Timestamps:

02:12 – Rahel’s Journey to Reilo

05:09 – Why Farmers Need Finance

07:53 – How Reilo Works

17:08 – Building Across Different Markets

Episode description:

Rahel Guggenbühl is the Founder and CEO of reilo, a Swiss climate fintech working at the intersection of smallholder finance, nature-based solutions and carbon markets. Her path into entrepreneurship started on the ground, first in Kenya and Tanzania, where she saw how many smallholder farmers were locked out of financial systems despite owning land and stewarding forests with real ecological value.

In this episode, Rahel explains how reilo is trying to make living nature bankable. The company works with farmer groups in places like Tanzania and Brazil, turning future revenue from nature-based carbon projects into collateral that banks can understand. In Brazil, that means working with açaí farmers to turn bio-waste into biochar, creating new revenue potential while strengthening the position of local cooperatives.

The conversation also gets into what it means to build in markets that work very differently from Switzerland. Rahel explains why trust has to be earned before the solution can work, and why the way you explain an idea can shape the whole project. That becomes especially clear when she talks about Tanzania, where even a word like “biodiversity” does not translate directly. For her, building reilo is as much about listening and adapting as it is about creating the financial infrastructure behind it.

This episode is presented in partnership with Swissnex in Brazil. Swissnex connects Switzerland with some of the world’s leading innovation hubs and helps Swiss startups expand internationally. In Brazil, Swissnex helps ventures identify opportunities, build strategic collaborations, and engage with Latin America's vibrant innovation landscape, with a focus on climate, nature-based solutions, the bioeconomy, clean energy, and beyond. Explore their work through the link above.