. These follow-on investments bring our total capital investment in CoreWeave to $25 million, making CoreWeave the single largest initial investment in our firm's history. Lastly, subject to quarter's end, we made a $12 million investment in VAST, a data management solution for AI developers. through the membership interests of IH10 LLC, whose sole portfolio asset is an interest in VaaS Data's Preferred Beep preferred shares. Together, our investments in OpenAI, CoreWeave, and VaaS give our investors access to leading AI companies at each point in the AI valuation, AI value chain. I will discuss these investments in further detail later in my prepared remarks. Turning to our third quarter results, we ended the quarter with a net asset value of $157.4 million, or $6.73 per share. Please turn to slide six. CSIRO's top five positions as of September 30th were CoreWeave, which includes CW Opportunity 2LP, the CoreWeave SPV, and our $5 million follow-on secondary investment in CoreWeave Common Shares. OpenAI through the AHRQ Type 1 Deep Ventures Fund, Blink Health, and Service Titan. These positions accounted for approximately 47% of the investment portfolio at fair value. As of September 30th, our top 10 positions accounted for approximately 75% of the investment portfolio. As of the quarter's end, our cash available for investment was approximately $32.7 million representing 14% of our gross assets. Please turn to slide seven. During the quarter, we made a $17.5 million investment in OpenAI through our Type 1 Deep Ventures, a fund whose sole asset was the Class A, and Class A interest was the convertible equity of OpenAI. OpenAI is a leading developer of generative AI models using deep learning technology. According to Axios, OpenAI's $6.6 billion fundraising in which we participated was the largest venture capital deal of all time. The financing made OpenAI one of the most valuable private companies in the world. OpenAI offers its models via free and paid plans that suit the needs of consumers, small teams, and large organizations. Its fully released flagship models, GPT, and GPT-40 mini are multimodal, meaning they accept both text and image inputs and output text. According to a company blog post, these models are part of OpenAI's broader chat GPT suite, which is used by over 250 million people every week around the world. Additionally, according to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI has 11 million paying subscribers and approximately 1 million paying business customers. For consumers, ChatGPT can quickly generate text with a human-like understanding of a user's input. For example, a user may prompt ChatGPT to write a cover letter based on the user's input and work experience or come up with a workout plan based on the user's input and fitness goals. Within seconds, ChatGPT generates a relevant text response tailored specifically to the user's input. ChatGPT can also summarize more extensive content such as a research paper or lease agreement and extracting details specific to the input. For small teams, ChatGPT acts as an assistant for tasks such as analyzing data, generating code, and writing emails. For example, the finance department of a small business may prompt ChatGPT to summarize financial data based on an inputted Excel spreadsheet. ChatGPT can then visualize the data via chart or graph and generate text that describes trends in data over time. Additionally, the engineering team at a startup may prompt ChatGPT to find a bug in a set of code. Moments later, ChatGPT can identify the bug, explain the mistake, and provide an appropriate correction. For large organizations, ChatGPT provides advanced data analysis capabilities, customized options, and large-scale content generation services, all with enterprise-grade security. Klarna, a global leader in consumer payments, uses ChatGPT to power multilingual customer services. According to OpenAI blog posts, Klarna's AI assistance has 2.3 million conversations representing two-thirds of Klarna's customers' chats. This AI assistance is more accurate and expedient than Klarna's previous solutions, leading to a 25% decrease in repeat inquiries and resolutions in less than two minutes on average compared to 11 minutes on average before. According to PitchBook, OpenAI has raised over $21.9 billion in debt and equity financing from investors including CodeTwo, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Thrive Capital, Tiger Global, and others. We are excited about OpenAI's traction and positioning at the forefront of generative AI development. Please turn to slide eight. During the third quarter, we made a $5 million follow-on investment in CoreWeave's common shares via a secondary transaction. Subsequent to quarter's end, we made an additional $5 million follow-on investment in CoreWeave Series A shares, again via a secondary transaction. These investments add to our previously discussed $50 million investment in CW opportunity to LP, which is invested in CoreWeave's AC preferred shares, bringing our total investment in CoreWeave to $25 million. CoreWeave is a specialized cloud provider delivering access to NVIDIA GPUs and a fast, flexible cloud computing infrastructure tailored for AI and machine learning. It supports end-to-end AI workflows from