Alejandro Betancourt López

Alejandro Betancourt Lopez, a businessman in the fields of energy and EPC, earned two undergraduate degrees (economics and business administration) from Massachusetts’s Suffolk University.

Betancourt’s professional career began as a manager at several companies, including the commodities trader Guruceaga Group and BGB Energy (a subsidiary of Kawasaki Heavy Industries). He was also the Latin American commercial manager for ICC-OEOC, a U.K. company that provides technological solutions to the offshore oil industry. Betancourt later decided to explore opportunities by founding O’Hara Administration, an international asset management company with a stake in a wide range of investment vehicles, including two other companies that Betancourt is active in, Pacific Exploration & Production Corporation (formerly Pacific Rubiales Energy) and Hawkers.

Although Betancourt Lopez did not start the company, he was brought in with a group of investors in 2016 to help stabilize Hawkers financially and provide an influx of external funding to grow the brand and increase its reach. At the time, word was already getting out about its reputation for quality sunglasses at affordable prices. The company was praised in 2015 for starting two years earlier with a small $300 investment and leveraging it into $60 million. However, even though this number was certainly impressive, expenses continued to climb, and the company was in danger of shutting down.

Lopez and a group of investors formed a group called Saldum Ventures and injected $56 million (50 million euros) into Hawkers.