Portfolio Spotlight: How Muvuca Agroflorestal is restoring the Brazilian Atlantic Forest through agroforestry

In the heart of Brazil, Muvuca Agroflorestal is building a new model for farming that restores ecosystems and improves rural livelihoods. Selected as a winner of the Winter Venture Program 2023, they got financially and operationally backed by Brainforest. Muvuca is proving that agriculture can support both climate resilience and community wellbeing.

This blog post dives into Muvuca’s mission and impact. The team has now opened their seed round. If you're interested in joining their journey, you can find more details here.

Farming for the Future: How Muvuca is restoring land and livelihoods in Brazil

Brazil’s food system faces big challenges. Healthy and organic food is still too expensive for many people, and conventional farming is causing deforestation, poor soil, and loss of biodiversity. These problems are adding to the climate crisis and putting the country’s food future at risk. At the same time, small family farmers, who grow much of Brazil’s food, often struggle with low incomes and don’t have access to fair markets. Carlyle, from the United States, and Átila, from Brazil, both cared deeply about sustainable farming and saw up close how good crops weren’t enough to fix the hard lives of small farmers. That experience led them to the shared vision of farming that supports both people and the planet. Out of this need for change Muvuca Agroflorestal was born.

The name Muvuca Agroflorestal says a lot about their mission. In Portuguese, muvuca means a mix or crowd, and it's also the name of a planting method that spreads a variety of native seeds together to help forests grow back naturally. Agroflorestal means agroforestry, farming that works with trees and nature. Together, the name reflects Muvuca’s goal: to grow food in a way that restores the land and supports local communities.

Muvuca connects farmers across Brazil directly with consumers through a subscription-based food delivery service and an e-commerce platform. These channels offer healthy, organic products to Brazilian households while ensuring farmers receive fair compensation and stable income. These deliveries provide healthy, traceable, and affordable food while ensuring farmers are fairly compensated.

The farmers Muvuca works with are supported to transition from conventional agriculture to a regenerative model rooted in agroforestry. Agroforestry is a method that combines food production with the planting of native trees. This approach helps regenerate soil, increase biodiversity, and create more stable income for farming families. Muvuca provides farmers with seedlings, paid labor, and hands-on training to support the transition from conventional agriculture to regenerative practices.

Impact

For the past three years, Muvuca has been working to bring healthy, affordable food to homes across Brazil, while helping farmers shift toward more sustainable practices. And the early results are promising. Muvuca has launched four pilot farms that are already restoring soil health, boosting biodiversity, and capturing carbon. Farmers in the program are starting to see their incomes rise, with the potential to triple within just two years. By growing a diverse mix of five to eight crops, they’re also reducing risk and becoming more resilient to changes in weather and market conditions.

Outlook

Muvuca is entering a new phase of growth, with a clear roadmap to scale both its environmental and social impact across Brazil. 

In the near term, by 2027, the team plans to restore 712 hectares of degraded land and support the transition of 75 farms to regenerative agroforestry. By 2028, the impact expands even further, with a target of sequestering 136,000 metric tons of CO₂ annually, restoring thousands of hectares, and helping smallholder farmers triple their incomes.

Looking ahead to 2033, Muvuca’s long-term vision comes into focus: establishing 100,000 hectares of productive agroforests, directly engaging 10,000 farmers, and reaching an impressive 800,000 metric tons of CO₂ sequestered each year.

These milestones reflect a bold but practical belief, that ecological restoration and rural prosperity can and must move forward together. And already, results from previous years show what’s possible: participating farmers are seeing meaningful income growth, more diversified crops, and greater long-term stability.

Brainforest’s role in the journey

With both operational and financial support from Brainforest, Muvuca is the fourth venture in our portfolio and represents exactly the kind of initiative we seek to back. It is a venture that combines ecological restoration with meaningful, long-term benefits for local communities.

Muvuca joined the Venture Program in winter 2023 and was selected as the winner of that cohort. Since then, we have been working closely with the team to support their growth. Their mission, along with the passion Carlyle and Átila bring to it, has inspired the entire Brainforest team.

Our investment reflects a strong belief in Muvuca’s potential to scale solutions that address some of the most urgent environmental challenges of our time. What makes Muvuca stand out is the clarity and practicality of their model. They offer a direct path for farmers to transition from conventional agriculture to regenerative practices that restore the land while strengthening rural livelihoods.

As Muvuca prepares to expand across Brazil, the team is opening its seed fundraising round to partners who believe that climate solutions must be rooted in both nature and equity. We see this as a unique opportunity to support a venture that is not only restoring landscapes but also rethinking how agriculture can work for people and the planet.

If you are interested in learning more or meeting the team, you can find more information here, or email us directly. Carlyle and Átila will be visiting our headquarters in Zürich this May 2025, and we would be happy to help you connect with them in person.

We look forward to continuing this journey together, sharing key milestones and insights along the way. Follow us on LinkedIn to stay connected and learn more about how Muvuca is helping to shape the future of ecological restoration in Brazil.

Interested in supporting Muvuca’s seed round? Learn more here.

Brainforest’s Venture Program is open twice a year, and we’re always looking for bold, nature-based startups like Muvuca. If you're interested in joining our ecosystem of innovators, you can already sign up on our website to join the waiting list.