Monika Mantilla remembers presenting to Fortune 50 board members who told her they had never heard an investment presentation from a Latina before. A meeting intended to discuss money had also revealed something about who usually got into the room. She kept presenting. The question of access would become central to the business she built.
Today, Mantilla leads Altura Capital from Miami. The firm she co-founded in New York in 2005 works with small and lower-middle-market companies, including businesses with diverse ownership and those operating in low- and moderate-income communities. The ambition is to help those enterprises grow while earning returns for investors. That ambition has accompanied her across professions and cities.
Her career is especially interesting at the point where an introduction becomes a business decision. A promising entrepreneur needs financing. A corporate customer needs a capable supplier. An experienced executive can help the company prepare for a bigger assignment. Mantilla’s work brings those people into conversation. The meeting is a beginning; a business still has to deliver.
A lawyer learns what a company needs
Mantilla’s route into investing began in Colombia. Originally from Bogotá, she studied law at Universidad del Rosario and worked as a lawyer before taking managerial responsibilities. Her earlier corporate career included international logistics, with roles across operations, finance and marketing. She learned the business from several desks, including ones where responsibility extended to profit and loss.
After moving to the United States with Jay Garcia, her husband and eventual co-founder, she ran the North American operations of the same company she had worked for in Colombia. Finance became a growing interest. An MBA at Columbia Business School followed, along with work in investment-management consulting and a firm investing in Latin America.
It is a less tidy path than the familiar march from business school to investment firm. It also gives the story a useful texture. Legal work concerns obligations; operations concerns execution; finance concerns the resources and choices that make execution possible. Her résumé contains all three. The later investor had already spent years working inside a company.
“Capital is the blood of our economic system.”
Monika Mantilla
First, make the overlooked visible
Mantilla and Garcia established Altura in 2005. Its early work included helping institutional investors understand smaller and emerging investment managers. That meant studying the people responsible for putting money to work, as well as the businesses that might eventually receive it. Access could become difficult at more than one point in the chain.
Altura built an emerging-manager database in 2006 and released its Emerging Manager Information Platform in 2008. The platform offered research, analytics and due-diligence information. The U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce describes a system covering more than 2,000 emerging money managers across asset classes. Research gave institutional investors a way to examine firms beyond their familiar circles.
The dates matter. Before Altura’s later business-building strategies came a period spent making investment opportunities easier to see and evaluate. A network can introduce someone; information helps another person decide whether to take the meeting further. Mantilla’s early work placed those two activities beside each other. An unfamiliar manager could at least become a manager an investor had the tools to assess.
New York
platform released
the firm’s base
Score introduced
The next customer belongs in the conversation
The businesses Mantilla focuses on have practical ambitions. They may want to meet rising demand, enter another market, buy a company or arrange a transition to new management. Altura groups those choices under G.R.E.A.T.: Grow, Refinance, Expand, Acquire and Transition. The acronym is rather pleased with itself, but the decisions underneath it are serious.
Each decision changes what an entrepreneur needs. Expansion calls for a different conversation from succession. Refinancing concerns the terms and flexibility of existing obligations. Acquisition brings questions about combining operations and creating value. In this approach, the founder’s next move helps determine the financing and support that make sense.
Altura brings investors, advisers, executive operating partners and corporations into its work with portfolio companies. Corporate and government relationships can help management teams find growth opportunities. An operating partner adds experience to the company’s own capabilities. This is where Mantilla’s work moves beyond identifying a gap and into the less glamorous job of helping people cross it.
The corporate customer matters because growth needs demand as well as funding. Supplier development makes the buyer part of the story. Mantilla’s role as a capital adviser to the Billion Dollar Roundtable connects her to that conversation, while her appearances at business forums keep her in contact with the people on both sides of a potential contract.
A growth problem, in plain sight
At a 2015 gathering honouring women in business, Mantilla spoke about women- and minority-owned companies that struggled to grow. She urged people to take part in designing solutions themselves. It was a business-development concern as much as a question of representation: starting an enterprise and helping it reach scale are different undertakings.
