Gonzalo Fuenzalida and the value of looking down

Gonzalo Fuenzalida used to lose part of Sunday to Monday. He had a well-paid banking career, a background in business and economics, and the sort of professional progress that looks reassuring from a distance. Yet the coming week could spoil the day before it arrived. Years later, explaining his move into biotechnology, he offered a more personal measure of success: whether he could enjoy the weekend.

Today, as CEO and co-founder of Andes, he works on a proposition that would have made an unusual banking prospectus: apply microorganisms to agricultural fields, measure the carbon they help store underground, and sell the resulting removals. The work connects plant roots with corporate purchasing departments. Between those two worlds lies a considerable quantity of soil, science, and paperwork.

The Sunday problem

Fuenzalida was born and raised in Santiago, Chile. Long before he became an entrepreneur, his sisters had a name for his tendency to stare at trees: “Mr. Nature.” It is an affectionate detail with a useful corrective built into it. His interest in the natural world preceded the job title. The job title took longer to catch up.

The birth of his first son changed his priorities. He has described reconsidering a list of things he wanted from life, many of them material. He began a biotechnology business while still working at the bank, building it alongside his existing career. An acquisition in California helped establish his connection to the United States.

“My Sundays are beautiful now.”

Gonzalo Fuenzalida

His formal education was commercial rather than biological. He studied at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; a 2018 teaching biography identifies him as an Ingeniero Comercial and lists his roles at Austral Biologicals, Ango Science, and Andes Crop Science. It also describes his participation in postgraduate teaching on biotechnology businesses and entrepreneurship. By then, the former banker was helping others think about building scientific companies.

A conversation over a beer

A conversation with Bernardo Gonzalez helped open the agricultural chapter. Gonzalez had spent years studying interactions between plants and microorganisms. Fuenzalida recalled talking with him over a beer and being drawn to the possibility that those relationships could become useful products. The idea sounded easier at the table than it proved in the laboratory. Bacteria, regrettably for entrepreneurs, do not arrive with a distribution agreement.

Andes brought Fuenzalida together with Tania Timmermann, a scientist whose work also concerned plant-microbe interactions. Their partnership put two kinds of experience beside each other: the business of getting something used and the biology of making it work. Fuenzalida has credited Timmermann’s expertise and contribution to the company’s direction. The story has a scientific co-founder at its center, alongside the executive telling it.

The early work was broader than carbon removal. Andes investigated ways microbes could help crops withstand difficult conditions, including salinity. In Chile, drought and the use of groundwater had made those questions concrete. The company explored the relationship between a plant and the organisms around it as a place to intervene, rather than treating the seed as the entire agricultural system.

By April 2020, Fuenzalida was publicly discussing the company’s work on incorporating microbial combinations into seeds. His explanation emphasized timing: the bacteria would be present as the plant germinated and developed. Delivery was part of the invention. A useful organism still had to reach the right place and establish the relationship on which its usefulness depended.

Research success did not automatically produce a ready market. Fuenzalida later explained that the early crop-resilience application had not found sufficient commercial demand, prompting a change in focus. That admission gives the company’s history some texture. The carbon business emerged through decisions about where microbial capabilities could meet an economic need. The route required revision.

The field has a balance sheet

The carbon program centers on microbial carbon mineralization. Andes applies microorganisms to agricultural land, where their activity around plant roots accelerates mineral processes associated with storing carbon in inorganic forms. The attraction is durable storage within land already being farmed. The practical question is how to make that happen repeatedly, across fields whose conditions differ.

For the farmer, the first conversation has to be more ordinary. What must change at planting? What equipment is required? Who will organize the sampling? A climate technology that arrives with an additional unpaid occupation for the grower has created an adoption problem before the first field visit. Fuenzalida’s business background is relevant here: the costs and responsibilities have to land somewhere.

He has described applications that fit existing seeding equipment, including seed treatments and in-furrow delivery. Andes covers the carbon program’s sampling, analysis, and verification costs. Those details are central to the offer. The program asks farmers to host a new biological process while keeping participation compatible with the work they already know how to do.

