Good day, everyone, and welcome to the SuRo Capital First Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. During today’s presentation, all parties will be in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, the conference will be open for questions. This call is being recorded today, Wednesday, May 4, 2022. I’ll now turn the conference over to Willy Lee of SuRo Capital. Please go ahead, sir.

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, Allison 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 & Presentations. Today’s call is being recorded and broadcast live on our website, www.surocap.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 guarantees of our future performance or future financial conditions or results and involve a number of risks, estimates and uncertainties, including the impact of COVID-19 pandemic and 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 the SEC. Management does not undertake to update such forward-looking statements unless required to do so by law. To obtain the 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 would like to turn the call over to Mark Klein.

Thank you, Willy. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. We are pleased to share the results of SuRo Capital’s first quarter 2022. Volatile public markets coupled with a slowdown across the Board in late-stage venture capital and IPO activity have resulted in a quiet quarter for the firm. We did not make any new investments during the quarter. However, we continue to have a strong pipeline of opportunities available to us. Given current conditions, we believe that being judicious on pricing conviction when assessing a potential investment opportunity is paramount in our mission to create shareholder value. As of yesterday, on a year-to-date basis, the NASDAQ is down roughly 20% and the S&P 500 approximately 13%. Roughly 45% of the companies in the NASDAQ are down 50% or more, and more than 22% of companies in the NASDAQ are down 75% or more. We believe there will be opportunities for the firm to capitalize on as valuations resettle across various industry groups. And we remain excited about the prospects of our existing portfolio companies. With over $170 million of investible capital on hand as of quarter end, we are prepared to take advantage of our robust pipeline and execute on opportunities throughout the late-stage private venture environment. Despite significant declines and volatility in the public markets during the quarter, SuRo Capital achieved its highest dividend adjusted NAV per share. At the end of the quarter, SuRo Capital had a net asset value of approximately $381 million or $12.22 per share. The $12.22 per share net asset value is inclusive of an $0.11 per share dividend declared during the quarter and paid in April. This net asset value per share represents a $0.61 increase from the $11.61 dividend adjusted net asset value per share at the end of 2021.…

Thank you, Mark. I would like to follow Mark’s update with a more detailed review of our portfolio and financial results as of March 31, 2022. First, I will provide some additional detail on the share of repurchase program, please turn to Slide 5. As Mark mentioned, on March 13, our Board of Directors authorized a $15 million expansion to the Share Repurchase Program to $55 million. Under this expanded Share Repurchase Program, since the expansion, as of March 30, we were purchased 153,517 shares of our common stock for approximately $1.4 million. Subsequent to quarter end and pursuant to attend 10b5-1 purchase plan, we repurchased an additional 431,134 shares of our common stock for approximately $3.7 million. Since the expansion on March 13, we have repurchased a total of 584,651 shares of our common stock for a total of just over $5 million. Since the inception of the Share Repurchase Program in August 2017, we have repurchased a total of 5,407,983 shares of our common stock for a total deployment of approximately $35.4 million of the $55 million authorized by the Board. Approximately $19.6 million remains authorized under the Share Repurchase Program and is currently set to expire on October 31, 2022. Please turn to Slide 6. I will review our investment portfolio allocation by investment themes. Segmented by six general investment themes, the top allocation of our investment portfolio at quarter end is to financial technology and services representing approximately 41% of the investment portfolio at fair value. Education technology was the second largest category, representing approximately 34% of the portfolio. The marketplaces category accounted for approximately 16% of our investment portfolio and approximately 5% of our portfolio is invested in social and mobile companies. Cloud and big data accounted for approximately 4% of the fair value of…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And we’ll go first to Kevin Fultz of JMP Securities.

Hi, thank you. This is actually Michael Falco filling in for Kevin. Thanks for taking my question. I believe you talked on last quarter’s call about the significant opportunities that you’re seeing in sports technology and Web 3. You’re clearly already active in sports technology through SuRo Capital Sports, and have some exposure to Web through your investments in True Global Ventures. Just curious if you’re also currently evaluating direct investments in Web 3 companies or what the opportunity might look like there for SuRo in the future.

