SuRo Capital Corp.

Welcome to the Suro Capital's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025 earnings call. My name is Alan and I'll be your coordinator for today's event. Please note this call is being recorded and for the duration, your lines will be on listen only. However, you will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end. This can be done by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If you require assistance at any time, please press star zero and you'll be connected to an operator. I will now have your host, Jackson Stone, to begin today's conference. Thank you.

Thank you for joining us on today's call. I am joined today by the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Suro 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.surocap.com under Investor Relations, Events, and Presentation. Today's call is being recorded and broadcast live on our website, www.sterocap.com. Replay information is included in our press release issued today. This call is the property of Stero Capital, and the unauthorized reproduction of this call in any form is strictly prohibited. I would also like to call your attention to customer 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 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 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 filing to the SEC. In addition, the preliminary financial estimates regarding the company's estimated accretion to current net asset value provided herein have been prepared by and are the responsibility of the management of the company. This information is preliminary and is thus inherently uncertain and subject to change. Actual results relating to the company's net asset value for any period subsequent to December 31st, 2025, including March 31st, 2026, may differ materially. 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 hc.gov. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Marsh Klein. Thank you, Jackson.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. This is an important moment for Cerro Capital. We are entering 2026 with meaningful momentum across our portfolio, a disciplined investment strategy, substantial embedded value, and what we believe is a highly differentiated position and one of the most consequential technology cycles of our time. Before I review our full year results, I want to begin with what has happened since year end because those developments matter. They matter for our portfolio. They matter for how we see the opportunity ahead. And most importantly, they matter for our shareholders. Since the beginning of 2026, public markets have been mixed. Volatility has remained a feature of the environment. Sentiment has moved back and forth. But beneath the day-to-day noise, one much more important trend has continued to strengthen. The global build-out of AI infrastructure is accelerating. We do not view this as a passing theme. We do not view this as a short cycle. We view it as a structural shift in how the modern economy will be built. Across the largest technology platforms in the world, capital commitments continue to rise. That tells us something important. AI is no longer being treated as an experimental initiative. It is becoming core infrastructure. It is becoming central to how businesses compete, how they invest, and how they grow. And when capital begins moving at that scale, the effects extend far beyond the largest public companies. It benefits foundational infrastructure. It benefits enabling software. It benefits private companies building essential tools, platforms, and systems that support this transition. That is where CERO is positioned. Against that backdrop, we continue to see strong execution across our portfolio. Since the end of the year, several of our portfolio companies have completed or are in the process of finalizing significant financings. Based on indications available today and assuming each of these financings close and the remainder of our portfolio remains as it was at the end of this year, valuation, we believe, at the end of 2025 valuation, we believe these financings could contribute at least $5 and as much as $6.50 per share to our current net asset value. This is highlighted, and I want to underscore one point very clearly. As these developments across arose in 2026, they are not reflected in our fourth quarter 2025 net asset value. While our reported year-end NAV reflects a year of strong underlying performance, it does not yet capture what we believe is a meaningful amount of value creation that has already emerged clearly this year. Now, because several of these transactions have not yet publicly been disclosed, there are limits to what we can share today. But the direction is clear. The progress is real. And as more of these developments become public, we will expect to provide full context in our first quarter pre-release and earnings call. One financing that has been widely reported and one worth highlighting is OpenAI. This transaction was notable not only for its size, but for what it represents. It reflects the extraordinary scale of capital now being committed to AI development and to the infrastructure required to support it. It reflects the capital intensity of this next era of computing, and it reinforces the fact that AI has moved from possibility to priority. Moments like this help define markets. They show where strategic capital is flowing. They show where conviction is building. and they validate a core principle behind our strategy. Some of the most important value creation in technology happens while great