Quito, Ecuador - December 23, 2025

 

An early exploration from IMPAQTO Capital.

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At IMPAQTO Capital, we see finance not only as a mechanism for allocating resources, but as a tool for shaping the future we choose. Over the past decade, our work across Ecuador and the Andean region has shown us both the power, and the limits, of capital as it is currently deployed.

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We are sharing this note as a pre-announcement and invitation into our thinking. We are actively exploring and designing a potential investment vehicle focused on the Andean Amazon, currently in its early design phase. No fund has been launched, and no capital is being raised. What we are doing,intentionally and transparently,is opening up a process of learning, listening, and co-creation, because we believe the Andean Amazon demands nothing less.

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Why the Andean Amazon

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The Andean Amazon sits at a critical intersection of global importance and local neglect.

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It is one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet and a vital regulator of climate stability, water systems, and cultural continuity. At the same time, it is home to communities who have historically been excluded from mainstream financial systems and whose livelihoods are too often framed only through the lens of extraction, charity, or conservation, rather than enterprise, innovation, and long-term value creation.

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Despite growing global attention on the Amazon, capital flows remain misaligned. Too much funding is short-term, fragmented, or disconnected from local realities. Too little is designed to support enterprises that make the forest worth more alive than dead, enterprises rooted in regenerative value chains, agroforestry, biodiversity-positive products, and community-anchored business models.

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We believe the Andean Amazon needs patient, place-based, and intelligently structured capital, capital that understands both ecosystems and markets, and that can bridge the gap between global investors and local entrepreneurs.

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Why IMPAQTO Capital (and why us)

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Our interest in the Andean Amazon does not emerge from a blank slate.

 

IMPAQTO Capital is a proximate fund manager, born and built in the Andean region. Through Fund I, we have deployed flexible capital into “missing-middle” enterprises across Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia, working closely with founders to strengthen governance, resilience, and impact. Several of our portfolio companies already rely on regenerative and Amazon-connected value chains, including partnerships with Indigenous and women-led producer associations.

 

Importantly, IMPAQTO Capital is part of IMPAQTO, a broader platform that for more than a decade has supported small and growing businesses, social enterprises, and entrepreneurial ecosystems across Ecuador and the region. In recent years, IMPAQTO has increasingly focused on regenerative business models and Amazonian entrepreneurship, supporting founders who are building livelihoods aligned with forest conservation, cultural continuity, and territorial resilience.

 

Beyond our direct investments, our team has been actively contributing to the broader Amazon finance and innovation ecosystem. This includes participation in platforms such as the Amazon Investor Coalition, where we engage alongside other investors and partners working to improve the quality, coordination, and effectiveness of capital flowing into the Amazon.

 

This exploration has also been shaped by a period of intentional reflection and learning. Over the past semester, IMPAQTO Capital’s leadership has had the opportunity to step back and think more deeply about these questions through a residency at Yale University as part of the Yale World Fellows Program. We are deeply grateful to the Yale World Fellowship for creating the space to interrogate prevailing models of impact finance, engage with scholars and practitioners across disciplines, and explore what it would mean to design investment vehicles that are better aligned with ecological systems and lived realities in places like the Andean Amazon.

 

 

The team and partners shaping this exploration

 

This exploration is being shaped by a multidisciplinary team that brings together investment experience, value-chain expertise, and deep regional knowledge.

 

In addition to the IMPAQTO Capital team, this work is being informed by Rick Gellert, whose decades of experience span smallholder agriculture, regenerative and bioeconomy value chains, and private investment across Latin America. Rick’s grounding in how value chains function on the ground, particularly in contexts involving small producers and forest-dependent communities, adds an essential lens to how we are thinking about investment design and risk.

We are also grateful for the support of Fundación Avina, which has accompanied this exploratory phase by helping us think through systems change, territorial approaches, and how capital can better support inclusive and regenerative development pathways in the Amazon.

 

These relationships reflect how we are approaching this work: not as a standalone fund concept, but as a collaborative design process embedded in a wider ecosystem of practitioners and institutions.

 

 

Early thinking on value chains (still exploratory)

 

While it is too early to define a fixed investment thesis, our early exploration has been guided by a simple question: where can capital unlock durable livelihoods while strengthening forest integrity?

