“They had to change their name,” a business professor told CNBC.com. “Their old name had negative value to it.”
Despite its recent name change, Yieldstreet continues to report losses to its investor clients, with CNBC.com reporting a new round of $41 million losses from real estate deals that are in default.
Yieldstreet launched 10 years ago with the mission to widen access to alternative investments to Mainstreet investors. This fall, it changed its name to Willow Wealth.
“As Yieldstreet tries to distance itself from a rocky past with a new name and ad campaign, its customers are dealing with a present reality that is increasingly dire,” according to the report.
“The private markets investing startup, freshly rebranded as Willow Wealth, last week informed customers of new defaults on real estate projects in Houston and Nashville, Tennessee, according to the report. “The letters, obtained and verified by CNBC, account for about $41 million in new losses.”
“They come on the heels of $89 million in marine loan wipeouts disclosed in September and $78 million in losses revealed by CNBC in an August report,” according to the business news website. “In total, Willow Wealth investors have lost at least $208 million, according to CNBC reporting.”
Yieldstreet, which has a FINRA registered broker-dealer and registered investment advisor with $1.86 billion in client assets, bills itself on its website as a “Leading Alternative Investments Platform.”
The online company was founded 10 years ago by Michael Weisz and Milind Mehere, and the company has several well-known venture capital backers.
According to the CNBC.com report, Willow Wealth also removed a decade of historical performance data from public view in recent weeks.
A chart on the company’s website showing annualized returns of negative 2% for real estate investments from 2015 to 2025 — down from 9.4% gains just two years prior — has been taken down.
“They had to change their name,” Mark Williams, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, told the business news website. “Their old name had negative value to it, so they’re trying to do a 2.0 to restart things. They’re also making it harder to uncover their poor performance by removing the stats, which is alarming.”
The high-stakes rebranding is the latest chapter for a company that sought to empower retail investors, but instead left some of them saddled with deep losses and years of uncertainty, according to the report.
Over the summer, one senior alternative investments executive who spoke to InvestmentNews privately about the matter said: “These problems at Yieldstreet look like customers investing in things they don’t understand. And they’re investing without the proper financial advice, based on the pitch of higher returns.”
A spokesperson for Willow Wealth did not return a call on Friday to comment.
On Thursday, the company announced it was giving investors direct access to three new evergreen funds on its platform from Carlyle, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, and StepStone. Together, the three funds represent more than $11.7 billion in AUM across private credit, private equity, and private real estate.