Goldman Sachs Veteran Camila Clarke Is Building a Transatlantic Tech Investment Bank — With a Small Team and a Big AI Bet

Camila Clarke spent 22 years inside the machinery of elite finance — Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, the so-called bulge bracket of global banking — before concluding the industry had a structural blind spot. Large banks plant flags everywhere but operate like tankers; boutique firms move nimbly but stay stubbornly local. Clarke founded Clarke Capital Advisors (CCA) to thread that needle, building a transatlantic tech investment bank that connects Silicon Valley, New York, and Europe in a format no massive institution was bothering to replicate at the boutique level.

The final nudge to launch came from an unlikely source: her own clients. Female CEOs she had served inside corporate giants encouraged her to break away and run her own shop. Clarke frames the decision in explicitly representational terms — she wanted to become the kind of Latina investment banker she never had as a model when she was coming up. She describes never having seen a Latina woman in M&A or coverage banking during her early career, a gap she now considers both a personal wound and a market opportunity.

At Davos, speaking at the Female Quotient forum, Clarke laid out a mentorship philosophy she calls the 'angel' framework. She credits Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser and a cohort of Nordic business leaders with providing guidance at critical moments, and argues that asking for help is a form of strength rather than weakness — it gives mentors the satisfaction of contributing to something meaningful. Her pitch: the world is full of experienced people willing to point you in the right direction if you have the nerve to ask.

On AI, Clarke is bullish in a specific, operational way. She argues that the capital and headcount required to launch a competitive financial services firm has collapsed compared to two decades ago. AI functions as leverage — a small team at CCA can now punch at a weight class previously reserved for firms with hundreds of employees. She's careful to frame AI as an enabler rather than a replacement, noting that human relationship skills — particularly the kind of organized, relationship-first approach she associates with her own background — remain the irreducible ingredient in dealmaking. For Clarke, Davos itself embodies that tension: the real value isn't the transactions, it's the collaborative spirit and the realization that global dealmakers have more in common than the geography separating them.