About Culttivo
We score plots, not paperwork.
Culttivo began in Belo Horizonte in 2023 to address the credit gap keeping Brazilian coffee growers outside formal finance.
Origin
Why we started
Brazil supplies approximately 40 percent of the world's coffee. Much of it comes from smallholder farms of 5 and 30 hectares, concentrated in Minas Gerais, Sao Paulo, and Espirito Santo. These farms are productive and often well managed, yet remain largely shut out of formal credit markets.
The obstacle is often documentation, not repayment capacity. Banks require tax documentation, formal income statements, and SERASA histories that many smallholder growers have never been able to establish. Even a grower with twelve years of recorded harvests, strong yields, and no debt can be rejected for lacking a three-year tax filing.
Our starting point is simple: the land can serve as a credit history. Altitude, soil composition, satellite-based canopy density, and two seasons of yield records can say more about repayment risk than a SERASA score based on urban consumer behavior. We trained the model on Brazilian coffee data from Cerrado and Sul de Minas, then validated it with a 2024-2025 early-access cohort.
Culttivo is a credit intermediary, linking grower applications with lending partners seeking Brazilian agricultural credit and verified data infrastructure.
Team
The team behind Culttivo
Gustavo Foz
CEO and Co-Founder
His background is in agricultural finance and rural credit operations in Minas Gerais. He repeatedly saw productive farms with recorded harvests, strong soils, and no debt rejected because growers lacked a SERASA score or a three-year tax filing. Culttivo grew from his effort to create the origination model those farms needed.
Pedro Alves
CTO
His background is in geospatial data engineering, including pipelines for multispectral satellite imagery, land-use mapping, and crop productivity analysis. At Culttivo, he designed the satellite ingestion layer and scoring architecture. He treats the GPS plot boundary as the core analytical unit, linking Sentinel-2 and EMBRAPA signals to each parcel.
Camila Ribeiro
Head of Credit
She worked with a rural credit portfolio at a regional cooperative bank in Minas Gerais, reviewing applications that failed the documentation requirement despite supporting field data. At Culttivo, she oversees credit model validation and the analyst review layer.
Coverage
Where we operate
Applications open in Minas Gerais. Sao Paulo and Espirito Santo coverage is planned for the second half of 2026.