HAPPY |
TH ANNIVERSARY |
JULY 2026 |
More about this article |
A $ 300-Million Education
SEAN AND KENNY SALAS DIDN’ T WALK AWAY MILLIONAIRES WHEN THEY SOLD THEIR COMPANY“ CAMINO FINANCIAL”— THEY WALKED AWAY WITH SOMETHING MORE VALUABLE: THE EXPERIENCE OF HAVING BUILT, FROM SCRATCH, ONE OF THE MOST AMBITIOUS LATINO FINTECH PROJECTS IN THE COUNTRY. NOW, AT 41, THEY ARE READY TO GENERATE RETURNS ON THAT LEARNING.
›› BY: PABLO SCARPELLINI | LOS ÁNGELES
There is an image Sean Salas recalls with a mix of tenderness and melancholy: the twins fighting over who would sleep in their mother’ s bed that night. Not out of childish whim, but to spend a few minutes with a woman who opened restaurants from Monday to Sunday and who negotiated lease contracts with
We put everything into a cocktail shaker that was incubated during the Harvard MBA, and from that Camino Financial was born.”
— Kenny Salas
20 the same determination with which her sons would later negotiate with venture capital funds in Los Angeles. A Mexican immigrant without a college degree who understood, before anyone in her family, that entrepreneurship was not an option— it was the only way out.“ We grew up in a very entrepreneurial environment, and we saw the benefits, but also the downside: the stress, the absence,” says Sean.
That woman opened more than 30 restaurants over the course of her career. She didn’ t have them all open at the same time. Her genius lay elsewhere: test fast, close fast if it doesn’ t work, and if it does, renew the contract for decades. A methodology that her twin sons would apply, without consciously knowing it, in the fintech world.
When Sean and Kenny were 12, their mother made a decision that would change their lives forever: she closed her businesses, remarried, and moved to Mexico. The twins would live in their parents’ home country until they were twenty— eight years that would give them something no
PUBLISHED BY
MBA can teach: a binational perspective on the Latino world that goes far beyond the border between Mexico and California.
Back in the U. S., they arrived at UC Berkeley, one of the most prestigious universities in the country. Wall Street received them next: investment banking first, private equity after.
YEAR MILESTONE
Kenny at Palladium Equity Partners and Sean at ICV Partners. Then Harvard Business School, where the pieces of their personal story began to fall into place.“ We put all of that into a cocktail shaker that was incubated during the Harvard MBA, and from that was born Camino Financial,” Kenny summarizes.
2014 Founded Camino Financial in May, focused on small Latino businesses with no access to bank credit.
2020 Surpassed $ 100M in capital deployed. Teams operating in the U. S., Mexico City, and Mazatlán.
2023 Sold and merged Camino with Fundation, forming Quantum Financial Technologies. Sale without a“ pot of gold”— but with a $ 300M education.
2024 Launched nuDesk, an AI-augmented workforce agency for institutions such as banks and lending organizations, operated from Mazatlán, Mexico.