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 · 844

844+Live
frontline communities, live on the Globe
1531+Live
Certs 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 Certs 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 and granted tax-exempt status by the Swiss authorities.
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 working at the frontier of AI and decentralized systems.
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.

Advisors

Lily Xu
Assistant Professor, Columbia · United States
Builds AI across machine learning and optimization for biodiversity conservation at Columbia, and leads the AI work behind the SMART protected-area partnership.
Millie Chapman
Assistant Professor, ETH Zürich · Switzerland
Leads the Environmental Policy Lab at ETH Zürich, working where decision theory, ecology, and data justice meet to make biodiversity policy effective and equitable.
Ken-Ichi Ueda
Co-founder, iNaturalist · United States
Co-founded iNaturalist, the global platform where millions of naturalists document and share the biodiversity observations that ground open ecological data.

Core team

Nurfatin "Fatin" Hamzah
Community Lead · Malaysia
Holds GainForest's global community programme together. Spends weeks each year in the field with GainForest's community partners across the network.
Diego Rivera Buendia
Engineering & AI · Mexico
Builds the open-source GainForest stack and the AI tooling on top of it. Ships ATProto integrations, Cert pipelines, and the models behind them.
Satyam Mishra
Engineering & Design · India
Engineer and designer on the GainForest app. 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 Cert. Contributes across GainForest and the wider Hypersphere ecosystem.

Nature Guild

Stephen Bright Sakwa
Bees & Trees, Uganda
Jaya Kandir
Darukaa Earth, India
Esayu Daniel
YLEC, Uganda
Njambi Njoroge
Grassroots Economics, Kenya
Simon Peter Okoth
Climatica Foundation, Uganda
Marina Mura
Inhaã-bé, Brazil
Nurfatin Hamzah
GainForest, Malaysia
Tin Dalida
WOVOKA, the Philippines

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.