By: Aman Jalan
Ronny Castillo and Kimberly Lacayo spent years in corporate environments before an unlikely series of relationships brought them to Costa Rica, natural capital, and conversations that now range from avocados to cocobolo.
A finance guy and a comms gal walk into a Costa Rican restaurant.
It sounds like the beginning of a joke. In a roundabout way, it became the beginning of a company.
Ronny Castillo spent part of his early career as a financial analyst in New York before his path moved through conventional finance toward regenerative finance, impact investment, and natural capital. His entrepreneurial interests eventually expanded well beyond finance. He also runs a stem cell manufacturing company and has taught circular economics in Spain.
Kimberly Lacayo’s career took her through communications, business strategy, ESG and corporate social responsibility, alongside a longstanding interest in organic growing, regeneration, health and wellness.
Both had spent plenty of their professional lives under the fluorescent lights of big-city corporations. Yet today, they can find themselves discussing avocados, cocobolo, water systems and what an overlooked piece of land might become.
The route between those worlds was anything but linear. Their paths crossed in Costa Rica after Castillo’s car broke down during a group trip to visit a forest planted decades earlier by attorney Tatiana “Tati” Salgado.
Later, while transportation was being sorted out, Castillo found himself at a local restaurant with Lacayo, her husband, engineer Roberto Lacayo; Salgado’s husband, Costa Rican businessman Marco Zúñiga; and attorney Meli Vega, a longtime friend of Castillo. Salgado and Alain Romero, co-founder of Forests to Fortune, had gone to help resolve the transportation problem.
The relationships continued and eventually brought the broader group back together in Costa Rica to evaluate a real estate opportunity.
The property became the foundation for Raíz de Oro, with Castillo as president. Within weeks, Castillo and Lacayo formed Forests VC.
What interested them went beyond one property.
Around the table were people who understood different pieces of the same puzzle. Zúñiga brought business and real estate experience. Forester Javier Esquivel brought decades of tropical forestry and silviculture. Agronomist Adrian Vargas, another longtime friend of Castillo, brought expertise in agricultural systems. Romero brought the perspective of Forests to Fortune, which is now a strategic regenerative silviculture partner to Forests VC. Others contributed engineering, law, social development, and land stewardship. Forests VC began connecting those disciplines around a simple idea: land may be capable of considerably more than its current use suggests.
“Better stewardship should be one of the reasons the asset becomes more valuable,” Lacayo says. “That changes sustainability from something alongside the business into part of how value is created.”
Romero sees the forestry component through a similar development lens. “Development taught me to look at an asset and ask what it could become. Regenerative silviculture applies the same discipline, except part of what we’re developing is alive.”
The company now aims to acquire or partner around undervalued properties and develop them as productive natural assets. Its FINCA Framework provides the development discipline, bringing together high-value regenerative forestry, agriculture, strategic water management, biodiversity, processing, circular systems and technology where they make economic and ecological sense.
Castillo brings the conversation back to capital.
“The challenge isn’t finding capital,” he says. “It’s building natural assets that deserve it.”
Raíz de Oro is intended as an early proving ground. The larger Forests VC ambition is a repeatable acquisition and development platform that can find overlooked properties and bring together the expertise, strategy, and capital to unlock more of their potential.
It is an unlikely destination for two careers that began far from tropical forestry.
But perhaps not as unlikely as it first appears.
Finance taught Castillo to think about capital and value. Communications and ESG taught Lacayo to think about people, systems, and value. Their shared interests in wellness and regeneration added another thread. Today, those perspectives increasingly converge around a shared belief that financial value and ecological regeneration do not have to be competing goals.
And sometimes, apparently, a broken-down car can change the direction of the road.
