The context

Co-founding of Palmtech Biomantas e Serviços Ambientais, a degraded land recovery startup built on biodegradable biomats. I learned to create and manage a startup in an adverse context, and we got two projects approved in highly regulated contexts.

The projects

Centelha-MA Program (2021)

Palmtech was selected among the innovative ventures supported by Brazil’s National Program for the Generation of Innovative Enterprises (FAPEMA, FINEP, and MCTIC, Public Call 22/2019), in the Biotechnology and Geoengineering track. Acceptance validated the company’s core business thesis, biodegradable biomats for degraded-soil recovery, through a highly competitive national program. It also provided a mentorship track in business planning, product modeling, and positioning, which structured the startup ahead of larger fundraising.

An economic subsidy project for business innovation, in partnership with the State University of Maranhão (UEMA). It applied the technology validated through Centelha to erosion-driven land degradation in the Bacanga State Park, in São Luís, a water source supplying roughly 200,000 people.

I served as a researcher on the technical team: I conducted the degraded-soil research, the technical validation of the biomats against conventional recovery methods, and the technical and operational structuring of the project, including community capacity-building workshops and the filing of a patent application with INPI.

Aruwê Project (research proposal, FAPEMA and FAPESP)

I collaborated on drafting a multi-institutional research proposal (UEMA, UNESP, UNICAMP, UFSCar, UFMA, UFRJ, IBAMA, INPA, and the Meli Bees Network) that integrates the traditional knowledge of the Tenetehar/Guajajara people with science to restore degraded areas and develop a bioeconomy (meliponiculture and biomats) on the Araribóia Indigenous Land, one of Maranhão’s most biodiverse indigenous territories. I contributed to the technical formulation of the proposal, the degraded-area recovery plans, and soil characterization.

What I learned

Applied research has to become auditable evidence. Every project goal (biomat production, community workshops, recovered area) required formal proof: signed attendance sheets, photographic records, georeferencing, and physical inventories. That forced me to design fieldwork with external verification by a funder in mind from the start, a discipline that purely academic research does not always demand.

Navigating public funding bureaucracy without sacrificing technical rigor. When the schedule allocated funds to a generic startup-management training in São Paulo, I formally petitioned FAPEMA to reallocate that budget to attending the VIII Brazilian Conference on Slope Stability, in Pernambuco, because that was the technically relevant knowledge for the product. Part of the work on an innovation-funded project is arguing, in writing and within the rules of the grant, for where the money should go.

Technically validating a low-cost solution. Researching degraded soils and comparing coconut-fiber and buriti-fiber biomats showed that, once properly documented, technical validation becomes a business argument too: a cost of roughly a third of conventional recovery works does not come from intuition, it comes from measurement.

Fieldwork in restoration is interdisciplinary. Coordinating the research in a multi-institutional team (UEMA and Palmtech), with geographers, a chemical engineer, and social scientists, showed that soil data alone does not recover an area without understanding the community that will operate and sustain the recovery over time.

Ancestral knowledge as a source of scientific data. That understanding deepened when I helped write the Aruwê proposal, which required going beyond applied technical research to treat the ancestral knowledge of the Tenetehar people as a legitimate source of scientific data, not as cultural backdrop. It changed how I have approached environmental restoration research ever since.