Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Silver Spike Investment Corp.'s first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To remove yourself from the queue, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Umesh Mahajan , Chief Financial Officer. Please begin, sir.
Thank you, Norma. Good morning. This is Umesh Mahajan , CFO of Silver Spike Investment Corp. With me here today is Scott Gordon , CEO of Silver Spike Investment Corp. Welcome to Silver Spike's earnings conference call and live webcast for the first quarter of 2023. Silver Spike's financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2023 were released yesterday and can be accessed from our website at ssic.silverspikecap.com. A replay of this call will also be available on our website. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that certain statements that are not based on historical facts made during this call, including any statements related to financial guidance, may be deemed forward-looking statements under the Federal Securities laws.
Because these forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, there are important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. We encourage you to refer to our most recent SEC filings for information on some of these risk factors. Silver Spike assumes no obligation or responsibility to update any forward-looking statements. Please note that the information reported on this call speaks only as of today, May 12, 2023. Therefore, you're advised that time-sensitive information may no longer be accurate at the time of any replay or transcript reading. With that said, good morning again, and thank you all for joining. We released our earnings results yesterday, and there's a management presentation deck attached to the earnings release as well.
Those who have joined us on this earnings webcast should be able to access this presentation live. You'll find the link to the deck in the Form 8-K also that was filed yesterday or this morning. We may refer to the slides by numbers just for your reference as we go through the presentation. Turning to page 3 of the presentation, financial highlights for the first quarter 2023. As you can see in the first column, we had a gross investment income of $2.5 million. Expenses of approximately $1.1 million gives us net investment income of $1.4 million. Net investment income per share of $0.22 for this quarter. Net assets at the end of the period of $88.8 million versus $86.5 million at the end of last quarter.
The net asset value per share at the end of the period was $14.29 versus $13.91 at the end of last quarter. The increase in gross investment income reflects the ramp-up in our portfolio. We made one new investment during this quarter, and the gross investment income reflects the interest we have earned on that investment for this quarter. We'll discuss the portfolio and the pipeline in more detail in subsequent slides. Before I do that, to expand a little bit more on the Silver Spike story and the market opportunity, I'll turn it over to Scott Gordon , our CEO.
Thank you, Umesh. Good morning, everyone. Just to remind folks, we are a BDC focused on lending to the cannabis sector, predominantly in the US market. We believe that lending to cannabis companies is a compelling investment opportunity with attractive yields and limited competition. We also feel that lending to cannabis requires intense focus and specialization, given the myriad of regulatory, legal, and operating complexities that exist in the space. At Silver Spike, we have a team of experienced professionals with extensive backgrounds in both credit and cannabis to execute on our mandate. We continue to benefit from an excellent vintage of lending to the cannabis sector currently. Previous vintages of cannabis loans did not afford the same opportunity that we are seeing today with respect to pricing, terms, and overall structure.
We remain focused on finding the very best operators in the industry in every jurisdiction and provide them with growth capital. We structure our investments appropriately and carefully and do not take or rely on any equity sweeteners to obtain our returns. Our loans are typically made to borrowers with very low leverage. Lastly, our objective is to create a diversified portfolio of investments offering high quality risk at an attractive yield to our shareholders. With that, I will pass it back to Umesh. Thank you.
Thank you, Scott . Turning to page 8, which talks about sourcing and origination. On the origination front, we do have, at Silver Spike, an extensive network of contacts within the industry, which has been built over the years through our partners' operating experience in the industry. As a result, we've been able to originate and lead deals that are much larger than what we would otherwise be able to do based on the size of our BDC. We are very pleased with the pipeline of opportunities in front of us. To date, till March 31st, we have seen over $7.3 billion of transactions. As of March 31, we were actively looking at a pipeline of over $670 million of transactions. Where we were engaged with these potential borrowers.
We feel good about the opportunity set. Moving to the next page, SSIC portfolio summary. It shows our portfolio summary as of May 5th. On this list, you can see companies A and B are Shrine and PharmaCann, which are investments we made earlier, during 2022. Company C shows Ayr's 12.5% secured bonds. Company D shows Curaleaf's 8% secured bonds. These were investments made at a significant discount to their par values. Our last three investments on this page are floating rate loans. With Prime currently at 8.25%, these investments offer an attractive return at this point. Company E is of our large investments in Verano's first lien term loan, a transaction that was completed in October last year.
In the first quarter of this year, we made an investment in MedMen, shown as company F. We talked about this investment in our last earnings call. It's a three-year first lien senior secured term loan, with Prime plus 5.75% cash and 1.4% PIC. Subsequent to the end of the quarter, in first week of May of this year, we made an additional investment in Greenfield Brands, shown as company G. The company's brand, Jeeter, is one of the most recognized cannabis brands, especially in the pre-roll cannabis product category. We believe this loan also offers an excellent and attractive yield on our investment.
