Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the SuRo Capital Second Quarter 2021 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, August 4, 2021. I will now turn the conference over to speaker, Claire Councill 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 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 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 reflective and/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, Claire. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. We are pleased to share the results of SuRo Capital's second quarter 2021. Today I will discuss how our portfolios performed in the second quarter. This has been one of the most exciting quarters to-date for our fund, ranging from portfolio exits to exciting investment opportunities in various different verticals. Five of our portfolio companies have announced intentions to either become publicly traded companies by either a SPAC merger or traditional IPO. One portfolio company announced it intends to be acquired, and we expect the lock-up on remaining Coursera shares to expire imminently. On the investment side, we continue to evaluate exciting new opportunities in the market. In this quarter alone, we sourced and performed diligence on more opportunities than any other prior quarter. I am excited to share in more detail our performance over this quarter, and then we'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 our highest dividend adjusted net asset value per share since inception, beating the record marks we set in both Q4 2020 and Q1 2021. As of June 30, 2021 net asset value was $16.56 per share, which is $1.05 increase on a dividend adjusted basis from the prior quarter. As of June 30, 2021, net assets totaled approximately $440 million compared to $436 million in the first quarter. On August 3, SuRo Capital's Board of Directors, consistent with our desire to be shareholder friendly, and our continued practice of distributing realized gains declared a $2.25 cent per share dividend to shareholders. This dividend will be payable on September 30 to shareholders of record on…

Thank you, Mark. I would like to follow Mark's update with a more detailed review of our second quarter investment activity and financial results as of June 30, including recently declared dividends and our current liquidity position. First, I will review our investment activity, please turn to slide 12. During the second quarter we invested a total of $29.8 million in new and follow on investments. New investments during the quarter include a $2.7 million investment in the class B and class W unit of Columbier Sponsor LLC, the sponsor vehicle for Columbier Acquisition Corp; a $10 million investment in class A common shares of Churchill Capital II, whose shares subsequently converted to Skillsoft Corp. common shares after the completion of the business combination between these entities; a $10 million investment in the common shares and the Investec preferred shares of Trax, additional funding an aggregate $2.1 million related to capital calls from our $10 million commitment to Architect Capital PayJoy SPV, $5.1 million of which has been funded to date, and an additional follow-on investment of $5 million in the series C preferred shares of Blink Health. Obviously, all of the SPAC activity in our portfolio is highly accretive, that these transactions are evolving, multistage and highly complex and nuanced in nature. We've spent a great deal of time with our Valuation Committee, our independent valuation firm and our auditors to determine the appropriate fair value for these investments. And all parties are in full agreement on the valuations as presented in the financial statements to be included in our Form 10-Q filing for the second quarter of 2021. During this process, the fair value of two of our portfolio companies currently in the process of a SPAC merger were found to initially had misaligned current value per share…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And first we'll go to Kevin Fultz from JMP Securities. Your line is open.

Good afternoon, and thank you for taking my question. Could you provide some commentary on the private code strategy and your satisfaction with investment opportunities and the deal flow that you're seeing there and possibly also touching on the cadence of investment activity we should expect over the next few quarters? Thank you.

Sure. We are actively seeing flow in the private creditors' credit strategy be bespoke and absolutely proprietary. We continue to evaluate opportunities and have seen as good a set of deal flow in that as we would have anticipated and are evaluating several as we speak. Thank you.

And we'll pause just for a moment to compose our other questions. Right, and it looks like next we'll go to Alex Paris from Barrington Research. Your line is open.

Hey, guys, thanks for taking my question. Just had a couple, there's a lot of information obviously within the prepared comments. First off on Coursera, how many shares did you say you have currently after selling the first tranche earlier this year?

Wait, well, we did say, Alex -- and thank you for your question. We have $87 million worth price of $39.56 as of last quarter during the last quarter plus a discount. Allison, if you have the exact count.

So we've retained 75% of our initial position. So we have remaining 2,346,271 remaining corporate shares, as of security and as of today that we feel will be freely tradable on Friday. Thank you.

Next we'll go to Jon Hickman from Ladenburg. Your line is open.

Could you could you run through the Skillsoft thing? Again, you participated in a PIPE and in return you got shares of the merged company. And when will those be freely traded tradable, I mean?

Sure, we made a commitment to invest in a PIPE in Skillsoft, which is Churchill Capital. Two at the end of last year, we joined process who did a $500 million part of the pipeline. Obviously there are large and well respected investor in online learning and other digital strategies. That merger was completed earlier this earlier at the end of Q2, and the registration statement has just been filed and is not deemed effective yet. And once it's deemed effective we'd be able to freely trade it. Thank you, John.

And next we'll go to Mihir Meswani from HMC Capital. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the call. Just a quick question with regard to current share price. I think you closed today a little over $12.24. Any plans on doing a stock buyback to close the roughly 28% discount?

Sure. Thank you for your question. As you know, we have actively been involved in buying back stock through direct buybacks or through tenders. We still have a fairly large approved buyback available to us by our Board of Directors. I think we've demonstrated in the past that we've utilized that, where we're we believe that was the most appropriate use of our capital to drive the share count when it made sense. We will continue to evaluate that. Obviously, we are in a situation we're actually doing a great deal of distributions, having just distributing $5.25 to our shareholders as well. We believe that our communication strategy, our investment performance, should take hold, as well. But we actively always were looking at the best way to enhance shareholder value. And we obviously have deployed, share, buy up share buybacks is one of the methodologies to achieve that. Thank you.

Next, we'll go to Lou Greif from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

On regulations, but about the pipeline, I think about [Technical difficulty]

So thanks for calling, Lou. Unfortunately, you're coming in and out. But I think you're asking me if we have the ability to deploy the capital that we have, is our pipeline robust enough to be able to do that, given market conditions, etc. At the onset of my prepared remarks, we're seeing more opportunities than ever before, in this quarter, this is the most opportunities that we've evaluated and diligence than, we've done ever. So our deal flow is extremely robust. We are obviously selective and judicious in the deployment of our capital, given where markets are and what our valuation is, but our competence to be able to deploy the capital or opportunities to deploy the capital is extremely high. But we are conscious on valuation, and we make sure that we do it in an appropriate fashion. Thank you.

And at this time, I'll turn it back to management for closing remarks.

Well, thank you all very much. It was a lengthy call, we appreciate it. Obviously, there is an awful lot going on in our portfolio. We're very fortunate to have the successes that we've been enjoying, and that -- in the recent successes and numerous of our portfolio companies either being acquired or going public, we do find the investment pipeline to be as robust or more robust than ever. And we are highly excited and highly engaged about the future of our fund. So we appreciate all your support and thank you all for taking the time to be with us this afternoon.

This does conclude our call for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.