Fundo Vale, in partnership with Quintessa, celebrated the end of the Forest & Climate Challenges Program with five accelerated businesses that have the potential to solve challenges in the agroforestry carbon ecosystem. Find out more!
Fundo Vale is driven by innovation, sustainability and the continuous search for solutions that contribute to a greener future. This was borne out in the Forest & Climate Challenges Program – Carbon Edition, carried out in partnership with Quintessa, which selected and accelerated five businesses and initiatives that work with innovative solutions in the carbon ecosystem.
After a six-month immersion, a demo day held on September 29 at Cubo Itaú in São Paulo marked the end of the program, involving strategic networking and exciting pitches, showing how the acceleration program contributed to each selected startup and presenting the main results achieved by the entrepreneurs.
There was also a presentation about the Carbon Business Mapping Exercise, undertaken by Fundo Vale in partnership with Pipe Social, sharing insights into the evolution of this market in Brazil, as well as concepts and results. The aim of this exercise was to map information about the ecosystem and explore the maturity of businesses in the sector.
“The carbon credit ecosystem is very new in Brazil, so the solutions still need support to become mature enough to reach the large scale that the market requires. We have also seen from the program that academia has a lot of technology with the potential to generate innovation in this market, as academic spinoffs Quanticum and Inspectral have shown us. We have now reached the end of the program and many valuable connections have been generated between entrepreneurs and the players in the ecosystem through the program, further reinforcing Fundo Vale’s strategy of working in coalitions.” Lucas Folgado, innovation consultant, Fundo Vale
The demo day also discussed Fundo Vale’s open innovation activities on the impact carbon and forestry agenda, aimed at fostering valuable connections between players in the innovation, financial and forestry ecosystems.
About the Forest & Climate Challenges Program – Carbon Edition
The program supported our mission to promote solutions with positive social and environmental impacts, which strengthen a sustainable, fair, inclusive and zero-carbon economy. At first, we launched the selection process, which attracted 239 applications. We then interviewed 20 initiatives, 11 took part in the pitch day (the last stage of the selection process) and 5 were selected.
We were looking for businesses/initiatives that had solutions or were interested in adapting solutions to meet the following challenges:
| INDIRECT | DIRECT |
| Refers to solutions that operate in the agroforestry chain, indirectly impacting carbon. | Refers to solutions that bring about direct benefits for the carbon market, from origination through the various stages of a project’s development and monitoring cycle. |
| Supply of inputs for agroforestry systems | Monitoring of carbon credit projects |
| Technical training for carbon chain actors | Carbon credit project management |
| Sale of agroforestry products | Funding carbon credit projects |
| Securing land tenure and use | Access to carbon market |
| Reducing risks of carbon credit projects |
Accordingly, in April we started to accelerate the enterprises to validate their business model and/or solutions developed by them. The five selected companies received mentoring, training/lectures/workshops and tools to help them develop their businesses.
The demo day in September was an opportunity to conclude and celebrate this edition of the program with its participants, strategic partners and organizers.
According to Quintessa’s Fabiana Goulart, there are various bottlenecks for generating and selling agroforestry carbon in Brazil and there are few mature solutions for solving these challenges on a large scale. “It was a great privilege to watch the development of the companies selected by the Forest & Climate Challenges Program, an initiative designed to support businesses in diagnosing their main management bottlenecks, prioritizing and solving the most urgent problems and taking advantage of the program’s network of partners to test and validate solutions,” she said.
“Seeing startups leaving with more robust management and good commercial prospects for the solutions prototyped in the program is our great cause for celebration.” Fabiana Goulart
The results are inspiring! Discover the stories of the participating startups that are making a difference in the fight against climate change:
Umgrauemeio (Portuguese for “one and a half degrees”)
This is an innovative start-up in the forest fire monitoring market. Its Pantera software has several modules, making up a complete solution that works on everything from fire prevention to the identification, management and analysis of the impacts generated. Since 2016, it has had a strong presence in productive agribusiness areas, but the program enabled it to better understand and adapt its system to the carbon market and environmental protection applications, resulting in the start of four trials that are monitoring more than 1 million hectares. In addition, the acceleration program played an important role in structuring the company’s management framework, encompassing aspects such as finance and pricing, making its management more robust and boosting the confidence of potential investors. Finally, during the program, Umgrauemeio won the startup challenge at the Brazil Climate Summit in New York.
The technology developed by Quanticum offers more accessible and faster soil analysis compared to traditional approaches, paving the way for two important areas of activity. First, this superior technology contributes to increased productivity and cost efficiency in agricultural and forestry activities, from crop planning to harvesting. Second, it has the ability to measure the soil’s natural potential to preserve carbon and thus help with the additionality of projects that generate carbon credits in a more transparent way. The Forest & Climate Challenges Program helped Quanticum enter the agroforestry sector and it won the first Expoforest Prize for Startups in the Plantation Forestry Sector.
Eccaplan’s Carbon Fair is a carbon credit marketplace that is democratizing access to the market for small and medium-sized social and environmental projects. Through the platform, projects increase the liquidity of their credits and companies manage their emissions inventory and offset their emissions. The acceleration of Carbon Fair improved its value proposition for carbon credit buyers and validated the financial and operational viability for small and medium-sized social and environmental projects to be paid for the environmental services they provide.
This startup, which originated in the academic world, offers a remote environmental monitoring solution, initially focused on water quality. As the technology developed, the need for remote environmental monitoring in other areas, such as forestry and agriculture, became apparent. The high accuracy of water quality analysis, 93%, led Inspectral to adapt its algorithms for forestry analysis. During the acceleration program, we explored the market for remote monitoring of forests and built an internal carbon pricing model to help this new product go to market effectively.
Sintrópica offers end-to-end solutions for paying for environmental services. Its main product is Green Rural Product Certificates, which it structures, issues and monitors. The startup has designed four arrangements for paying for environmental services using Green Rural Product Certificates: Restoration, Biodiversity, Conservation, and Soil Health. During the acceleration program, we worked with different players in this area, such as financial institutions, agricultural input suppliers, forest restoration companies and ecosystem development organizations, in order to build a product that can serve all stakeholders.
Fundo Vale works in coalition to achieve its objectives. The Forest & Climate Challenges Program fostered connections between startups (with solutions), corporations (with demands) and investors (with financial resources). All of this connects to the objectives in Fundo Vale’s Theory of Change, as it generates stronger and more solid interactions for us to act in new partnerships.