That same year, Altura’s principals launched Small Business Community Capital, an impact fund licensed through the Small Business Administration’s SBIC program. Altura records Mantilla as the first Latina to receive an SBIC license. The Chamber’s biography describes a $120 million fund providing debt and equity to small and midsized companies, with a focus on diverse ownership and underserved communities.
These were specific mechanisms for a recurring ambition. A fund makes financing available; a network helps locate businesses and partners; a company’s managers have to turn those resources into results. Mantilla’s work has repeatedly returned to the relationship between those tasks. The entrepreneur remains responsible for the company, but the entrepreneur need not possess every useful connection already.
The gazelles and the bread company
In 2020, Mantilla wrote about a group of Latino-owned businesses she called Gacelas, the Spanish word for gazelles. She described companies with annual revenue above $5 million and the potential to grow quickly. Her argument concerned the combination of suitable financing, strategic support and a founder prepared to pursue growth.
She drew on conversations with hundreds of businesses over more than a decade. Some had expanded; others had stalled or declined. The differences prompted her to consider mentoring, coaching, contracts and access to capital together. That is a more detailed account of opportunity than simply encouraging an entrepreneur to think bigger. It asks who will help with the next decision.
One example was Cidrines, the Puerto Rican bread company, which she described as having expanded into all 50 U.S. states. It is an appealingly ordinary product in an investment story: bread, with a very considerable distribution problem attached. Mantilla’s official biography also lists a board role with Cidrines. The business gives her ideas about scale a tangible setting.
Height, dignity and fourteen competing demands
Mantilla connects Altura’s name with both height and dignity. In conversations about her leadership, she returns to integrity and to the values learned in her family. She credits her mother with helping shape her discipline, determination and kindness. Those ideas sit alongside the technical responsibilities of running an investment business.
She has described a demanding but empathetic approach, with clear expectations, honest feedback and transparency. Her account of leadership also includes being a mother, wife, business leader, friend, community participant and board member. In a 2026 interview, she counted fourteen fronts in her daily life. A full calendar is hardly rare in finance; hers comes with an unusually explicit inventory.
Her public explanation of motivation includes faith. She has said that making a positive impact on others gives her work meaning. The point is personal, rather than a formula for investing. It helps explain why her career conversations move readily between a company’s prospects and the people affected by its decisions.
Measurement belongs in that discussion too. Altura introduced its proprietary Impact Score in 2022, and Mantilla has spoken about tracking the impact of investments. The firm’s stated priorities include quality jobs, investment in underserved communities and, where possible, employee ownership. An aspiration becomes easier to examine when it comes with outcomes people can follow.
Miami, with more people in the room
Altura has been based in Miami since 2020. Mantilla’s work there includes a partnership with Miami Dade College on a private equity and private credit internship program. Her education work extends to the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative, where she teaches a capital seminar. Explaining the profession is another way of widening access to it.
Her more recent appearances have remained practical. In March 2026, she discussed AI and small-business operations on Univision Miami. In April, she joined Radio Isla during Puerto Rico’s Business Opportunity Exchange to talk about supplier development and economic opportunity. The subjects change; the concern with helping businesses operate and compete carries through.
Recognition has followed those years of work. She received the Miami Maestro of Entrepreneurship award in 2024 and the New America Alliance’s Business Excellence and Empowerment Award in 2025. In September 2026, Altura announced her selection for Miami’s inaugural Titan 100 class. The ceremony is scheduled for November 19, still ahead at the time of this profile.
Mantilla has also publicly encouraged women to consider finance as a way to help change their communities. It is an invitation from someone whose own career took several turns before arriving there. She has spent years meeting entrepreneurs, investors and corporate leaders. Her story leaves a practical question for anyone in those rooms: who else should be invited, and what could you help them do once they arrive?