The eighth cohort of the Brainforest Venture Program has officially kicked off, and our forest just got a lot livelier 🌳!

This time, more than 300 applications reached us from all five continents. That is the most we have ever received. At a time when sustainability rules are being rolled back, climate alliances are shrinking and funding is harder to find, that number gives us real hope.

People keep building for nature, and the ventures keep getting better at finding the sweet spot between a business model that respects nature and impact that can truly scale.

Seven teams made it through. Each one works on a different piece of the same puzzle. Here they are, in alphabetical order.

🔗 AgTrace (Brazil)

AgTrace is the traceability infrastructure for agricultural supply chains. It connects every step from the farm to the consumer, using verified origin data to improve efficiency, guarantee market access, and unlock product differentiation for producers and brands. Brazil is the world's largest agricultural exporter, yet its commodities sell at a 5 to 25 percent discount because origin cannot be proven, and new EUDR rules will soon block produce without farm-level traceability. AgTrace already works at national scale across cotton, coffee, cattle, fruits and vegetables.

Led by CEO André Maltz (ex IBM Research), COO Luciano Tamiso (President of the Brazilian Food Traceability Institute) and CTO Alberto Tormos (ex Solinftec), with over fifty combined years in agtech and data.

LinkedIn

🌊 AquaBloom (Indonesia)

Climate change and farming that depends on synthetic inputs are wearing down soil health and biodiversity across Indonesian smallholder agriculture. AquaBloom turns tropical seaweed into biological crop inputs that reduce the need for synthetic fertilizers, bring soil biology back to life and regenerate coastal ecosystems through the seaweed farming behind it. Growth here lifts farmer income and ecosystem health at the same time, on land and at sea.

The team is led by CEO Michelle Arsjad (chemical engineer, ex-McKinsey, founder of Edufarmers Foundation), with R&D guided by Didik Sudihardjo and Hana Christine, who bring decades of agri-input and biostimulant experience.

LinkedIn

🌳 ForestiFi (Brazil)

Amazon products like wild guaraná, Brazil nuts, managed pirarucu and açaí have real market potential, yet the cooperatives behind them rarely get working capital or access to investors. ForestiFi works with local organisations to originate real production assets, then uses blockchain and tokenization to create transparent, traceable instruments that fund harvest, processing and sales. The idea: make the standing forest economy an investable asset class.

Founded in Manaus in 2022 by CTO Glauco Aguiar da Paz, who co-founded FabLAB Manaus, and Macaulay Abreu, who brings deep experience in agribusiness and Amazon production chains. Around 80 percent of the team comes from the Amazon.

LinkedIn

🌾 Greenerth (India)

Greenerth is a climate tech company that works with smallholder farmers to end the open burning of agricultural residues. It converts these residues into biochar and returns it to the farmers' soils. This improves soil health, creates jobs and supports the social and economic development of rural communities, enabled by carbon finance. Its proprietary MRV technology provides end-to-end traceability across the process, generating high-quality carbon removal credits.

Founded by CEO Saurabh Mehendale (ex Amazon) and CTO Jhanavi Chaudhary (ex Reliance), who met in a sustainability class at Duke and moved back to India to work directly with rural communities.

LinkedIn

🫐 Maçaix Hispam (Brazil)

Biodiversity value chains are scattered and lack trusted standards for quality, traceability and market access. That means producers capture little of the value, and there is little reason to protect the forest. Maçaix builds the trust infrastructure to change this, combining science, protocols, traceability and certification, and starts with Specialty Harvest Açaí as a model other value chains can follow.

Led by CEO Anelise Stahl Martins, who spotted the gap in 2014 and launched Maçaix in 2018 together with her co-founders Marco (operations and supply chain), Tomaz (brand and international expansion) and Tiago Martins (commercial and technology).

LinkedIn

🐟 RISCO (Singapore & Philippines)

Coastal aquaculture in the Philippines supports 1.2 million farmers across 250,000 hectares, yet almost none can borrow from a bank. They have no land title, their income comes twice a year and there is no data to assess them. RISCO lends to these farmers directly, repaid as a share of each harvest, with mangrove restoration written into the loan terms. Daily water quality and farm data become the credit file that never existed.

Founded and led by Ashwin Bhagavatula, who spent fifteen years building financial services for low-income customers across Africa and Asia. In the Philippines, Joan Awayan and Irene Hamora lead operations.

LinkedIn

🪵 Riziki Nature Based Solutions (Kenya)

Riziki Nature Based Solutions is a Kenya-based company built on a simple belief: the best way to solve the invasive woody species crisis is to build a business around it. Riziki converts woody invasive weeds into biochar, which it sells as a soil amendment and as carbon removal credits. This restores degraded land and creates meaningful income for communities living on an average of just 32 cents per person per day, where few other economic opportunities exist.

Led by CEO Julie Brown, with over a decade in climate finance and carbon projects, and COO Cody Danet, who sits on Kenya's national working group on invasive Prosopis.

LinkedIn

Curious to see them in action?

Every cohort ends with our Pitch Day. This time it takes place online, so investors from anywhere can meet all seven ventures in one engaging live session and connect with other people who invest in nature.

Are you an investor, or curious about how to start?
Register here: https://luma.com/shonwh0l

Pitch Day: Tuesday, 8 December 2026, 13:00 to 15:00 CET, online via Zoom

And if you are building the next venture rooted in biodiversity and regeneration, our waitlist for the next Venture Program is open. We would love to hear from you!