Cultivo aims to generate capital for financial institutions and regenerate 1% of the world’s land into healthy ecosystems using their ‘upstream’ model of building portfolios. Speaking to Finextra, CEO and founder of Cultivo, Dr. Manuel Pinuela emphasises that Cultivo seeks to help financial institutions develop portfolios in order to invest in future high quality carbon credits, and provide solutions to achieve sustainable goals such as Net Zero.

“We can unlock the natural capital value of an existing land portfolio a corporate customer may have creating carbon credits they can use for investing.”

Pinuela furthers: “The symptom of the ‘upstream’ supply issue we see is a crunch of high quality nature-based carbon credits in the market. However, the root cause is a lack of investment flowing ‘upstream’ to originate and develop high quality nature-based projects in the right way. Cultivo is directly addressing this by building portfolios of high quality natural capital with financial institutions and corporations.”

The fintech uses a climate tech platform that analyses land for natural capital potential.

Pinuela adds that the technology employed by Cultivo was designed for the sole purpose of solving the ‘upstream’ issue: “We have built a Search Engine for Natural Capital, that proactively identifies parcels of land that are degraded and have high regeneration potential. We have also built a series of proprietary tools and algorithms that allows us to forecast the biodiversity, water and carbon gains for a project. In essence, our tech dramatically reduces the time and cost to screen and originate projects that have high natural capital potential, which significantly accelerates the speed and scale that money can flow into nature.”

Pinuela expresses a positive outlook on the future ambitions of Cultivo, and concludes that the addition to significant board members such as Mark Carney will only accelerate the progress they have already achieved.

“It’s a huge validation of both our model and our ambition to accelerate investment into nature at scale. Mark Carney brings a wealth of knowledge on climate, finance and the voluntary carbon markets that is fundamental to solving the supply issue and his experience and insight, as with all our board members, will be invaluable.

The other five new board members include chair of Social Finance, Brace Young, senior advisor at Centerview Partners, Mark Tercek, head of sustainable investing at UBS Asset Management, Lucy Thomas, impact investor and CEO of Reaseguradora Patria S.A., Francesco Martinez, and CEO and chair of the Rainmaker Group, Gabriel Holschneider Osuna.

Finextra recently announced its fifth Sustainable Finance Live conference and hackathon, scheduled to take place on 29 November. For more information and to register for this event, please visit the event page here.