business units / finvest ventures

In 2000, FINVEST’s founder and partners entered into a JV between with Swiss Re’s private equity arm, Securitas Latin America, to create Rio Bravo Investimentos. With the acquisition of broker dealer Mercurio DTVM, Brazil’s first REIT manager and a major partner of RB Capital in its built-to-suit and sale-lease-back structured transactions, Rio Bravo came to achieve an AUM in excess of R$8 Billion. In 2016, Fosun, China, acquired control of Rio Bravo.

In 2005, FINVEST’s founder promoted the management-buy-out of Unik SA, a pharmacy benefit manager acquired from Sodexho that was restructured as a prepaid credit card and payment solutions provider supervised by the Brazilian Central Bank and subsequently sold to WEX Inc, Portland, Me, in 2013.

In 2014, FINVEST acquired FinHealth Gestora de Recursos SA. formerly named Burrill Brasil Investimentos Ltda, a licensed investment manager that raised Brazil´s first venture capital fund for Healthcare and Life Sciences sponsored by a group of Latin American institutional investors and 2 large pharmaceutical companies. The company was founded by João Paulo Poiares Baptista, a former colleague of FINVEST´s founder at Rio Bravo Investimentos. Through VC funds and vehicles managed by FinHealth, FINVEST invests in Healthcare and Life Sciences start-ups and early stage companies, such as (a) BioZeus, a Brazilian drug development company, (b) Timpel, a research and development company that produces software and hardware for cardio-pulmonary monitoring, support of clinical decisions and bedside diagnosis, (c) Placi Brazil´s first transitional care hospital that is building a national network, (d) LifeMed, one of the largest Brazilian medical device companies, (e) Mendelics, Latin America's first lab dedicated exclusively to genomic analysis and (f) Virtech Bio, Inc., a biotech company based in Massachusetts, developing products for organ and limb transplants and multi-use human derived Hemoglobin Based Oxygen Carrier (HBOC) solutions, based on research conducted by a Brazilian surgeon, Dr. Paulo Fontes, MD, associate professor of the University of Pittsburgh.

In 2017, Finvest, in partnership with other technology-oriented entrepreneurs and company founders, launched WebForce investimentos S.A, that invests, as a partner of choice, in a vertical of start-ups and early stage technology-enabled companies with an emphasis in financial services (“Fintechs”).