model training to deployment by offering distributed clusters powered by NVIDIA's Quantum InfiniBand network solutions. With spin-up times as short as five seconds, CoreWeave provides one of the industry's fastest inference solutions using NVIDIA GPUs. According to the company, its inference service is eight to ten times faster than those of leading generalized cloud providers. CoreWeave's momentum has accelerated in recent months. According to the Financial Times, it now operates more than 45,000 NVIDIA GPUs, making it the largest private operator in North America. Additionally, according to Bloomberg just last month, Cisco invested in CoreWeave as part of a transaction valued at $23 billion. Also last month, CoreWeave announced the close of its $650 million credit facility led by JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, building on the close of its $7.5 billion credit facility led by Blackstone and Magnetar in late May. Later in the month, CoreScientific, a leader in digital infrastructure for Bitcoin mining, announced that CoreWeave exercised its final contract option to deliver approximately 120 megawatts of computing infrastructure to core scientific data centers. According to Core Scientific's press release, this contract exercise expands core weeds in contracted infrastructure to approximately 500 megawatts across six scientific sites. The information reported that Microsoft plans to invest $10 billion between 2023 and the end of the decade to use CoreWeave's data centers. According to the information, Microsoft's contract will be a key driver of CoreWeave's significant revenue growth. According to the information, the estimated revenue for CoreWeave is $500 million for 2023, $200 million for 2024, $8 billion for 2025. According to Bloomberg, this scale positions CoreWeap for a major IPO with bankers already hired for a 2025 listing. According to PitchBook, CoreWeap has raised over $9 billion in debt and equity financing from investors such as CO2, Fidelity, Magnetar, and more. With its best-in-class cloud infrastructure, we believe CoreWeap will continue its exponential growth and capitalize on accelerated AI adoptions. Please turn to slide nine. Subsequent to quarter's end, we made a $12 million investment in Vast Data through a membership interest in IH10 LLC, an entity whose sole portfolio asset is interest in Vast Data's Series B preferred shares. Fast data is a data management solution for leading AI companies. Fast data has emerged due to an inability of legacy data management solutions to serve customers building complex AI applications. For several decades, enterprise data solutions was built around the concept of tiers. Tiered storage is the idea that data is segmented based on its importance to daily operations. An example of segments could be cold, warm, hot, and mission critical. However, AI applications need to access to all data at once, rendering the tiered storage system increasingly obsolete. Fast data collapses the tiered storage model by offering all flash storage. All flash allows all data in a pipeline as opposed to data in a specific tier to be accessed This is especially valuable for companies that train AI models to produce outputs as these companies require constant movement of data between back-end systems. As customers scale and face increasingly complex data management needs, VAST data can add nodes to increase with a customer's data architecture and GPUs to accelerate the production and usage of customer data. Leading companies at the forefront of AI development use vast data to accelerate their applications. According to a vast data blog post, Pixar, a globally recognized animation studio, uses vast data for its data-intensive media productions. For example, in its 2023 film Elemental, Pixar used this custom-edged animation methods that created several times the data footprint and computational demands for data than other previous movies. Even during the film's peak rendering usage, Vast Data delivered fast, uninterrupted performance. Pixar continues to use Vast Data to employ new animation techniques using machine learning models for adopted and improved media production. According to a vast data blog post, Zoom, a leader in live video conferencing, uses vast data to assist in training its AI models. On top of its video conferencing interface, Zoom offers AI-powered features such as speech-to-text transcription and language translation. To build and refine these features, Zoom required a data management solution that could access and retrieve data instantly. Zoom uses vast data to help process audio efficiently even in real time during a video conference. BassData has quickly cemented itself as a dominant AI infrastructure provider. According to a press release, at the end of 2023, BassData reached over $200 million in ARR. Additionally, the company has been cash flow positive for the last three years. According to PitchBook, BassData has raised over $390 million in equity financing from investors such as NEA, General Atlantic, TPG, and others. We believe Vast Data is poised for growth as a leading data management provider for the AI universe. Over the last few months, we've been deliberately focusing on deploying capital into companies offering critical AI infrastructure