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Cohen's Point72 Unit Backs Real Estate Investing Firm AlphaFlow

Cohen’s unit is leading the round alongside Resolute Ventures, a VC firm that specializes in early-stage investments, according to a statement Wednesday.

(Bloomberg)—Point72Ventures, the venture arm of Steve Cohen’s family office, is one of two firms leading a $4.1 million seed investment round in AlphaFlow, a real estate firm that creates portfolios of short-term loans for investors.

Cohen’s unit is leading the round alongside Resolute Ventures, a VC firm that specializes in early-stage investments, according to a statement Wednesday. Other investors include Silicon Valley mainstays such as Social Capital and Y Combinator, the release said.

San Francisco-based AlphaFlow, which buys debt from lenders in various cities, aims to build more liquid and diversified portfolios for investors than marketplace or traditional lenders offer.

“What they saw in us was a different way of looking at this industry, going beyond the marketplace model as an asset class consumable by RIAs and wealth managers," AlphaFlow Chief Executive Officer Ray Sturm said in an interview.

The asset manager will use the funding to build its team, particularly groups in data science and engineering responsible for analytics and investment algorithms, Sturm said. It intends to roughly double its staff to 15 over the next year.

Cohen’s venture unit targets fintech enterprise and artificial intelligence startups. Operational database company Fauna Inc. announced last week that Point72 Ventures had led a $25 million investment round alongside investors including GV, formerly Google Ventures. The Point72 unit has also invested in crowd-sourced hedge fund Quantopian and cloud communications service provider Cloud9 Technologies.

A spokesman for Point72 Ventures declined to comment.

To contact the reporter on this story: Simone Foxman in New York at [email protected] To contact the editors responsible for this story: Margaret Collins at [email protected] Vincent Bielski, Alan Mirabella

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