About

We are tech support for nature.

GainForest is a Swiss non-profit building open, community-first tools that give the people protecting our planet the funding, data, and governance power they deserve.

Live · 50

Agape Hand

PE · live partner

50+Live
frontline communities, live on Green Globe
153+Live
high-quality Bumicerts signed on ATProto
4
years as a registered non-profit in Zurich
3
continents: Latin America, Africa, Asia

Our mission

Scaling human cooperation through trustworthy machines.

Most climate finance never reaches the grassroots. We close that loop with regenerative intelligence; a research practice for designing sociotechnical systems that preserve human agency, build digital trust, and scale Ostrom's principles of commons governance beyond their local limits.

In practice that means open protocols, community-owned data, AI assistants co-designed with Indigenous communities, and Bumicerts that bind a community's photos, audio, and field notes into one signed proof-of-impact record they own.

Read the essay

Our story

From a 2017 UN hackathon to the Amazon.

Eight years of co-designing technology with frontline communities; a few moments that shaped the work.

2017
A hackathon at the United Nations
David Dao prototypes a small idea at the UN: an AI model that predicts deforestation, wired to a blockchain that pays forest stewards directly when they protect their land. It wins the grand prize of the hackathon.
2018
Decentralized Sustainability
The founding essay publishes on Medium; the concept finds its first community partners across Brazil, Bhutan, Kenya, Paraguay, and the Philippines.
2022
Registered as a Swiss non-profit
GainForest e.V. is registered in Zurich, with two years of operational runway and direct support from the Ethereum Foundation.
2023
Co-designing Taina with Indigenous communities
Taina; the community-owned AI assistant co-designed with four Indigenous and local communities around Manaus, ships its first version on Telegram.
2024
Winning the XPRIZE Rainforest finals
After five years of competing, GainForest and ETH BiodivX win the XPRIZE Rainforest Bonus Prize in the Amazon, beating 298 teams worldwide.
2024
Founding the Indigenous Science Endowment Fund
The entire $250,000 XPRIZE prize is donated to a new endowment fund to train Indigenous and grassroots scientists in the Amazon.
2025
Launching the Nature Guild
A rotating circle of stewards from Brazil, India, Uganda, Kenya, Malaysia, and the Philippines is formalised to steer GainForest's research priorities.

The team

A small global team, building in the open.

We're a distributed team of researchers, engineers, ecologists, and community organisers spread across Switzerland, France, Mexico, India, Bhutan, Nigeria, the Philippines, Malaysia, and beyond.

Co-founders

David Dao
Co-founder & Chief Scientist · Switzerland
Pioneer in data valuation for machine learning with a PhD in AI Systems from ETH Zurich. XPRIZE Rainforest winner and World Economic Forum Global Shaper.
Sharfina "Sharfy" Adamantine
Co-founder & CTO · France
Connects climate finance to local conservation through hypercerts and on-chain data systems. Ethereum Next Billion Fellow and XPRIZE Rainforest winner.

Core team

Nurfatin "Fatin" Hamzah
Community Lead · Malaysia
Holds GainForest's global community programme together. Spends weeks each year in the field with Bumicerts partners across the network.
Niña Cerilla
Operations Lead · Philippines
Runs operations across the global team and leads delivery on the Klarna AI for Climate Resilience grant. Keeps the organisation moving day to day.
Diego Rivera Buendia
Engineering & AI · Mexico
Builds the open-source GainForest stack and the AI tooling on top of it. Ships ATProto integrations, Bumicerts pipelines, and the models behind them.
Satyam Mishra
Engineering & Design · India
Engineer and designer on Bumicerts. Shapes the product, the interface, and the editorial system that make proof-of-impact records feel inviting.
Karma Yoezer
Engineering & Infra · Bhutan
Engineer on the ATProto and Hypercerts layer that anchors every Bumicert. Contributes across GainForest and the wider Hypersphere ecosystem.
Donald Nwokoro
Engineering & Infra · Nigeria
Engineer on Green Globe; the live planet view that surfaces community-led nature projects, and the ATProto packages and lexicons that power it.

Recognition

Backed by friends who believe in this future.

GainForest e.V. is a small Swiss non-profit standing on the shoulders of foundations, labs, communities, and ecosystems that fund open infrastructure for nature. Every name below has helped move this work forward.