businesses are still private. That is where we seek to invest. That is where we seek to build exposure. And that is where we believe CERO offers shareholders something distinct. As noted earlier, This financing occurred in the first quarter of 26 and is therefore not reflected in our year-end NAV. More broadly, we continue to believe AI is a multi-year structural transformation that remains in its early stages. It is moving from research into deployment, from experimentation into integration, and from isolated use cases into broad commercial adoption. As that happens, the opportunity set continues to expand. Some companies will benefit directly by providing the infrastructure, compute, and tooling that make this shift possible. Others will benefit indirectly through increased demand for software, automation, data, and more efficient digital systems. We believe both dynamics matter, and we believe both are increasingly relevant across our portfolio. This is one of the reasons we remain constructive on the road ahead. Public markets offer investors exposure to many of the largest and most established beneficiaries of technological change. But by the time many of those companies are broadly owned, a meaningful share of the early value creation has already taken place. CERO is positioned differently. We provide market, Public market investors access to venture-backed private companies earlier in their life cycles before broad public ownership, and often the full scale of their long-term potential is reflected in market value. That matters because early in a company's life, innovation can be sharper, growth can be faster, strategic advantage can be more pronounced, and when those companies execute, the value creation can be extraordinary. Our responsibility is to identify those businesses carefully, invest with discipline, remain patient where conviction is high, and realize gains thoughtfully when liquidity opportunities emerge. We do not chase noise. We do not allocate capital for appearances. We focus on quality. We focus on asymmetry. And we focus on long-term shareholder value. When we look back on 2025, we believe the results speak clearly. Our stock price increased from $5.88 per share at year end to $9.44 at the end of 2025, an increase of over 60%. Including our $0.50 dividend per share declared and paid during the year, total shareholder return approximated 70%. That is a strong outcome. It reflects performance across the portfolio. It reflects disciplined capital allocation, and we believe it reflects increasing recognition of the value embedded in sero capital. Our net asset value also grew meaningfully. At the end of 24, our NAV was $6.68. By the end of 25, it had increased to $8.09, representing a year-over-year growth of approximately 21%. In addition, during 2025, we declared and paid $0.50 per share in cash dividends. On a dividend-adjusted basis, our December 31, 2025 NAV would have been only $8.59 per share, representing a year-over-year growth of approximately 29%. Again, a reported year in NAV MARC does not include the previously referenced potential increases in value from the 26 financings, which could contribute at least $5 per share and as much as $6.50 per share to our current net asset value. This is important because it reflects how we think about stewardship. We are committed not only to building value, but to realizing value, not only to compounding capital, but to returning capital when appropriate. Our objective is straightforward, to create durable long-term value for shareholders and do so with discipline, transparency, and accountability. At the same time, we continue to invest where conviction is strongest. Our recent commitment to TensorFlow is a good example. We believe TensorFlow is operating in a part of the market that stands to benefit directly from one of the most powerful secular trends in technology. rising demand for AI compute. TentaWave has deployed what the company described at the time as the world's largest liquid cool AMD GPU cluster and has continued to expand the footprint, including through two additional 10 megawatt deployments in Arizona and Pennsylvania. As customers seek performance, scale, and diversification in an increasingly important layer of the technology stack, we believe this company is well positioned. More broadly, we see further evidence of this trend in announcements such as Meta's recent multi-year agreement with AMD to support up to six gigawatts of AI infrastructure. This investment expands our exposure to AI infrastructure and reflects a broader principle that guides us. When the world is changing in a fundamental way, the companies enabling that change can become extraordinarily valuable. We intend to remain disciplined, but we also intend to be decisive when we see this kind of opportunity. So when I look at where Acero stands today, I see a company with momentum in the portfolio, meaningfully embedded upside, a strong liquidity position, and a strategy aligned with some of the most important innovation trends in the global economy. We are confident in what we own. We are disciplined in how we invest. We are thoughtful in how we realize gains. And we are clear about who we work for, our shareholders. Our mission is to give public access to exceptional private companies before they become broadly owned and to convert that access into long-term shareholder value through disciplined execution over time. That is what we are building. That is what we are focused on. And that is why we are excited about the road ahead. With that, I will turn the call over to Allison.