By June of this year, Oryx Capital will have R$100 million under management, as signed management transfer contracts are finalized. But being a wealth management firm wasn't the initial plan for Verônica Pimentel, the youngest woman to create an asset management company in Brazil.
At the end of Oryx's second year, Pimentel sat down with her investors for a strategy discussion. The DBOA 11 ETF was live, operating, and clients were seeing returns between 10% and 15%. But there was a structural problem she couldn't ignore.
"The plan isn't going to work in the long run," she told Nebula, the venture capital firm that anchored a $3 million pre-seed round for the creation of the business and the launch of the ETF, in a statement to NeoFeed .
The barrier was the Brazilian distribution model, where a few players concentrate access to the end investor and charge commissions that can reach 5%.
For a structure designed to be an American fixed-income ETF, this rebate made it impossible to deliver what it believed was best for the client.
The decision that followed was a rare move in the financial market to voluntarily shut down a product, return capital to investors with positive returns, and start over.
What could have scared investors away had the opposite effect. Nebula not only accepted the change of course but also financed a new round of capital to structure its wealth management area – the idea is to raise a Series A this year.
The ETF ceased to exist, giving way to an advisory business. The focus now is on being the financial right-hand man for small entrepreneurs and high-net-worth families, charging an annual fee between 0.5% and 1% and receiving no product commission – it operates on a fee-based model .
Oryx obtained an additional license from Anbima for managed portfolios, hired a compliance team, strengthened information security - including regular ethical hacking tests - and set up an analysis structure that covers both the Brazilian and American markets.
Seven months after starting to accept clients, the asset manager has R$ 20 million in assets under management, on track to reach R$ 100 million by June, with an average growth of 15% per month.
The current base consists of approximately 40 families, most of whom are small business owners. The goal is to reach R$ 300 million in mentored funds within three years.
With 15 employees and five more hires in progress, Oryx operates with BTG Pactual as a partner bank – client funds are held in custody by the bank – and manages portfolios that mix Brazilian and international assets. Pimentel's investment philosophy focuses on mitigating Brazil risk, seeking genuine diversification, and avoiding locking up capital.
In the medium term, the plan is to return to proprietary products. "When we reach 150 or 200 million in assets, we'll go back to proprietary funds, but without the commission fee that made the ETF unviable," she says.
For now, the focus is on growing through word of mouth, maintaining zero churn, and proving that the fee-based model works in Brazil – even in a market that, as she learned in practice, still charges a 5% commission to distribute a product that costs 0.6% per year.
Self-made woman
Born into a lower-middle-class family in Limeira, in the interior of São Paulo state, Verônica Pimentel moved to the capital to study economics. She entered the financial market at Mirae Asset to work on the trading desk with government bonds and serve Korean investors. After working at Banco Indusval in the private fixed income area, she went to London.
In the UK, he secured a position as vice president of sales and trading at ETI Capital and soon moved to ETC Group – one of the first asset managers in the world to launch a Bitcoin ETF, with over $1 billion under management.
As the distributor, she was responsible for listing products on European stock exchanges, negotiating with local regulators, and expanding the portfolio from country to country: Deutsche Börse, London Stock Exchange, SIX in Switzerland. It was during this process that the question that changed everything arose: why not bring this model to Brazil?
The ETF market was growing exponentially in the country, Brazilians did not have easy access to international assets, and there was a clear gap to bring global exposure in a listed format. Today, there are more than 100 funds listed on the B3, 721,700 investors and R$ 26.9 billion in assets under custody.
With the support of the founders of ETC Group, she went to Harvard to develop Oryx's business plan. Her professor was Linda Applegate, an expert in new entrepreneurs and a reference for anyone who wants to bring an idea to life.
In Brazil, the first year was entirely dedicated to obtaining the CVM license. Office, recording systems, compliance, anti-money laundering, certifications, technology.
It was only after completing the process that she learned she was the youngest woman to found an asset management firm in Brazil. "If I had known beforehand, I wouldn't have done it. I would have kept thinking about it," she says.
The second year was dedicated to listing the ETF - an American fixed-income ETF, more suited to the current high interest rate environment in the country - with Vórtex as the administrator and BTG as the market maker.
Pimentel clings to client stories to reinforce that the decision to pivot Oryx wasn't solely financial. She has seen how the product-based model corrupts the advisory process.
The case that most impressed her was that of a 75-year-old client, a retired teacher who had saved her whole life to build up savings for retirement.
When she arrived at Oryx, her portfolio was entirely locked in bonds with maturities of 10 to 15 years, at rates of only 20% of the CDI (Brazilian interbank deposit rate).
"The woman will receive this money when she's 90 years old. That's practically a crime. There's no way a person in their right mind could have done that without earning a commission," says Pimentel.
