Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to SuRo Capital's First Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. During today's presentation all parties will be in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, the conference will be open for questions. This call is being recorded today, Wednesday, May 5, 2021. I will now turn the conference over to today's speaker, Adam Bates of SuRo Capital. Please go ahead.

Thank you for joining us on today's call. I'm 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 that corresponds to today's prepared remarks by management is available on our website at www.surocap.com under Investor Relations, Events and 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 condition or results and involve a number of risks, estimates, and uncertainties, including the impact of the COVID-19 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 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, Adam. We are pleased to share the results of SuRo Capital’s first quarter of 2021. These are obviously unprecedented times we’re living through. But, we are pleased to see indicators of a post-pandemic recovery throughout the economy. As a number of fully vaccinated individuals increase, we are hopeful that the end of the pandemic is in sight. Today, I will discuss how our portfolio has fared during the first four months of the year, highlighting how a few of our larger positions have continued to exhibit acceleration in their business. To conclude, I'll hand the call over to Allison Green for a brief financial overview. At the conclusion of our remarks, we will open the call for questions. Let's start with slide 3. This quarter, SuRo Capital reached, both our highest absolute and highest dividend-adjusted net asset value per share since inception. At March 31, 2021, net asset value was $18.01 per share, inclusive of dividends declared during the quarter totaling $0.50 per share. This is an increase from $15.14 per share at December 31, 2020. As of March 31, 2021, net assets totaled approximately $436 million compared to $302 million at year-end. Consistent with our desire to be shareholder-friendly and our continued practice of distributing realized gains, on May 4th, SuRo Capital's Board of Directors declared a $2.50 per share dividend to shareholders. This dividend will be payable on June 30th to shareholders of record on May 18th. Our Board is offering shareholders the option to elect to take as much as 100% of their dividend in stock and has kept the aggregate cash dividend to 50% of the total dividends payable. This $2.50 per share dividend follows the $0.25 per share dividend declared on January 26th and paid on February 19th, and the $0.25 per share…

Thank you, Mark. I would like to follow Mark's update with a more detailed review of our first quarter investment activity and financial results as of March 31, including results of our redemption notice for the 4.75% convertible senior notes due March 2021, recently declared dividend, our current liquidity position and details of the upcoming Annual Shareholder Meeting. First, I will review our investment activity. During the first quarter, we invested a total of $9.5 million in new and follow-on investments. New investments during the quarter include a $200,000 investment in the share units and warrant of Churchill Capital Sponsor VI of the sponsor vehicle for Churchill Capital VI and a $300,000 investment in share units and warrant units of Churchill Sponsor VII of the sponsor vehicle for Churchill Capital VII. A $7 million investment in the Series B1 and Series B2 preferred shares of Shogun Enterprises, the funding of a $500,000 capital call related to our $10 million commitment to Architect Capital PayJoy SPV and a $1 million investment in a simple agreement for future equity or space in BettorView via our $10 million wholly-owned subsidiary SuRo Capital Sports. During the quarter, we also funded a follow-on investment of approximately $500,000 in the common shares of GreenAcreage Real Estate Corp., now known as NewLake Capital Partners. Please turn to Slide 11. During the first quarter, we sold our remaining unrestricted publicly traded Class A common shares of Palantir. On September 30, 2020, Palantir Technologies completed its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker PLTR. Upon IPO, 80% of our shares remained restricted until the lockup period expired on February 18, 2021. After selling our initial 20% portion of unrestricted shares in 2020, and once the remaining 80% of our shares became unrestricted in mid-February of this…

[Operator Instructions] And we'll go first to Devin Ryan of JMP Securities.

This is Kevin Fultz on for Devin Ryan. Looking at SuRo Capital Sports, the vehicle has $10 million of committed capital and has invested $1 million to-date, can you just talk about expectations around the investment cadence there and if you view the $10 million of capital as an initial investment with expectations for further -- sorry, for future growth beyond that?

That's a great question. We're obviously very excited about -- and it's not a unique view of the direction of sports betting and the adoption of sports betting throughout the country and looking for opportunities to capitalize on that. We have looked at probably a couple of dozen companies to-date and we will -- we see them on a very regular basis. I think this is an initial investment of $10 million over several companies with the anticipation that those companies would continue to raise money and then we will continue to participate in that. The sports betting industry is largely fragmented, there are obviously very large players in the space than a lot of smaller ones, and we are spending our time to try to identify them and participate. In the case of BettorView, not only are we an investor, but we are also -- were able to garner Board membership as well.

And now we will take a question from Howard Kaminsky of Kaminsky Family LLC.

I'll limit this to one question, but I have a couple of them. On Page 4 of the presentation, you noted the valuation of Course Hero at $32.5 million, that's $2.5 million less than what was disclosed in the 10-K, given all of the positive attributes and news concerning Coursera, as well as the online education space in general, why did you take the markdown in value?

Great question and thank you for that. We have a very stringent set of heuristics that we apply against our evaluations, which start with transactions in secondary -- either primary transactions, primary capital raises and over time, we had tried that as part of our valuation mechanism and either move to where there are secondary trades and/or public comps that influence that. In the case of Course Hero, there were those secondary transactions that were occurring, that greatly influenced the valuation for this quarter. So that's why you ended up with a modest write-down in Course Hero. I think, it is counter-intuitive giving -- given the success of the Coursera IPO, as well as names like Chegg and their success. But -- we are very stringent about our valuation, consistent with it, we have an independent valuation firm in Anderson and our auditors, Marcum also point our valuation as well as the valuation committee within the Board.

And now, we will go to Jon Hickman of Ladenburg.

I guess my question is mostly for Allison. The last page of the presentation, where you walk through the NAV, I'm a little confused, I don't see where the gain from Coursera -- the unrealized gain from Coursera factors into your calculations. Can you walk me through that?

Let me just pull out my pen, okay, so I can help you a little bit more here. I believe, the unrealized -- because the -- with Palantir leading unrealized, since we realized Palantir during the first quarter, that kind of created a nice little vacuum out of the unrealized gain that kind of covered the increase in gain from Coursera. So that can kind of covered it and made the net unrealized gain for the quarter about 1.3 and then you'll see the major Palantir gain reflected in the realized gains.

And that was all the questions that we had. I would like to turn the call back to our speakers for any additional or closing comments.

Well, as always, we like -- we would like to thank all of you for taking the time to listen to this call, for being investors and for supporting SuRo Capital. If any of you have additional questions, feel free to reach out to Allison or myself and we're happy to have a conversation. Again, thank you very much for your time and effort, we really appreciate it. Thank you. Bye.

And with that everyone, that does conclude today's call. We'd like to thank you again for your participation. You may now disconnect.