Brenno Raiko joined Advent in 2011 and is a Managing Director in São Paulo. He advises on investments in the technology and healthcare sectors. Brenno has advised on 15 investments during his career at Advent.
Prior to joining Advent, Brenno was an associate at A.T. Kearney in São Paulo and New York for four years. His consultancy experience includes M&A strategy, commercial due diligence, and corporate strategy and operations for a broad range of industries, including consumer goods, financial services, and mining.
Brenno holds a BS in Economics from Fundação Getulio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro and an MBA from Harvard Business School, with a Fundação Estudar merit-based scholarship.
What advice would you offer to someone joining the firm?
When Advent makes an investment, we’re committed to the long term. You need consistency, you need resilience, and you need to be laser-focused on the thesis and the value creation plan. You should have conviction in your plan, but at the same time, you need to be nimble enough to act quickly. And remember that this job is all about people: your attention should not just be on the business, but also on the team around it.
Has the private equity industry changed much since you began your career?
In general, companies have become larger, more complex, and more diversified. They are likely to have more products and operate across a greater number of markets, and I think that’s a natural evolution. The size of Advent’s investments has likewise grown. But despite this increase in scale, the foundation of what we do has not changed, and neither has the nature of what we’re looking for in an investment.
If you weren’t in this profession, what other career might you have chosen?
As a teenager, my original plan was to become an economist, because it combined hard and soft skills, involving both quantitative and qualitative analysis. But that wouldn’t have offered the same intersection of finance, strategy, and entrepreneurship that you get in private equity. I also previously worked in capital markets and consulting, but what those two lack is accountability – another trait that attracted me to this job.
“You need consistency, you need resilience, and you need to be laser-focused on the thesis and value creation plan.”
Brenno Raiko
Managing Director, Advent
Which industries do you currently find most interesting?
Today, I’m focused on two. The first is digital services, where Advent has invested in businesses that export tech services from Latin America to the US and other developed markets. Advent is always looking to identify how we can take Latin American companies global, as we’ve recently done with several cases. The other is software, which is a core sub-sector for Advent globally. We want to back great businesses or help them grow at scale.
How does working with Operating Partners help to improve your work at Advent?
Our Operating Partners and Operations Advisors are senior executives with a very deep operational background in a particular industry, who really understand the day-to-day running of companies and how to drive value. They can complement our views with knowledge of what can and cannot be done in terms of operational improvements, and they can connect us with other companies and other experts in the wider ecosystem. Involving them also provides founders and entrepreneurs with reassurance that Advent is the right business partner for their journey experience and we will bring expertise and domain knowledge for the next chapter of the company.
