The Spanish ride-hailing win was a template, and Alejandro Betancourt López ran it again somewhere unexpected. Not in transport this time, but in artificial intelligence.

Through O’Hara Administration, the international investment group he founded in 2014, he placed what he’s called a significant bet on an AI company around 2019 or 2020. The stake was placed quietly, long before AI became a headline. Institutional money would flood in later; the position had been taken well ahead of that wave. That was years before the sector turned into a magnet for large capital flows.

The Same Move, a Different Sector

The parallel with the permits is hard to miss. Different sector, identical instinct. Both bets looked unconventional the day they were made. Both rested on a read of where the economy was heading rather than where it sat.

By early 2025, that AI position had returned about 20 times its original cost, a figure Betancourt López confirmed publicly while declining to name the company. The company still hasn’t been named. He’d bought conviction, then waited for the rest of the market to arrive.

Patience as the Common Thread

What links VTC licences to early AI equity is patience paired with a particular kind of contrarian nerve. Neither position was validated at the moment of purchase. Each needed the world to catch up to a thesis he’d already committed to.

That’s the pattern worth noticing. Buy early. Wait. Comfort was never the point; the gap between entry and payoff was. Alejandro Betancourt López tends to take the thing that will matter later, at the price it commands before it matters. The ride-hailing permits proved the method; the AI stake showed it wasn’t a one-off.