Crowd Street is taking concrete steps to expand its business beyond commercial real estate.
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The popular crowdfunding platform, which rebranded itself from CrowdStreet in May, is partnering with Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America subsidiary Nuveen and private markets investment firm StepStone Group. For the first time, Crowd Street is offering private market investments outside of commercial real estate, according to a press release.
The partnership will expand “access beyond the commercial real estate asset class, and will accelerate our vision of self-directed private market investing into a reality,” Crowd Street CEO John Imbriglia said.
Nuveen, which manages $1.3T in assets, will launch two funds on Crowd Street. The first is a $2B fund that provides private investors access to U.S. middle-market companies and will be available this fall. The second funds for Nuveen and StepStone are anticipated to launch later this year, a Crowd Street representative confirmed to Bisnow.
StepStone, which has $189B of assets under management, is also launching two funds. One fund will be focused on private equity, and the other will be focused on venture capital.
The move comes after Crowd Street, then under its old handle, navigated some PR headaches. In 2023, it was revealed that Nightingale Properties CEO Elie Schwartz used the platform to defraud more than 800 investors out of $63M, ostensibly for properties in Miami Beach and Atlanta. Schwartz is serving a seven-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to wire fraud earlier this year.
The crowdfunding platform was hit with a $1B class-action suit in March from three investors who claimed it didn’t do enough to prevent Schwartz from defrauding them. The suit was paused in August to allow individual arbitration.
Over the summer, the company has made some other steps to position itself outside of real estate. In March, Crowd Street moved its headquarters from Austin to New York City to be closer to Wall Street. In June, Imbriglia told Street Fight that the company planned to introduce investment funds beyond commercial real estate by the end of this year.
Crowd Street tapped employee-owned investment consulting firm Callan in August to help review and conduct due diligence for investment opportunities in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, venture capital and commercial real estate.
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