Mauricio Camargo

Mauricio Camargo is Director and Co-Founder of Altra Investments, a Bogotá-based private equity firm he helped establish in early 2005 alongside co-founder Darío Durán. Altra was built on the founders' shared conviction that mid-cap companies in the Andean region and Central America are attractive private-equity targets — businesses where a hands-on manager-owner can create value through operational improvement and strategic management. Over its life the firm has invested in roughly nineteen companies and raised approximately USD $547 million in capital commitments, mobilizing about USD $757 million including reserves, co-investments and third-party arrangements.

Before founding Altra, Camargo spent eleven years at McKinsey & Company, where he was elected Partner in 1999 and headed the firm's Bogotá office. In that role he served as lead consultant to the boards and senior management of leading Andean and Caribbean conglomerates, including Valorem (Colombia's largest industrial conglomerate), Grupo Carvajal, the agro-industrial group Manuelita, and Fundación Social. This McKinsey background — advising the region's largest family-controlled industrial groups — directly shaped Altra's thesis of professionalizing and scaling mid-cap, often family-owned businesses.

Camargo holds a Master of Science in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a Civil Engineering degree from Lehigh University. Beyond Altra, he is Chairman of Compartamos Con Colombia (a Colombian nonprofit that channels pro-bono professional services to the social sector) and has served as an Independent Director at Grupo IMSA. He sits or has sat on numerous portfolio and corporate boards, including Digitex, Colfrigos, PetroTiger, Semiglo, CrediQ and Grupo Mundial, and previously Integrar (a Grupo Carvajal company), Copa Colombia, Corporación Infarmasa and Procafecol.

• Invests in established mid-cap companies, not startups — typically businesses with ~USD $15–150 million in sales, writing equity checks in the ~USD $30–60 million range.
• Strong preference for family-owned businesses in the Andean Region and Central America, concentrated in Colombia and Peru.
• Value-creation model centered on operational improvement, professionalization and strategic management rather than financial engineering — a thesis rooted in the founders' McKinsey consulting experience with the region's largest conglomerates.
• Sector-generalist / opportunistic: deals span pharmaceuticals, consumer and retail, insurance, industrial products, cold-chain logistics and oil-and-gas/environmental services.
• Emphasizes control or significant-influence positions, with the firm's principals taking active board roles in portfolio companies.