As real-world assets attract growing attention from digital finance, Forests VC is starting with a more fundamental question: how can the underlying asset itself be made more valuable?
Real-world assets have become one of finance and blockchain’s most compelling areas of innovation. Real estate, private credit, commodities, and infrastructure are increasingly being connected to digital financial systems.
Forests VC sees another opportunity growing beneath investors’ feet: productive land.
The natural capital development company, co-founded by regenerative finance executive Ronny Castillo and business strategist Kimberly Lacayo, is developing an approach designed to transform undervalued land into diversified productive assets before considering how technology might expand investor access to them.
For Castillo, who began his career in conventional finance before moving into regenerative finance and natural capital, the sequence matters.
“Capital is extraordinarily good at finding opportunity. The challenge is designing natural assets that deserve that capital, with real economics, measurable performance and structures investors can understand.”
Forests VC begins with the land.
Through its FINCA Framework, the company intends to identify undervalued properties, design productive systems around their particular characteristics, grow and measure those systems, optimize their economics and ultimately connect them with markets and capital.
Costa Rican businessman and business partner Marco Zúñiga brings an important perspective to that process: understanding both what a property is and what thoughtful development could make it.
“The question extends beyond what the land is worth today,” Zúñiga says. “It’s what the land could become.”
That can create several layers of potential value. High-value forestry offers long-duration biological growth. Regenerative agriculture can generate nearer-term production and cash flow. Processing can retain additional margin at the property level. Circular systems can transform agricultural byproducts into useful inputs or products. Depending on the property, tourism and measurable ecosystem services can contribute additional economic opportunities.
The approach effectively treats a farm as a portfolio of interconnected productive assets.
Technology then becomes increasingly valuable.
Remote sensing, ground-level data, digital monitoring, and a digital twin can help measure biological growth, agricultural performance, and changes in the underlying property. Better information can support management decisions while creating the transparency sophisticated capital increasingly expects.
Yet the technology ultimately measures something physical. Forester Javier Esquivel brings decades of experience in tropical forestry and silviculture to the broader team.
“A forest has yet to grow according to your financial model. The biology has to work first.”
That principle places the physical asset at the foundation of the financial infrastructure eventually built around it.
Technology enters after that foundation is established. For Forests VC Chief Technology Officer Leonardo Chonkan, the opportunity is to build a digital layer around the physical asset rather than substitute for it. Remote sensing, ground-level data, and planned digital-twin capabilities can increasingly show how forestry, agriculture, water, and other productive systems are performing over time. His work also extends to the Forests marketplace, which aims to use technology to broaden access to natural assets and make participation more transparent and accessible.
“Technology can make the living asset more visible and more accessible,” Chonkan says. “Better data helps us understand performance, while the marketplace can create new ways for people to participate in natural assets that historically have been difficult to access.”
As natural assets become more measurable, digital securities and tokenization may provide new mechanisms for structuring ownership, administering investments, and connecting qualified investors with opportunities. Forests VC views those technologies as tools within a larger investment architecture, with value creation beginning in the land itself.
Its flagship Costa Rican project, Raíz de Oro, provides an opportunity to apply the model across forestry, agriculture, and complementary natural-capital enterprises, with Castillo serving as its president.
The model also works from the landowner’s side.
Owners of underutilized farms may control significantly more economic potential than their property’s existing use reveals. Forests VC aims to acquire or partner around suitable properties and use FINCA to identify what those assets could become.
For investors, the opportunity is access to differentiated natural real-world assets. For landowners, it is a pathway toward realizing more of their property’s productive potential.
And for the rapidly evolving RWA market, Forests VC is advancing a simple proposition:
Before creating a better way to own an asset, create an asset worth owning.