In March 2023, Andes announced completion of a $30 million Series A, bringing its reported funding at that point to $38 million. Investors included Voyager, Yamaha Motor Ventures, Leaps by Bayer, and Cavallo Ventures. The announced purpose was to expand the microbial technology and farmer partnerships and commercialize carbon removal credits.

The company then reported deployment across 25,000 acres. It also said participating farmers could increase net operating income by up to 25%. These were dated company figures, describing deployment and a potential financial benefit. They should be read with those limits attached. A field program’s footprint, a farmer’s payment, and a verified quantity of carbon are separate measurements.

That distinction runs through Fuenzalida’s work. Raising capital funds development. Recruiting farms creates places to deploy. Selling removals creates demand. None of those activities can take over the job of determining what happened below ground. A company can make progress on one front while still having work to do on another.

The paperwork beneath the promise

In March 2023, Fuenzalida described a problem facing the new carbon program: its particular approach did not fit an existing methodology. Andes was developing one with EcoEngineers. The company was using direct sampling and planned third-party review. For a business selling an outcome that customers cannot inspect by looking across a field, a shared method of accounting is part of the product.

Andes publicly released its Microbial Carbon Mineralization methodology on July 25, 2023. The document drew on work involving the team, scientific reviewers, agricultural communities, and carbon-market specialists. At publication, validation by Earthood under ISO 14064 was still underway. Andes now describes that framework as its independently validated legacy methodology for historical vintages.

“This document has been designed to be transparent, accountable, and conservative.”

Fuenzalida, announcing the methodology in July 2023

A later milestone arrived on January 21, 2026, when Gold Standard published its Microbial Carbon Di-oxide Mineralisation methodology. Its acknowledgements name Andes Ag, Inc. as the developer, with contributions from external reviewers. This is a separate stage from the 2023 release. The chronology matters because developing a method, validating it, and applying it to a project are different pieces of work.

The 2026 framework requires untreated baseline locations to represent what would occur without the microbial application. It applies to existing cropland, with exclusions including irrigated land, wetlands, grasslands, and forests. Lab and field evidence must support the selected microbe and crop combination. Its maximum crediting period is ten years. The baseline is standard agricultural practice without the microbial inoculant. Changes such as cover crops or no-till must be applied equally to treated units and their corresponding baseline units when included in a project. The method defines a bounded activity, rather than offering permission to claim removal wherever something grows.

Those boundaries explain why measurement occupies so much of this founder’s attention. He has identified verification across millions of acres as a scaling challenge. The appeal of a small biological input is easy to picture. Establishing a reliable, affordable account of its effects across a very large area is a different undertaking, with its own research agenda.

Back to what grows

The buyers have begun appearing in the story. In December 2024, Boston Consulting Group named Andes among suppliers in a carbon removal portfolio purchased through ClimeFi. The portfolio totaled 50,250 tonnes across several providers and technologies. Andes’ individual allocation was not specified in that announcement. The useful fact is the commercial connection: microbial mineralization had entered a diversified corporate purchase.

The work behind that connection continues. Andes’ research library includes publications on measuring inorganic carbon and collaborations examining microbial weathering. Some work is published; other manuscripts remain under review. Keeping those stages distinct is another way to understand Fuenzalida’s job. He leads a business whose claims must keep pace with what its scientists can establish.

In January 2025, Fuenzalida described work on modeling and soil spectroscopy as ways to make measurement more efficient. Traditional sampling establishes a connection to the field; expanding that work across millions of acres creates a logistical problem as well as a scientific one. His proposed direction was to improve the tools while retaining accuracy. That is a concrete expression of the next challenge: getting enough evidence, at a manageable cost, to support a business operating over much more land.

His ambition extends to deploying microbial climate solutions more widely, with farmers participating in the value they create. It is an ambition that depends on collaborators, practical delivery, willing customers, and careful accounting. For the boy who could spend an hour looking at trees, the adult occupation offers plenty to observe. Much of it now happens beneath them.