Founded in 2019, Brainforest is a Swiss tax-exempt association and the world's first for-impact venture studio developing innovative solutions for the regeneration and protection of forest ecosystems.
After just 3 years, Brainforest has already made great progress with 2 fully incorporated and seed-funded ventures, CHF 2.5 Million of grants received and CHF 6 Million of impact investments attracted for the two ventures. Having successfully completed the proof-of-concept phase, we are now preparing for the 2023-25 phase.
Throughout our work on forests over the last three years, we have identified and evaluated a range of different themes and potential business cases. We are now channeling our efforts on two focus areas with dedicated labs: biodiversity and regenerative food forests
- Revenues from nuts and other Non-Timber Forest Products: the goal is to combine alternative income sources from standing forests to avoid deforestation and enable communities to restore forests. This is taking place in our regenerative food forests lab.
- Monetizing biodiversity and other ecosystem services: the goal is to leverage innovative technologies and create market-driven solutions to generate revenues from biodiversity and other ecosystem services (e.g. carbon sequestration, standardization of biodiversity data, biodiversity credits) for local communities to restore and protect forests. This is being developed in our biodiversity lab.
PROJECTS
Brainforest has fully incorporated two ventures:
Our first venture, Xilva, is a Swiss-based company which was incorporated in 2021. Xilva offers a digital marketplace connecting capital providers with forest projects to deploy capital to forests faster, easier and more efficiently. The platform provides transparency from and for both parties, allowing forest projects to find funding from capital providers which in turn prevents deforestation by ensuring forest protection as well as supporting reforestation efforts at massive scale.
With our second venture (also incorporated in 2021), Ecosystem Value Association (EVA), we created a quality standard for climate certificates from reforestation that enables forest owners to generate direct revenues from ecosystem services. Having a forest climate standard is a way to ensure ecological diversity in forests. Thus, these projects not only promote a healthy regenerative forest but also improve biodiversity and climate resilience of these ecosystems.
Our newest venture in progress: Alalapadu project