Overall, if you look at the top of the page, we have almost $60 million invested within weighted average yield to maturity of almost 17.7%. This is all, as Scott mentioned, it's all fixed income-based. It does not include, we do not take any equity sweeteners on our transactions. Neither does it include any upside that can potentially come through prepayments, purely fixed income return. We believe that our portfolio has companies that are very well-positioned in the industry for the longer term, and at the same time, offer a really attractive yield on our investment. We've been very busy working on a number of very interesting opportunities.
We're excited about the pipeline that we're currently working on, and we hope to have more updates as we continue to deploy our capital and build a high-quality portfolio. I also wanted to briefly address the important topic of dividends. As we have mentioned in our previous calls, our goal is to announce a regular recurring dividend when we are nearly fully invested. Now that we are approaching 70% deployment, evaluating a dividend policy has become a key priority for management and the board. Also, I would highlight that we are required to distribute at least 90% of the income earned during the tax year, which ended on March 31, 2023 for us. We now have the audited results for that period, and we are finalizing the necessary calculations for the associated amount of dividend.
Our board will be evaluating our dividend policy. We should have an update for you on our next call. With that, I'll pass it on to the operator. Norma?
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you'll need to press star one one on your telephone. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please wait for your name to be announced. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. One moment for our first question. Our first question comes from the line of Michael Lavery with Piper Sandler. Your line is open.
Thank you. Good morning.
Good morning, Michael. How are you?
Good. Yeah. Just was wondering if you could give us maybe a little bit of the state of the industry. You're in a kind of a unique position to really see all across it and just maybe how it's evolving and then what the key implications are from that for your business.
I'm sorry. Michael, can you repeat the question? It wasn't coming in clear on our end.
Sorry, yeah. Just given, you know, how many operators you are in contact with, you know, you seem like you have a unique perspective on the industry overall. Just was wondering if you could give a sense of how you see the market evolving and what that means for you. Obviously, you're pointing to some stronger pricing and, you know, that's one of the aspects of it. But just curious, sort of, you know, at a high level, what you're seeing across the industry and then some of what that means for your business.
Okay, let me start, and I'll pass it on to Scott. In terms of the market, I mean, we all know that the market did take a significant turn in the second half of 2022, not just from the point of view of what we saw as valuations for the company, but also at the industry level. This was reflected in the wholesale pricing that we saw across the markets. If we split that further and dig into those pricing trends, you'll notice that a lot of the pricing decline happened in cycles. The extremely competitive markets, the likes of California, Oregon, Nevada, they saw a large wholesale decline earlier in this phase.
We have now reached a point where some of those markets have arguably hit a bottom and have started coming back up. California did see a bounce back. In the limited license markets, like maybe Illinois, Massachusetts, Connecticut, we're still going through that decline phase of wholesale prices going down. What that does is, it makes the operators think about what how they should position themselves. The earlier era of 2021 and early 2022, where they, where they were all just chasing revenue for the sake of revenues, are now thinking, looking inward, and trying to figure out what are the cost reduction strategies, what are the most effective competitive strategies.
As a result, we are in a better position to have a clearer understanding of which companies are positioned well, which companies are not positioned well. As we see this dynamic play out, yes, some of the good operators are taking the measures to cut their costs, slow down their CapEx deployment, and we view that as a positive. We like the fact that they are taking a step back. It may mean that some of the capital raises that these companies were planning get pushed out by a quarter. At the end of all of it's actually good for the industry, it's good for us. We do have an optimistic view in terms of where this is gonna end up by the end of this year or next year.
This process of correction in many ways was much needed. We think that we are right at the or if not at the bottom, we are pretty close to the bottom in terms of correction, we should start things improving over the next couple of quarters. Scott, do you wanna add?
Yeah. No, I think Umesh, you covered most of it. I, you know, there's still, I think, you know, a fair amount of consolidation that has yet to occur in the industry. You know, while I think Umesh was reflecting more of the end market trends, I think, you know, you'll continue to see a fair amount of consolidation, as well as, you know, just a number of operators who are dropping off and shuttering. I would just, you know, add to the sort of industry comments, you know, in terms of what we see on the capital market side. As you know, Michael, it still remains very much in the doldrums, you know, just in terms of, you know, the general sentiment out there towards the sector.
And, and, you know, the capital availability, I would characterize still as extremely constrained, you know, both as it relates to sort of public equity, private equity, as well as the availability of credit capital. I mean, that sort of works in our favor, obviously, is it, you know, affords us, you know, the ability to really be selective and pick and choose and dictate terms in a way that, you know, we might not be able to in a more competitive environment. And, you know, the beat goes on there. We, we haven't really seen any, you know, meaningful change in trend in terms of capital formation or flow into the sector.
Okay, thanks. That's great color. Thanks so much.
Thank you. At this time, I'd like to hand the conference back over to Umesh Mahajan for closing remarks.
Thank you, Norma. Thank you everyone for joining us on this call. We look forward to speaking with you again on our next call and give you an update on our business and our strategy going forward. Thank you very much.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a wonderful day.