Mombak's $150 million Fund II rides Salesforce offtake and BNDES credit

Mombak announced the first close of its second Amazon reforestation fund this month with a $150 million target that would surpass the $120 million predecessor, a multi-year carbon-removal offtake in hand from Salesforce, and approval for a $40 million credit line from Brazil's national development bank, BNDES, as ESG Today first reported, but it does not say what the first close actually raised, leaving the headline figure an ambition rather than a tally.

What the fund buys is carbon removal through native, biodiverse reforestation of degraded pastureland, replanted with native species and assisted natural regeneration rather than a single commercial crop. Founded in 2021, Mombak lists the co-benefits standard to nature-based developers — biodiversity recovery, watershed protection, local employment and social impact — and says Fund II will draw on nearly 100 field experiments in species selection, genetic enhancement and planting technique to work a larger pipeline of degraded pasture at greater scale.

Fund I supplies the track record — reforestation across 15 farms in the Brazilian Amazon, close to 15 million trees planted and 600 jobs created, all of it Mombak's own accounting — but the figures that matter for the second fund are smaller: Mombak expects a second issuance of roughly 80,000 carbon removal credits later this year, taking total issuance for 2026 past 100,000 tonnes, and subtracting one from the other means the July delivery that anchors the whole story ran a little above 20,000 tonnes.

That delivery went to Google, McKinsey, Bain, Climeworks, Commons, McLaren Racing and Union Square Ventures, issued under Isometric's Reforestation Protocol and, Mombak said, more than two years ahead of schedule; two consultancies, a search company, a direct-air developer, a venture firm and a Formula 1 team make an unusual register of buyers for a rainforest, and it is that list, more than any planting schedule, that an LP in Fund II is really underwriting.

Salesforce's agreement covers future credits and counts toward its commitment to procure nature-based removal through the Symbiosis Coalition, and Tim Christophersen, the company's vice president for climate action, described the deal as pairing value-chain decarbonization with high-integrity removal and restoring ecosystems as part of an economic model in which planet and business both do well. The announcement carries no volume and no price, and those two numbers are what would make the contract bankable, far more than the $150 million target.

As this publication argued when the Symbiosis Coalition's first contracts were announced, the allocation of risk is the innovation in these deals, not the tonnage. Forty million tons of nature-based removals now sit behind them, and an offtake of this shape moves delivery risk off the developer's balance sheet and onto a corporate buyer with a public commitment and a budget line, years before the first acre is planted. Google's green steel certificates with Stegra work the same way: sell the attribute forward and the developer gets cash during the ramp instead of after it; for Mombak, as for the Swedish wind farms Amazon signed PPAs with in August, the contracts are the revenue backstop.

A nature-based tonne, though, is not interchangeable with one from a direct-air plant, whatever a registry serial number implies, and reforestation carries reversal risk — fire, disease, land-use change — that an engineered removal does not. The protocols issuing these credits are still writing the rules for how that risk is carried, which is the plumbing argument in miniature: the bottleneck in carbon has moved from whether supply exists to who certifies and settles it, and here the protocol decides what a tonne is worth more than the pasture.

The BNDES approval tells you where the first loss is landing: Brazilian public development money inside a private reforestation vehicle fits the pattern of public capital absorbing early-stage transition risk that private capital has avoided, with private money following once the template prices the risk. A $40 million line from a domestic lender to a borrower whose costs sit in reais while its revenue is denominated in dollar-linked credit sales is likely as much a currency match as a concession, and the announced terms do not say which. If the line reaches the project vehicles, Fund II's equity case turns far more on the price per tonne than on the cost of capital.

For wealth allocators the practical reading is about the vehicle rather than the theme: nature-based removal reaches private clients through structures of this shape — a developer raising against a contracted book with public credit alongside — and the funds that get raised over the next year will be sized off signed offtakes rather than hectare counts. A fund that cannot pre-sell its tonnes is asking LPs to underwrite a price it has not yet found, and next to a Salesforce contract that is a harder story to tell.

Which is why the number worth watching is the roughly 80,000-tonne issuance due later this year and the price per tonne behind it, a figure that neither the fund announcement nor the Salesforce agreement has disclosed.