We are starting 2025 announcing our latest investment, breaking the rules we set for ourselves in our mandate. Over the past few years, we have devoted our efforts and capital mainly to nature-based solutions projects in Brazil, while cherishing our relationships with a diverse group of fund managers who have far more capacity than we do to make direct equity deals in startups and manage them.
During this period, our standard response to entrepreneurs seeking funding has been that we no longer engage in direct deals. This is what we told Marcelo and Zé, founders of Mazo Mana, when they reached out to us as they were on the final stages of the acceleration program at Amaz, one of our key investments and main partners in the quest to support entrepreneurs building sustainable solutions for an Amazonian bioeconomy.
In our role of supporting the ecosystem with potential connections, we scheduled a conversation with Mazo Mana to see how we could help. After a one-hour meeting, we realized that the business they are building is at the heart of our thesis on regenerative food systems. One of the pillars of our theory of change is supporting companies that can purchase a variety of products from the same producers. This gives the supply chain an incentive to embrace complex production systems that involve multiple species and, in tropical regions, often agroforestry as a method of production.
Mazo Mana was embracing complexity on deeper levels. They were sourcing 14 different ingredients, mostly from extractivist indigenous communities deep in the Amazon, around the region of Altamira, home to a large diversity of indigenous communities and many social issues putting pressure on the forest. This includes the mega-government project of Belo Monte, which flooded a large area of the forest to create space for a dam supplying water to one of Brazil’s largest power plants, contributing to one of the biggest recent ecological disasters, disguised as progress.
The first product they developed and are offering to the market is a nutrient-dense, high-protein vegan shake that blends these fourteen ingredients into a beverage that is nutrient-dense enough to serve as a quick meal or a post-workout blend of protein with lots of nutrients, rich in fiber, minerals and anti-oxidants, coming straight from the forest. More interesting than their delicious and nutritious shake, which is already selling in retail stores in São Paulo, is the story behind creating a traceable supply chain for a diversity of Amazonian ingredients sourced directly from communities that are helping conserve precious native forests under the pressure of deforestation. Mazo Mana presents the richness of the forest and its diversity as a more sustainable and economically viable model for the communities that live in and help conserve the forest—far better than the alternative coming from mainstream agribusiness, introducing unproductive cattle management, followed by soy production to feed the animal factories of China and Europe.
As we engaged further with the founders, we discovered another remarkable aspect that had been creating a barrier for the company during their pre-seed fundraising: they were keeping the communities that source their valuable ingredients with a significant amount of equity on the cap table of the company. They were attempting to go the venture capital route, trying to convince investors that the enterprise should be collectively owned by those who run the business, provide the ingredients for the product, and those who fund it. This level of complexity was enough to scare off even self-proclaimed impact investors, and definitely a red flag for any traditional venture capitalist seeking to multiply their investment by a double-digit multiple as quickly as possible. For us, it was an emblematic case study of embracing complexity at every level, closer to how things work in nature.
An impressive team with vast experience in the region, deep roots in the Amazon, and a strong sense of purpose. An amazing product that I wish I had access to consume daily after my workouts in the Netherlands, and a platform to showcase the world a multitude of superfood ingredients that go beyond the already popular Açai, with plants that thrive in native forests or agroforestry systems. We decided to embrace the challenge of exploring new regenerative stewardship models that can support the company with the funding needed for its growth.
It was a hard sell in our own investment committee to defy our mandate and embrace an early-stage direct investment in the Amazon, but in times of crisis, with the threat of climate breakdown, we need to be able to make bolder moves and put our money behind something that embodies a beautiful vision of the future.
We saw in Mazo Mana a company that gives communities in the forest the alternative to conserve their ways of living while holding the threat of a broken industrial food system that values volume over diversity, and is less concerned about the nutrient quality of what it produces, focusing instead on yield per hectare. Even if it means tons of GMO grain soaked in chemicals being shipped across the world to feed pigs. Nothing can be more insane than destroying pristine forest to produce soy. Sometimes, we need to trust our gut biome and invest in something truly beautiful, even without a clear exit strategy.
https://www.mazomana.com.br/en
