How to turn bioeconomy into investment?
Thursday, 8th October 2026
By Paula Perrelli dos Anjos
The bioeconomy is moving up the global agenda, and investors are paying closer attention. But the money isn’t reaching the forest at scale. In the experience of Amazonia Impact Ventures (AIV), the work starts with producers and value chains, and then capital follows.
The distance between interest and investment was the starting point for one of the sessions at Building Bridges 2026 in Geneva, where our Co-founder and Investment Director, Pajani Singah, spent the week talking to investors and development institutions. The bioeconomy is projected to reach US$30 trillion by 2050, yet speakers kept returning to the weaknesses in metrics and deal-making that hold capital back.
Across sessions and meetings, Pajani made the case for building investment from the value chain up. In Geneva, he also met Philip Kauders, CEO of Courageous Land, our partner in Brazil (pictured together).
The ticket-size mismatch
Again and again, the conversation turned to scale. Insurers, pension funds and large financial institutions need tickets in the tens of millions before they can invest. But a cooperative processing Amazon nuts, or a company scaling up copoazú pulp, typically needs between US$50,000 and US$ 1million. The capital exists, but it comes in the wrong size.
Narrowing that gap is what AIV is built to do:
Aggregate small deals into one investable portfolio. Investors come in once, at a size that works for them, and we deploy capital toward dozens of loans along the value chain.
Use catalytic capital to absorb the first risk. Around 30% of our capital is catalytic, which makes the risk acceptable to more conservative investors.
Get businesses ready before they borrow. Our Technical Assistance Facility builds the pipeline, so capital has somewhere sound to go.
So far, AIV has provided more than 50 impact-linked loans across Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Brazil, reaching over 5,000 smallholder farmers, and zero write-offs to date.
Our partnership with Courageous Land in Roraima, through Ecotierra, and our role leading the UK PACT programme in Loreto and Madre de Dios to catalyse the bioconomy are two recent examples of this model in practice:
For the bioeconomy, scale means finding ways for large investors to fund many small businesses at once.
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