Artificial intelligence had swallowed 53 percent of global venture capital deal value by the third quarter of 2025, according to the WIPO Global Innovation Index, with single rounds for Anthropic ($13 billion) and xAI ($10 billion) that showed just how crowded the trade had become. Alejandro Betancourt López placed his bet five years earlier, when almost no one was competing for the same equity.
Around 2019 or 2020, through his investment group O’Hara Administration, he took what he called a “big ticket” position in an AI company. By the time the sector became the consensus trade, he was already deep inside it.
A “Big Ticket” Made Before the Rush
“I have a big investment I made about five years ago in AI, and now it’s 20 times its investment,” he said. By early 2025 the position had returned roughly twenty times what he originally paid for it.
He confirmed the figure publicly while declining to name the company, citing a confidentiality agreement. There was no claim about predicting a specific breakthrough and no detailed account of due diligence, just a plain statement of return and timeline that let the number speak for itself.
Why the Math Works
A 20x outcome lines up with what happens when institutional money reprices an entire sector at once. A company worth $500 million in 2020 could reach $10 billion by 2025 without changing its underlying business, carried upward by a tenfold jump in sector-wide capital flows.
Early shareholders capture that markup. Late entrants pay for it. His edge in this case came from the same place it came in earlier deals: owning the equity before the consensus formed and the money arrived in volume. The consensus trade, by the time institutional money piled in, was fully priced, which is exactly the moment early holders like him get paid while newcomers inherit the premium.
The Same Move, Bigger
He has run this play before. In 2014 he accumulated Spanish VTC licenses before Uber entered the country, and his €50 million bet on Hawkers in 2016 landed before social-first fashion retail was even a recognized investment category.
The AI position followed the same logic, only at a larger scale. Get in ahead of the crowd, hold through the uncertain years, and let the market’s later enthusiasm do the revaluing. Timing and patience did most of the work.
