ANGEL INVESTMENTS

My name is Sophia and I’m a NYC based startup angel investor as well as a Principal investor (focused on PropTech, FinTech, and InsureTech) at Nine Four Ventures, a real estate technology focused venture fund backed by strategically relevant institutional stakeholders (i.e. owners/operators, banks, insurers, suppliers, etc) across sectors and asset classes.

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My background is in startups (i.e. was at both Compass and Select pre-launch) and in real estate (i.e. was a project manager at a real estate development consulting firm called TMD). After over 3 years at TMD, I decided to pursue an MBA at Columbia Business School and work on an idea I had for a social planning app (think: Doodle meets Eventbrite, powered by an Ai assistant). I focused my studies on Entrepreneurship, Finance, Technology, and Venture Capital and used my learnings to incubate and launch an MVP of my app, Rally. 

Although I eventually decided to shut Rally down, I learned a lot along the way and used those insights to start angel investing. I started with a pre-seed investment in Caraway Home in January 2019. A few months earlier, I had also dipped my toe in the institutional investing world through an internship at Metaprop (an early stage PropTech Accelerator and VC fund). Soon after the internship, I was pitched Branch Furniture by one of the Co-founders who was also a classmate of mine. I knew the team was on to something! Fast forward and I made my second angel investment, in addition to receiving advisor status at the company after helping to raise the majority of their seed round. 

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Upon graduating from CBS, I started my full time role at Nine Four Ventures (who was just getting started), where I work on everything from sourcing to diligence to portfolio management to marketing and new initiatives, and everything in between.

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Throughout the years, I’ve cultivated a vast network of people in/around the startup ecosystem (i.e. founders, VC funds, angel investors, corporates, branding agencies, PR firms, VC and startup lawyers, etc) across industries and leverage those relationships as well as operational expertise and go to market best practices to help add value to every company I invest in (...and many that I don't! I've helped countless startups raise venture funding). 

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*Feel free to ask me for references!