solutions. Today, with nearly $55 million invested in AI infrastructure, we believe our portfolio is well positioned upside given AI tailwinds. Now I would like to highlight recent developments in our portfolio company Canva. As previously discussed, Canva is an online productivity design software and collection platform with a mission to empower everyone in the world to design. According to a Forbes article as of late October, Canva crossed 200 million active daily users, and $2.5 billion in annualized revenue. Additionally, the company reported having completed several transactions at a $32 billion valuation, up from the $26 billion valuation it received in its larger company tender in April. As previously discussed, we made our $10 million investment in Canva on similar terms as what was reported in the company tender offer. Finally, Canva continues to gain traction with enterprise companies, having added names such as HP and the New York Stock Exchange to its platform. According to PitchBook, Canva has raised over $581 million in equity financing from investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Iconic, and others. We are excited about the Canva about Canvas traction and positioning in the market as it expands its enterprise footprint and further captures international markets. Transitioning to our public investments. As previously stated, it is our objective to sell our public positions when lockups restrictions expire and there is relative stability in a given public position trading. In line with this approach, we began to monetize our position in public square shares as their lockup restrictions expired during the quarter and have continued to do so subsequent to quarter's end. One additional portfolio company we'd like to highlight again is Oklo. Oklo has been very positively received as a public company, with the stock closing in excess of $26.50 today, more than double where the stock initially listed. As previously discussed, Oklo is a fast-firing, clean power company backed by Sam Ullman. Oklo is on the cutting edge of nuclear fuel recycling, which has many uses, including the potential to add clean power to AI-related data centers. According to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Energy, nuclear power has one of the lowest lifecycle emissions of any major of any major generating energy source, providing electricity to the grid with the lowest CO2 emissions per megawatt hour of any currently available technology. Oklo is in the forefront of the small modular nuclear reactor space, which has recently received significant commercial interest. According to an Oklo press release in August, Oklo is a preferred supplier agreement with Siemens Energy, a leading manufacturer of steam turbine generated products and services. This partnership exceeds 1,300 megawatts in non-binding letters of intent, underscoring Oklo's significant market traction. Additionally, in September, Oklo announced the finalization of an agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho Operations Office. According to Oklo's press release, this agreement gives Oklo access to conduct site investigations as the only advanced formation company with a DOE use permit. We're excited about OKO's positioning as a leader, as a leading nuclear energy provider, as the company continues to expand its commercialization prospects. Finally, we continue to focus on our shareholder-friendly initiatives, including our recently executed note purchase agreement and note repurchase program, and the expansion and extension of our share repurchase program. Allison will discuss these initiatives during her prepared remarks in further detail. To conclude my remarks, I want to highlight why I believe this is an exceptionally promising time for our portfolio. Over the past five years, we have made it a priority to share our perspectives on the evolving market and cycles and trends. In the middle of 2020, we stated our belief that there would be a significant increase in IPO activity and we were strategically positioned to take advantage of this potential. Throughout 2021, we monetized over $258 million of our portfolio's assets, including two substantial monetizations of Palantir and Coursera, each exceeding $100 million in net proceeds. We also declared a total of $8 per share for over $212 million in distributions to our shareholders. In 2022, we conveyed our view that the market was a bit overextended, prompting us to considerably scale back on our new capital investments. In the subsequent year and a half, we had ongoing dialogue with our investors about the disparity between private and public market valuations. And as this year progressed, we have detailed our approach to judiciously deploying our available capital. I am confident that our current positioning is as strong, if not stronger, than it was in 2020. We believe that if the market remains robust, the IPO market will reopen. As I discussed earlier in my remarks, we have several investments that could materially benefit from a revitalized IPO market. Given our recent investments and broader portfolio, we believe we are well-positioned to drive shareholder return. Thank you for your attention, and with that, I will hand it over to Alison Green, our Chief Financial Officer.