Team & Operating Bench

Human judgment, at machine speed.

Cohort Capital is a human-led, AI-accelerated credit and growth platform. Our partners own every decision that moves capital. Our agent bench compresses cycle time, expands diligence coverage, and monitors the portfolio continuously — auditable end to end.

3 leaders · 27 specialized agents · 1 shared data fabric

A Van Dyke Acquisitions company.

Leadership

The people who own the judgment

Operators and investors who have built, financed, and scaled consumer businesses — accountable for strategy, capital, credit, risk, and fiduciary duty.

Peter Griscom

Chairman of the Board

Founder, Principal & Executive Chairman of Van Dyke Acquisitions. His work spans building, acquiring, operating, and financing consumer businesses.

OwnsInvestment strategy · capital formation · credit philosophy · portfolio construction · Investment Committee oversight.

Forrest A. Smith

Operating Partner — AI & Growth Systems

15+ years leading marketing, e-commerce, and performance teams. Former global head of performance marketing and a recognized thought leader on AI-enabled growth and digital operating systems.

OwnsAI architecture · growth diligence · incrementality systems · performance-marketing evaluation · portfolio optimization.

Conrad F. Smith J.D., M.A.

Partner — Operations, Finance & Risk

15 years leading operations, finance, compliance, and risk for leading performance-marketing agencies and growth organizations.

OwnsOperating controls · risk monitoring · compliance workflows · financial diligence · documentation oversight · fund-level governance.

Track record

The numbers behind the judgment

Experience financing and supporting consumer businesses, brought to a focused cohort-financing platform.

$180M+

Capital deployed

at the founding team's prior firm

120+

Brands backed

at the founding team's prior firm

Capital-deployed and brands-backed figures reflect activity at the founding team's prior firm. These are historical activity figures, not Cohort Capital fund returns or a commitment to fund.

Human-led, AI-accelerated.

The agent bench does not replace Investment Committee judgment, legal review, or fiduciary responsibility. It compresses cycle time, expands coverage, raises monitoring frequency, and builds an auditable operating system across origination, underwriting, funding, servicing, reporting, and compliance.

The team owns

JudgmentFiduciary dutyCapital decisionsCredit approvalLegal review

The bench owns

SpeedCoverageRepeatabilityAuditabilityContinuous learning

Financing scenarios

Where the structure can help

Illustrative use case · DTC beauty

Fund repeat purchase

A beauty brand with repeat-purchase customers can separate the economics of new acquisition from the working capital needed for inventory and fulfillment.

Illustrative use case · Apparel & accessories

Plan around seasonality

For a seasonal brand, a collection share tied to the financed cohort’s actual gross profit can flex with customer performance instead of a fixed daily debit.

Illustrative use case · Subscription commerce

Finance predictable retention

A subscription brand can use customer-level retention, acquisition cost, and margin data to help determine how much incremental acquisition is financeable.

Illustrative use case · Agencies & platforms

Connect capital and growth

An agency can introduce a brand with proven acquisition economics. Cohort handles underwriting and servicing under the agreed referral terms.

Illustrative use case · Home & lifestyle

Review existing obligations

A brand carrying several advances can request a review of its existing obligations alongside a proposed cohort-financing structure. Refinancing depends on underwriting and existing terms.

Illustrative use cases, not customer testimonials or historical results.

The AI Agent Operating Bench

Twenty-seven specialists, one data fabric

Each agent is a named function with a clear mandate, measurable targets, and — where capital, credit, or law is involved — a human gate. Together they form a single, learning operating system.

◆ Human-gated — no money moves and no credit or legal decision is finalized without partner approval. The Guardrail agent enforces this on every action.

Origination & Sourcing

Prospector Agent

Director of Market Intelligence & Pipeline Discovery

Scans the DTC universe for ICP fit on observable signals — commerce-stack detection, ad-library presence, hiring and review velocity, traffic growth — and produces a ranked pipeline before human outreach begins.

Partner Agent

Director of Referral Partnerships & Channel Attribution

Manages agency, platform, and ecosystem referrers; attributes funded cohorts to sources and tracks each partner's contribution to funded volume and portfolio quality.

Outreach Agent

Director of Founder Engagement & Qualification

Personalizes outbound, screens basic eligibility — $250K+ monthly revenue, 6+ months trading, gross-profit, CAC and contribution-margin signals — and books the initial data connection.

Diligence & Underwriting

Intake / Connector Agent

Director of Data Intake & Platform Connectivity

Orchestrates read-only connections across Shopify, Meta, Google, Stripe, and Plaid; assembles the diligence data room and turns a multi-week process into an hours-based workflow.

Data-Integrity / Anti-Fraud Agent

Director of Revenue Verification & Fraud Controls

Reconciles platform-reported revenue and gross profit against bank settlement and processor data; flags wash orders, related-party transactions, refund manipulation, and attribution gaming. The agent flags; a partner confirms.

◆ Human-gated

Cohort & Unit-Economics Agent

Director of Cohort Analytics & Contribution Margin

Constructs customer cohorts, computes CAC by channel and contribution margin after COGS, fulfillment, fees, and returns, and produces verified GP/CAC inputs for the underwriting engine.

