OnlyPlants Food joined the Brainforest portfolio as the seventh portfolio company, after winning the pitch competition of the Spring Venture Program 2025. Founder Marie Louise Wiegert began her journey far from agriculture. Originally from Germany, she worked in private equity in New York, analyzing climate risks on paper. But she wanted to build something real, something with tangible impact on the ground. That urge led her to Kenya. While exploring Nairobi's street markets, she stumbled upon woven baskets filled with an unfamiliar bean. The seller, Phanice, introduced her to the Bambara groundnut, a crop grown by generations of women in her family. Drought resilient, nitrogen fixing and rich in protein, yet missing from modern food systems. That discovery became the foundation of OnlyPlants. Today, OnlyPlants is building a vertically integrated model that begins with seed biodiversity and ends with a nutritious product on the shelf. In partnership with Kenyan researchers, the team collected and studied 266 Bambara varieties, now preserved in the national seed bank to safeguard genetic diversity, as Marie shared in her interview with Brainforest. Through an outgrower program, smallholder farmers receive quality seeds and training, along with the security that their harvest will be purchased at the end of the season. With its investment, Brainforest supports OnlyPlants in scaling its production facility in Nairobi, strengthening traceability and deepening partnerships with smallholder farmers. In 2026, the Wyss Academy for Nature matched Brainforest's commitment with an additional 125,000 dollars, bringing real momentum to the venture. Marie's vision is bold: turning OnlyPlants into a category defining African food company, one that turns underutilized indigenous crops into affordable everyday staples and keeps value, jobs and innovation in the region. Because restoration is about more than planting trees. It is about restoring balance in our food systems, economies and ecosystems.