On the 21st floor of a modern building in Medellín sits an office most of Maluma’s fans will never think about. It is the home of Royalty, the investment company the Colombian reggaeton star founded roughly six years before he sat down with Forbes; at the time of that profile, Caras reported, the firm employed 15 people and oversaw diversified holdings in Colombia and the United States.[s] The hits made him famous. The Maluma business model is what he has been quietly assembling with the proceeds: operating companies he helps shape, reported equity in startups, and consumer brands built to outlive any single song.
What the Maluma business model actually is
Royalty began as the kind of vehicle most touring artists eventually set up, a company to manage music income.[s] It grew into something closer to a family holding company. Maluma’s father runs it, and the singer frames the project as a family business and a legacy rather than a side venture, he told Forbes in remarks relayed by the Colombian edition of Caras. He also said he is fortunate that his passions are what pay him, and that business now excites him almost as much as music. The slogan matters less than the structure. Instead of licensing his name to a dozen products and collecting checks, the Maluma business model puts him on the ownership side of the table.
From burgers to mezcal: the brands he owns
The most literal expression of that was Dembow, a delivery-only burger chain he launched with the Colombian food-tech startup Foodology. It debuted across 17 Latin American cities through the Rappi app and sold 10,000 burgers in its first weekend.[s] At launch, the menu ran on Super Smashed Burgers, patties smashed hard on a hot griddle for a crisp, browned crust, using 86 points of sale on Rappi rather than a single dining room.[s] Maluma’s reported Rappi stake gave that food venture an added layer beyond the usual influencer restaurant playbook.
Then there is Contraluz, the premium agave-spirits brand he co-owns, produced in Mexico by the spirits house Casa Lumbre.[s] In November 2025, The Spirits Business reported that the brand had pushed beyond mezcal into a cristalino tequila, made its European debut in Italy, and was slated to reach Spain and other major European markets in early 2026.[s] It is the part of the Maluma business model that travels best: a bottle photographs well in a music video and ships across borders without a tour bus.
His most revealing bet is Remanence, an outdoor and athleisure label he launched in October 2024 with a 27-look runway show at Medellín’s EPM Intelligent Building.[s] He co-founded it with Ana Villegas, a childhood friend, and the two own the company outright. The brand emphasizes 100% Colombian production and says its clothing is designed in Colombia using renewable energy,[s] built from technical fabrics including a water-repellent jacket developed in Spain, with short-cycle drops every six weeks. By the time of its 2025 retail push, management said the label was stocked in 22 Colombian retail points of sale, including the chains Malva and Pilatos, with sales growing 30% a month and a goal of 40 to 50 outlets before the end of 2025.[s]
The thinking behind Remanence is the most instructive piece of the Maluma business model. The brand deliberately keeps his face out of the marketing. “The brand must stand on its own when Juan Luis is on tour,” Villegas, who manages it, told Modaes.[s] That inverts the usual celebrity playbook, where the famous name is the product. Here the famous name is the seed capital, and the goal is a company that survives without it.
The Maluma business model runs on equity, not endorsements
The cleverest move is less visible than any product. Caras reported that Maluma was a shareholder in Rappi, the delivery giant; in La Haus, a Colombian property platform; and in Foodology, the food-tech startup behind Dembow.[s] Celebrity Net Worth has separately flagged his venture stake in La Haus.[s] Read those reported holdings together and the burger chain stops looking like a vanity project: he had a reported slice of the app that delivers the food and the kitchen company that cooks it. Caras also reported that he had become a partner in Cubika Caribe, a logistics and industrial hub in Cartagena.[s]
This is what separates the Maluma business model from the standard endorsement résumé. He has done that work too, with Marca describing him as a major brand ambassador through collaborations with companies including Versace, Adidas, and Michelob Ultra.[s] But endorsements end when the contract does. Equity compounds. The brand extensions closer to his name are more conventional: after a 2021 menswear collaboration with the French house Balmain, he launched the clothing line Royalty by Maluma in early 2022,[s] alongside the Royalty Records label.[s] In August 2025 he signed with the talent agency WME across all areas, about a month after parting ways with his longtime manager Walter Kolm,[s] a move that reads less like a single deal than a decision to professionalize the whole operation.
The numbers behind the empire are softer than the headlines
For all the activity, the figures attached to the Maluma business model deserve caution. His personal net worth is an estimate, not a disclosure: Celebrity Net Worth puts it at $30 million,[s] while Marca, also citing Celebrity Net Worth in late 2025, reported $22 million.[s] Those are the educated guesses of celebrity-finance trackers, not audited accounts. Royalty’s revenue figures are softer still. The $80 million for 2022 and $200 million for 2023 that circulated were targets Maluma gave Forbes, more than double in a single year, not results the company has confirmed.
Music, meanwhile, is still the engine. His Papi Juancho Tour grossed $35 million,[s] Billboard counted his 26th No. 1 on the Latin Airplay chart in April 2026,[s] Variety has described him as the youngest artist to occupy its top two spots at once,[s] and Billboard has called him one of the best-selling Latin music artists in the world.[s] The ventures are bets placed with money the stage generates, and many celebrity brands quietly fold. Plenty of creators have turned one good idea into an unlikely franchise without a hit record to fall back on; for a musician the harder trick is building something that does not collapse the moment the touring slows. Remanence, engineered to stand without his face, is the clearest test of whether the model holds.
Why it matters beyond the charts
What the Maluma business model reflects is a generational shift in how Latin music stars treat fame. He launched his Medellín foundation, El Arte de Los Sueños, in 2016 to put at-risk youth through art and music education,[s] and he talks about Royalty in the language of legacy and family. The throughline is that fame is no longer the destination. It is the seed money. For an artist who built a global name from the first syllables of his mother, father, and sister’s names,[s] treating that name as capital and building a company meant to outlast the charts is the same instinct applied to a balance sheet.
