Donna Cangelosi
Co-Founder & Chief Investment Officer
Donna Cangelosi is BuildUp Capital’s co-founder and Chief Investment Officer — a court-appointed federal trustee and a two-decade veteran of secured real-estate lending. A landmark investor-advocacy fight reshaped how she underwrites, and she now leads BuildUp’s underwriting and portfolio discipline.
Donna’s career began in technology, where she was one of the first women selling enterprise computer systems, then went on to help scale fast-growing companies before building and selling her own — including a Silicon Valley company that grew to hundreds of employees before its exit. That operator’s-eye view of how real businesses are built, financed, and sometimes broken is the lens she brings to every loan BuildUp underwrites.
The experience that defined her approach came out of one of the largest private-lending collapses in U.S. history. When a major hard-money lender failed, thousands of individual lenders — many of them retirees whose savings were secured by a portfolio of real-estate loans — stood to lose everything. Donna became their advocate: organizing lenders across the country, fighting a multi-year court battle against the hedge fund that sought to put its own fees ahead of their principal, and ultimately being appointed by the court as a federal trustee to take over and work out the entire portfolio on their behalf. A federal judge who had once ruled against her reversed course and apologized in open court once the facts came out.
That fight taught her what the marketing around private lending often hides: the structure only protects people if it is underwritten honestly. She came away convinced that the two things that matter most on any loan are rigorous due diligence and a clear, credible exit — and deeply skeptical of brokers who chase origination and underwriting fees while putting the lender’s capital second. At BuildUp, that conviction is the model: we invest our own capital alongside every loan, we underwrite the business and the exit rather than the collateral alone, and we treat investors’ capital the way she describes it — as sacred.
Career & credentials
- Co-Founder & Chief Investment Officer, BuildUp Capital
- Two decades in hard money and secured real-estate lending
- Court-appointed federal trustee — took over and worked out defaulted private-lending portfolios
- Technology entrepreneur — built and sold multiple companies, including a Silicon Valley exit
- Investor advocate in a landmark private-lending bankruptcy
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