Portugal does not need more companies. It needs more companies capable of leading.

As a child, I wanted to own Disney. Not for the business, but for the magic. For the conviction that nothing is impossible. I grew up believing that the world belongs to those who have the courage to imagine further, and this belief continues to guide how I view companies, people, and what is possible to build.

Perhaps because I grew up among fairy tales, I never stopped believing that there are no impossibles, only people who give up before discovering how far they can go. Today, I no longer build castles. I help build companies. But I still believe in exactly the same thing: that the future belongs to those who dare, take risks, and visualize the impossible. I learned early, however, that imagination only builds something when it meets discipline. The castles I care for today have balance sheets, teams, and salaries to pay at the end of the month.

I have never been able to separate the person I am from the professional I chose to be.

I began my career at KPMG, my only employer, where I learned that financial discipline is the backbone of any business. But it was as an entrepreneur that I truly discovered what it means to build a company and the ingredients required to do so.

I started my first business at the age of 24. Since then, I have acquired companies, sold them, led merger and acquisition projects, launched new ventures, celebrated achievements, and faced moments when I thought of giving up. I know the excitement of closing a major contract and the responsibility of ensuring payroll at the end of the month. I know the loneliness of making difficult decisions when no one else can make them for us.

And I do not speak from theory. I built Grupo Your by consolidating small accounting firms until it became a group of hundreds of people. When the right moment arrived, I opened its capital to Explorer Investments to accelerate the next phase, leaving leadership in the hands of the team that built it. We applied the same thesis to DFK in auditing and consulting. And we applied it again in a completely different sector, healthcare, with HUG, which is now integrated into Lusíadas Saúde. Three times, two types of partners—one financial and one strategic—independently chose what we helped build. The constant was never the entity or the sector. It was the team and the methodology.

It was this experience that showed me that scaling a business is a rollercoaster. It is a succession of challenges, lessons learned, decisions, and major mistakes. The crucial acceptance of the beauty of error. And it is precisely because I have already walked this path that today I can stand alongside other entrepreneurs with empathy, pragmatism, and a genuine desire to help them achieve more.

Portugal has extraordinary entrepreneurs. It has talent, determination, and ambition. What they often lack is not just capital. They lack access to the right capital, at the right time. They lack the structure to sustain growth, strategic clarity to make better decisions, and the experience of those who have already walked this path and can accelerate results.

Throughout this journey, I also learned another non-negotiable lesson: no company is built alone. The greatest projects of my life were always born alongside the right people. People who share the same values, who put loyalty above ego, who honor their word, and who understand that commitment is the true foundation of any lasting partnership.

Financial capital opens doors. Human and relational capital is what builds enduring companies. Trust, the quality of relationships, and the alignment of values are what sustain the most difficult decisions and make it possible to create truly transformative projects.

It was to address this challenge that Ó Capital was born.

We believe that Portugal does not just need to start companies. It needs to help the best ones scale. Because it is larger, more competitive, and more ambitious companies that transform the economy, create better jobs, and leave a lasting impact on the country.

More than investors or advisors, we are growth partners. We work hand-in-hand with teams to strengthen organizations, develop strong brands, accelerate decisions, and prepare each new phase of growth. And what we do is not by chance: it is based on a clear consolidation thesis, built over years. Uniting companies with complementary skills so that together they gain scale; providing them with a shared structure that they could never achieve alone; and crossing knowledge between sectors that rarely talk to one another. This was the thesis we applied at Grupo Your, DFK, and HUG, and it is the one we now place at the service of others.

At Ó Capital, we believe that the best companies are not built in a hurry. They are built with ambition, discipline, and a long-term vision. We work in very close proximity because we genuinely enjoy building alongside founders, with total respect and admiration for their DNA, their vision, and the path they have already traveled. We get involved, we challenge, we celebrate victories, and we face difficult moments together. We do not seek to grow companies merely for immediate, often unsustainable, returns. We seek to help them become organizations that endure.

Over more than 20 years of working alongside companies in highly diverse sectors, we have realized that innovation rarely happens solely within one industry. Many of the best ideas emerge when we can transfer knowledge, practices, and business models from one sector to another. That was how we brought financial discipline from a consultancy to an elderly care operation, or commercial practices from one sector to another that had never heard of them.

This ability to cross-reference experiences allows us to bring different perspectives, anticipate opportunities, and help business leaders find solutions that would hardly emerge by looking only at their own reality. This is one of the greatest assets we bring to every project.

I have learned that companies rarely fail due to a lack of talent. They fail because they cannot assemble, at the right moment, what growth truly requires: access to capital, structure, focus, experience, and execution capability. That is what we want to change. We have a passionate, committed team that has worked together for many years. I learned from António Pinto Leite that love is a management criterion. But love without discipline is naive. Therefore, alongside humanity, we bring the financial rigor I learned at KPMG and the execution discipline that separates companies that dream from those that deliver. At Ó Capital, we live this practice every day, because we believe that the most extraordinary companies are also built with humanity, trust, and kindness.

I believe that every company we help grow contributes to a more competitive, more innovative, more prosperous Portugal, rich in great brands.

Decision by decision. Business by business.

The true impact of Ó Capital is measured not only by the businesses we help transform, but by the contribution we make and want to continue making so that the Portuguese business landscape consists of larger, more competitive, and better-prepared companies to lead.

This is our mission. Realized every day.