Bio
Camilo Martinez is a co-founder of Leal, a customer marketing platform for retailers based in Colombia. He grew up in Colombia and pursued a career in investment banking at Bain Colombia before earning an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, where he met his co-founder Florence Bretch. Prior to Leal, Martinez founded Impulse Travel, a sustainable tourism e-commerce company in Colombia, giving him early experience building technology-driven businesses in Latin America. Before founding Leal, Martinez worked in an advisory capacity in the retail sector, where he observed how much retailers spent on marketing with little visibility into the return on that spend. That insight drove him to build a data-driven platform to make marketing ROI transparent for brick-and-mortar and omnichannel retailers. He and Bretch split equity 50/50 at founding, a decision they made against the advice of their MBA professors, and have worked together for ten years. Martinez co-founded Leal in 2016, writing the first line of code that year and signing the first paying customers by the end of 2016. The company broke $1M ARR in 2018, raised a $1M institutional round that same year, and added a $3M round in 2019. COVID-19 nearly destroyed the business, with Leal losing approximately 90% of its revenue and coming within one month of running out of cash before legacy investors provided bridge funding. Martinez pivoted the company up-market, and by 2024 Leal had broken $5M ARR and closed an $11M Series A. An additional $6M was raised in 2025 and early 2026. By mid-2026, Leal serves roughly 700 merchants across 13 Latin American countries, reports net revenue retention above 120%, monthly gross churn below 0.3%, and has reached profitability with a team of 38 employees, down from a peak of 200.