Thank you very much. A great question. So broadly, as you discussed in SuRo Sports, we are seeing an awful lot of opportunities and evaluating an awful lot. Obviously, the tailwinds behind the legalization of sports gambling and the technology that is ensuing behind it is truly fascinating. And when we get to spend a fair amount of time talking about it and it’s been fun. In respect to Web 3, et cetera, you’re right, we have a very small investment in TG, true global. They’ve had very good success with companies like Animoca and the Sandbox and some others. And we have setup and have spent a great deal of time starting to look at those other companies in that space broadly. There is obviously some pretty aggressive valuations that some of these companies are trying to attain. And we’re spending our time to figure out the right areas that we wanted to deploy capital and weigh that against the stretch valuations that are out there at the present time. Thank you for the question.

And next we’ll hear from Mark Palmer with BTIG. Please go ahead.

Yes. Thank you and thanks for taking my question. As you look across the landscape of investment opportunities right now, particularly in the public – I’m sorry, in the private space, what are you seeing in terms of the trend line on valuations, particularly in the private space and the verticals that you focus on? We all know what’s been going on in the public space, as you mentioned during your remarks, it’s been carnage. But what are you seeing on the private side and are there any indicators levels anything that you are watching for that would cause you to be more aggressive in deploying capital?

It’s a great question, Mark. And Mark, thanks as always for your support and helping out the team in various different verticals. We really appreciate that. As we’ve discussed in over the last few quarters, the public markets have tended to lead the private markets. And for a while, there was a bit of disconnect, where public markets were coming in and private markets where in some cases actually achieving valuations higher than previous valuations. And for the most part that is stalled. You’re seeing a lot of primary rounds done as extensions of the last round or in some sort of convertible securities that will be priced at a discount against a future round. And all of those are indications that the upward trend broadly in pricing, there’s obviously select companies that continue to have increasing valuations. But broadly, primary raises are coming in some sort of either structured security or flat. And where you’re really seeing degradation now is in the secondary markets. I think there are a lot of early investors and/or not necessarily so early investors in private companies that anticipated that the IPO market and the stock markets would continue to be robust and were reticent to sell their securities in that environment, because they thought they would be taken out at higher valuations. Given the virtual closing down of the IPO market and the significant decline in the public markets, the likelihood of a lot of those companies going public in the near future is much lower and valuations that they could achieve may not be the levels that they initially thought. So we are seeing secondaries come to us at significant discounts to the last round. And even when we’re not excited at that price point, that those same sellers come back to us again at lower price points, just trying to find a level. So we’re now at least it feels to us that you’re finally getting a break in sort of pricing that is more – is starting to parallel or converge if you will with the public markets. We’ve all been around long enough. They don’t ring a bell when you’re at the bottom. So what we’re trying to do is look at the public comps and see as the private comps come in line with those. And if they’re in industries that we like in companies that we like, then we’re inclined to engage and to initiate into conversations. And we’re in those right now. I mean there are now companies and that – and opportunities that are coming at valuations that are getting into the realm of what we believe is attractive. But thank you, Mark.

Thank you. Next we’ll hear from Jon Hickman of Ladenburg.

Hi. I dialed in late and I’m sorry if you talked about this on your main comments, but could you talk about your feelings of the SPAC market and what you think is going on there versus public and private valuations opportunities, et cetera?

Sure. And Jon, thanks again for your support and communications with the organization. We greatly appreciate it. The SPAC market, not unlike the IPO market as quieted down dramatically, maybe for some of the same reasons and some of the different reasons. I think capital formation and public valuations are making it more challenging to take companies public, either in a traditional way in IPO or a less traditional way through the SPAC. So I think the announcements of SPAC business combinations have slowed down dramatically for market conditions. I think secondarily the – secondly is better, but the SEC has come out with proposed guidance and regulations, which has caused uncertainty in the marketplace both from the sponsor side, from the potential merger targets, as well as from the legal community, accounting community and the banking community. So there’s a bit of a pause as those proposals turn into some sort of rules that, that may make it – may cause people just have to understand it before people – before deals can move forward. So I think it’s a combination of what’s going on in the public markets, degradation of value in the public markets. The IPO market quite slowing down, it’s consistent of the SPAC market and performance of some of the – of a lot of the post SPAC names that have gone through a SPAC process as they fit right in the middle of that part of NASDAQ that is broadly of have had got hit a bit harder than maybe the indices reflect and the regulatory environment. With that Jon really appreciate the question.

And at this time, there are no further questions. We’ll turn the conference back over to you, Mr. Klein for any additional or closing remarks.

Well, the whole SuRo team, thanks all of you shareholders on the call and those that are interested in our company. We appreciate taking the time out this afternoon to listen. And as always we’re available, if you have any further questions you might ask. Thank you again for your support.

And that does conclude today’s conference. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.