Forests VC is building a natural capital platform around a limitless question: how much productive, ecological, and financial value can strategic development unlock from land?
For generations, we have divided land into categories.
Farm. Forest. Ranch. Development property. Conservation land.
Each label tends to define what we expect the property to produce and, ultimately, how we value it.
Forests VC sees opportunity in seeing the whole system
The natural capital development company, co-founded by regenerative finance executive Ronny Castillo and business strategist Kimberly Lacayo, aims to acquire or partner around undervalued properties and transform them into more productive, resilient, and valuable natural assets.
The premise is expansive, but the process is disciplined.
Forests VC developed its FINCA Framework to Acquire, Design, Grow, Measure, Optimize, and Connect each property according to what the land can realistically support.
High-value regenerative forestry can create biological growth with long-duration asset value. Agriculture can generate nearer-term revenue. Strategic water management can strengthen productive capacity. Processing can retain margin closer to its source. Circular systems can transform residuals into useful inputs or new products.
Biodiversity, soil health and habitat can strengthen the living infrastructure supporting those activities. The opportunity is not to force every revenue stream onto every acre. It is to discover which combination makes the whole asset stronger.
Costa Rican businessman and business partner Marco Zúñiga captures the philosophy:
“The question extends beyond what the land is worth today. It’s what the land could become.”
For Lacayo, that idea represents an evolution from her earlier work in ESG and corporate social responsibility.
“I began to see a point where circularity ceases to be simply ESG and land stewardship ceases to be simply CSR,” she says. “When they improve productivity, resilience and economic value, they become part of the business strategy.”
That intersection also defines Castillo’s perspective.
His path from conventional finance into regenerative finance and natural capital, including teaching circular economics in Spain, has increasingly focused on connecting environmental systems with investment fundamentals.
“Capital is extraordinarily good at finding opportunity,” Castillo says. “The challenge is designing natural assets that deserve that capital.”
Building those assets requires more than capital.
“The broader group brings experience spanning tropical forestry and silviculture, agronomy and agricultural systems, real estate development, engineering, law, finance, business strategy and hands-on land stewardship. Forests VC Chief Technology Officer Leonardo Chonkan is focused on adding a digital layer to those physical capabilities, using technology including remote sensing, ground monitoring and planned digital-twin capabilities to help make the resulting systems increasingly measurable and transparent.”
Raíz de Oro, the group’s flagship Costa Rican development with Castillo as president, provides an early opportunity to bring those disciplines together.
Yet Forests VC’s ambition extends beyond any single property.
The company ultimately envisions a repeatable acquisition and development platform that can identify overlooked land, apply FINCA to unlock more of its potential, and connect improved natural assets with markets and capital.
Creative financial structures could eventually broaden participation in those real-world assets.
For investors, that may create access to differentiated assets combining underlying land, biological growth, and multiple potential economic engines across varying time scales. For property owners, it creates another possibility: the most valuable version of their land may not yet exist. That is Forests VC’s larger proposition.
