Behzad Taufiq

Behzad Taufiq is the Founder and Managing Principal of Valentus Capital Partners ("Valentus"), and he is responsible for all investment decisions and management operations of Valentus. 

Prior to forming Valentus, Mr. Taufiq was the Head of Credit Trading and Managing Director at Hudson Advisors (“Hudson”) from 2011 until March 2020. Hudson has provided underwriting, asset management, and other support services to more than 1.1 million assets with an aggregate purchase price of more than $222 billion (including acquisition financing and co-investors). Hudson is the asset manager for certain Lone Star Funds (“Lone Star”), a private equity fund that has raised $85 billion in capital since 1995 and specializes in distressed investing. 

At Hudson, Mr. Taufiq was responsible for the oversight and trading execution of Lone Star's credit assets, which included US Residential Mortgage Bonds, US Residential Whole Loans, and US Corporate Loans. In addition to his trading responsibilities, Mr. Taufiq supervised the Credit Underwriting (assessment of prospective investment opportunities) and Credit Modeling (maintenance and application of proprietary analytics) teams. 

Prior to Hudson, Mr. Taufiq worked in the Mortgage Trading team at Cerberus Capital Management (“Cerberus”), a private equity fund that has raised $60 billion in capital since 1992 and specializes in distressed investing. Prior to working at Cerberus, Mr. Taufiq worked at Cerberus Operations and Advisory Company and Certavi Capital Management. Mr. Taufiq is also a licensed real estate broker in the states of California and New York. 

Mr. Taufiq is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where he focused on science and comparative literature (English and French). Mr. Taufiq worked as an entomological genetics researcher in the Sperling Molecular Systematics laboratory (trained by Dr. Daniel Rubinoff). In addition to academics, Mr. Taufiq was an athlete on the Track and Field Team (trained by US Olympic Head Coach, Erv Hunt in the 400 meters), Football Team (coached by Ron Gould as a running back), and participated in the 2002 NFL Regional Scouting Combines.