 

This has led us to look closely at regenerative and biodiversity-positive value chains that:

• Are already rooted in Amazonian territories

• Depend on standing forests, diversified landscapes, or agroforestry systems

• Offer pathways to move beyond commodity dependence through value addition, traceability, and market access

• Involve Indigenous peoples, women, and local producer organizations as central economic actors, not peripheral beneficiaries

 

One value chain that has emerged repeatedly in our early conversations is cacao, not as a predefined focus, but as an illustrative example of the kinds of dynamics we are seeking to understand more deeply.

 

Across the Andean Amazon, cacao is already embedded in agroforestry systems that can support forest conservation, soil regeneration, and diversified rural livelihoods. At the same time, many cacao producers remain exposed to price volatility, limited access to patient capital, weak downstream integration, and an uneven distribution of value along the chain.

 

From an investment-design perspective, cacao raises important questions we are actively exploring in this phase: how capital might better support transitions from commodity production to higher-value models; how investments at different points in the value chain (production, processing, aggregation, traceability, market access) could reinforce one another; and how finance can be structured in ways that reward long-term stewardship rather than short-term extraction.

 

Cacao is not the only value chain under consideration, and no investment focus has been defined. Rather, it serves as a concrete lens through which we are testing assumptions, learning from practitioners, and assessing whether a more focused, value-chain–anchored approach, potentially starting with one or a small number of value chains, could enable deeper learning, stronger enterprise support, and clearer demonstrations of what is possible when finance is aligned with ecological realities.

 

These questions are precisely what this design phase is meant to explore.

 

 

Why now

 

We are at an inflection point.

 

Across the region, political, social, and environmental pressures are converging. At the same time, there is growing recognition,among entrepreneurs, communities, and a new generation of investors,that extractive development models are failing. New narratives are emerging around the bioeconomy, regenerative enterprise, and nature-aligned value creation, but the financial infrastructure to support them remains underdeveloped.

 

Globally, impact investing is also maturing. There is less appetite for vague promises and more demand for approaches that can withstand scrutiny, deliver real outcomes, and scale responsibly. This creates an opportunity, and a responsibility, to design vehicles that are grounded, rigorous, and honest about trade-offs.

 

We believe now is the moment to slow down in order to design well.

 

 

Where we are in the process

 

This initiative is not a fund launch announcement.

 

We are currently in a design and exploration phase, which includes:

• Listening to Indigenous leaders, entrepreneurs, and local intermediaries

• Mapping value chains and enterprise needs across the Andean Amazon

• Exploring investment theses, structures, and risk-sharing mechanisms

• Learning from what has worked, and what has failed, in Amazon-focused finance to date

• Engaging with partners and peers who bring complementary expertise

 

Our intention in sharing this publicly is simple: to be open about what we are exploring and to invite dialogue. We see this as part of our broader commitment to supporting the ecosystems in which we operate, not only through deployed capital, but through thoughtfulness, collaboration, and transparency.

 

 

An open invitation

 

Designing finance for the Andean Amazon is not something any single organization should do alone.

As we continue this exploration, we are eager to learn from entrepreneurs, community leaders, researchers, funders, and peers who are grappling with similar questions. We are particularly interested in perspectives that challenge conventional fund models and push us to design finance that truly belongs to the living world it seeks to support.

 

We will share updates as this work evolves. For now, this page reflects where our thinking stands today, a snapshot of an active design process grounded in curiosity, responsibility, and care.

 

 

A broader theory of change

 

At a deeper level, this exploration is motivated by more than the design of a single investment vehicle.

 

We believe that successfully backing regenerative businesses rooted in the Andean Amazon has the potential to do something broader and more enduring, to expand what is imaginable. When viable enterprises demonstrate that standing forests, agroforestry systems, and biodiversity-positive value chains can generate dignified livelihoods and resilient local economies, they help shift the narrative about what the Amazon is and what it is for.

 

In a region where the dominant political and economic imagination has too often framed the Amazon primarily as a site for extraction, such examples matter. They can influence how urban populations, voters, and decision-makers understand development options, and in turn, what they expect from their leaders.

 

Our conviction is that finance, when thoughtfully designed and responsibly deployed, can help make visible a different economic logic for the Andean Amazon, one that supports regeneration rather than depletion, long-term value rather than short-term gains, and economies that work with living systems instead of against them. This is the broader change we are ultimately working toward, and it is the lens through which we are approaching this design process.