208 million wiped out

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/05/yieldstreet-investors-losses-willow-wealth-rebrand.html

• Private markets investing startup Yieldstreet, now calling itself Willow Wealth, recently informed customers of new defaults on real estate projects in Houston and Nashville, Tennessee.
• 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 previously reported by CNBC.
• Willow Wealth also removed a decade of historical performance data from public view in recent weeks.
• 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 losses and years of uncertainty.

 

Hampton Dumpty is the new corporate mascot for Willow Wealth, formerly known as Yieldstreet. The company is rebranding as its customers reel from investment losses.

Source: 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.

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, CNBC has learned.

 

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.

In total, Willow Wealth investors have lost at least $208 million, according to CNBC reporting.

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,” said Mark Williams, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. “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.

 

Under its former name, Willow Wealth — backed by prominent venture firms and buoyed by aggressive online marketing — had been the best known of a wave of American startups that promised to broaden access to the alternative investments that are the domain of institutions and rich families.

But the still-unfolding collapse of its real estate funds demonstrates the risks the private markets hold for retail investors. By their very nature, private investments don’t trade on exchanges and lack standardized disclosures. That leaves investors especially reliant on private fund managers, both for information and to safeguard their interests for years while their money is locked up in deals.

Private markets have gained in prominence this year after President Donald Trump signed an executive order to allow the investments in retirement plans.

While critics say that opaque, illiquid investments with high management fees aren’t appropriate for ordinary investors, asset managers including BlackRock and Apollo Global Management see retail as a vast untapped pool of capital. Retirement giant Empower said in May that it would allow private assets into the 401(k) plans of participating employers with help from firms including Apollo and Goldman Sachs.

New mascot, same pitch

Against this backdrop, Willow Wealth CEO Mitch Caplan, a former E-Trade chief who took the helm in May, said the company was heading toward a new model. Instead of only offering deals sourced by the startup, it would also sell private market funds from Wall Street giants including Goldman and Carlyle Group.

The company no longer provides the historical performance of its offerings because of the pivot to third party-managed funds, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who asked for anonymity to discuss internal strategy.

“Transparency is paramount to us, and we consistently provide strategy-specific performance information for each manager at the offering level to support informed decision making,” said a Willow Wealth spokeswoman.