Retention / LTV Forecasting Agent

Director of Retention Modeling & Lifetime-Value Forecasting

Fits survival, hazard, sBG and BG/NBD models to forecast lifetime cohort gross profit with uncertainty bands — using the lower band to size advances and preserve downside protection.

Underwriting / Scorecard Agent

Director of Credit Scoring & Advance Sizing

Runs the credit scorecard, enforces the investment gates, and pushes verified inputs through the Cohort Waterfall and Fund Returns models to produce an indicative structure, confidence score, and written rationale for the Investment Committee.

◆ Human-gated

Memo / IC-Packet Agent

Director of Investment Committee Materials

Assembles branded credit memos, underwriting exhibits, base/downside/severe cases, diligence summaries, and recommended terms into an IC-ready packet.

Incrementality & Causal Measurement

Incrementality Testing Agent

Director of Experimental Measurement

Designs and runs geo-holdout, matched-market, conversion-lift, ghost-ad and budget-split experiments, computing true incremental CAC versus blended or platform-attributed CAC.

Causal Inference / MMM Agent

Director of Causal Analytics & Media-Mix Calibration

Runs synthetic control, CausalImpact, difference-in-differences and media-mix modeling where experiments aren't feasible — and calibrates every model against real experiment results.

Marginal-CAC / Saturation Agent

Director of Spend Efficiency & Scaling Limits

Models the rising marginal-CAC curve to identify the spend band that remains incremental, profitable, and financeable — keeping capital out of over-saturated media.

Structuring, Pricing & Documentation

Pricing / Structuring Agent

Director of Deal Structuring & Risk-Adjusted Pricing

Recommends product, advance, share, cap, and duration-indexed multiple, and runs base/downside/severe cases — always inside the fund's defensible risk envelope.

Documentation Agent

Director of Funding Documentation & Contract Control

Generates master agreements, per-cohort funding schedules, closing checklists, and executed-term records, and maintains the documentation system of record.

◆ Human-gated

Treasury & Warehouse

Treasury / Warehouse Agent

Director of Capital Availability & Borrowing-Base Management

Manages borrowing-base reporting, covenant compliance, cash forecasting, and recycling between tiers — monitoring loss-adjusted asset yield versus debt cost and recommending leverage throttles as spreads compress.

Servicing & Weekly Monitoring

Collections / Remittance Agent

Director of Revenue-Share Reconciliation

Reconciles gross-profit and remittance flows; flags short payments, missed remittances, reconciliation exceptions, and cure requirements.

Cohort Performance-Tracking Agent

Director of Live Cohort Monitoring

Re-pulls actual cohort performance weekly, refreshes remaining-collection forecasts and marks, and calculates realized-versus-underwritten variance across every cohort and the full book.

Early-Warning Agent

Director of Portfolio Surveillance & Intervention Triggers

Monitors realization variance, CAC drift, retention compression, concentration, and payment delays — and recommends renewal pauses, repricing, reserve adjustments, deleveraging, or escalation.

Portfolio & Fund Performance

Portfolio Risk Agent

Director of Exposure Management & Tail Risk

Tracks exposure by brand, channel, vintage, platform, category and product, and computes expected loss, stress loss, concentration limits, and systematic platform-factor exposure.

Fund Performance Agent

Director of Fund Analytics & Investor Economics

Calculates live gross and net IRR, MOIC, DPI, RVPI, fee and carry accruals, and operator spread — reconciled to the Fund Returns model.

Closed-Loop Learning

Model Validation / Backtest Agent

Director of Predictive Accuracy & Model Governance

Continuously compares realized outcomes against original forecasts and recalibrates PD, LGD, retention, CAC and advance-sizing logic — turning underwriting accuracy from a static assumption into a compounding advantage.

Investor & Lender Relations

LP / Lender Reporting Agent

Director of Investor Reporting & Credit-Facility Communications

Produces quarterly letters, capital-account materials, borrowing-base certificates, lender updates, and brand-consistent investor communications.

DD-Response Agent

Director of Diligence Support & Knowledge-Base Management

Answers LP, lender, and counterparty diligence using a governed knowledge base, source citations, and approved disclosure language.

Compliance & Legal

Compliance / Disclosure Agent

Director of Regulatory Monitoring & Disclosure Controls

Enforces pre-funding disclosure gates, monitors state commercial-financing laws, and flags terms drifting toward fixed-obligation patterns that require legal review.

◆ Human-gated

Cross-Cutting Platform Governance

Orchestrator Agent

Chief of Staff, Agentic Operations

Runs the pipeline state machine, assigns agent tasks, enforces human approval gates, escalates low-confidence outputs, and keeps the operating cadence synchronized end to end.

Data Fabric / Feature Store / Model Registry

Chief Data Infrastructure Layer

Maintains the shared data substrate, feature definitions, model versions, lineage, and access controls — the operating moat that lets the platform learn across cohorts, brands, channels and vintages.

Guardrail / Eval Agent

Director of Agent Governance, Controls & Evaluation

Tests agent outputs, enforces confidence thresholds, blocks unauthorized actions, and ensures no money moves and no credit or legal decision is finalized without the required human approval.

◆ Human-gated

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Agent role titles describe functional mandates within a human-supervised system, not employment or legal authority.