Dominic Garcia

Dominic Garcia is a New Mexico native who has spent his career in institutional and public-pension investing rather than angel or venture investing. He began his career around 2003 at the Public Employees Retirement Association of New Mexico (PERA) — first as an analyst tied to the legislative finance committee and then, at a young age, as deputy CIO. In 2008 he was recruited to the State of Wisconsin Investment Board (SWIB), the ~$144 billion pension manager, where he spent nearly a decade as a Senior Funds Alpha Manager, building and running risk-based multi-asset strategies including hedge funds, portable alpha, risk parity, and active strategies across asset classes, and serving on its investment committee.

In October 2017 he returned home to become Chief Investment Officer of New Mexico PERA, a ~$16 billion (later ~$16.4 billion) pension system serving more than 90,000 members and paying over $1.2 billion in annual benefits. As CIO he modernized the fund's investment governance and rebuilt its process around a risk-based framework that explicitly separates alpha and beta in the multi-asset portfolio. He also helped usher through structural pension reform — introducing a cost-sharing mechanism and shifting PERA's cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) from a fixed to a variable rate to improve long-term sustainability. He was named to CIO magazine's 2021 Power 100 list for this work.

Garcia left PERA on June 4, 2021, to join CBRE Global Investors (now CBRE Investment Management, which manages well over $100 billion in real assets) as its Chief Pension Investment Strategist, where he structures investment and funding solutions for institutional investors and U.S. pensions — with a particular emphasis on helping pensions access infrastructure. He holds a B.A. in Political Science and Spanish from the University of New Mexico and a Master of Public Policy in Public Finance from the University of Chicago.

*Note on the stub data:* The email ([hidden]) and phone (505-476-9338) correspond to his tenure as CIO of New Mexico PERA, whose staff used @state.nm.us addresses and the 505-476-93xx Santa Fe exchange. The "Angel Investors / Seed Round" labels do not match any part of his verified career; he is an institutional pension/real-assets allocator.

• Institutional, not angel: Garcia allocates and structures capital for large public pensions and institutional investors — his "deals" are fund commitments, mandates, and portfolio construction, not seed-stage startup checks.
• Risk-based, alpha/beta separation: His signature approach, applied at both SWIB and PERA, is to separate market beta from alpha and build a risk-balanced multi-asset portfolio (risk parity, portable alpha, hedge-fund and active overlays).
• Real assets & infrastructure: In his CBRE role he focuses on helping pension funds invest in infrastructure and real assets, valued for their predictable, inflation-linked cash flows and liability-matching characteristics.
• Long-term sustainability lens: His public-fund work paired investment strategy with governance and benefit-design reform (cost-sharing, variable COLA) to keep pension promises fundable over decades.
• Advisory / research orientation: He sits on research and advisory boards (EDHEC Infrastructure Institute, UNC Kenan Institute / Institute for Private Capital, University of Chicago Center for Municipal Finance, Cliffwater Corporate Lending Fund directorship), reflecting a research-driven, evidence-based investment philosophy.