Dear community,

There is a Portuguese proverb I keep coming back to: “Longe da vista, longe do coração”. It would translate directly to “Far from sight, far from the heart“, a different version of the English proverb “Out of sight, out of mind”.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Porto to visit my family and I went to the opening of the new Norm. A beautiful project created by three women entrepreneurs who got together to challenge the status quo, or to normalize (hence the name), menstruation conversations and habits by designing absorbent underwear and beachwear. They say “it’s bloody normal”.

Leading a company in impact finance or sustainability can be additionally challenging. It is our “why” that keeps us going and it becomes very clear when I see it firsthand. This reminded me of a term coined by my co-founder Manuel, who has left Goparity to take his commitment to public service even further, in a political role focused on the energy transition. He used to say: we’re the “silent enabler”, people don’t see us but we made it happen.

Earlier this summer, during a weekend with friends, we drove by a “Luz Verde” outdoor in the highway, saw the people in the table beside ours having a “MAI Kombucha” (in a beach bar at sunset), a friend chose “Fita Preta” wine for dinner, and someone brought up how much they enjoyed going to “Chefs on Fire” last year. None of them had any idea all these things were related to us. To you.

This is what being a “silent enabler” means: you may not see us, but you made it happen.

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Highlights of the quarter

• Equity investing has arrived at Goparity, and I’m genuinely excited about this new chapter. Over 300 people signed up for our webinar on how equity investing works at Goparity, and the recording is available for anyone who couldn’t join. The first offer is going live really soon.
• Goparity now speaks Italian: the website and the app are fully available in Italian. More exciting news and projects are on our way.
• BOIL Climate Festival held its third edition in Porto, financed by our community. We joined with a CO₂ calculator for visitors’ travel emissions.
• Norm. opened its new store in Porto, financed by 188 people from our community, who invested 30,000€ in just 30 minutes.
• Agrarian Cooperative Sangareni became the first Peruvian organisation to raise funds through Goparity, with 487,335€ from our community.

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A renewed policy for safer investments

Crowdfunding, whether in loans or equity, always implies “capital at risk”. At Goparity, we have worked to mitigate these risks from day one, applying a risk policy that estimates a project’s probability of entering arrears (or default) and rates it from A to D. To date, we have not published any projects rated below C minus.

We always knew that a rating alone wasn’t enough. For projects presenting a higher risk, we usually asked for additional guarantees, such as collateral, personal or shareholder guarantees or a pledge of credits.

Our track record in recovering funds is solid, with 46% of the capital from late or missed instalments since 2020 already back in investors’ hands, but the path to get there takes time (about a year and a half on average) and requires complex negotiations, including asking ourselves questions like: to what point shall we give this company another chance? Does their impact deserve the effort? And, quite often, lengthy judicial processes.

It became clear we needed to go further in two ways: 1) increasing security and 2) speeding up recovery.

Here’s what changed:

• Every new loan will require a real guarantee, such as collateral, an asset, or a personal or corporate guarantee (except for projects rated A, and you’ll understand why very soon).
• Every promoter will also sign an executive title, such as a promissory note. If a loan defaults, this lets us go straight to enforcement instead of first spending time in court just to have the debt recognised.
• We will prioritise the markets where we have built the most experience and legal support over the years: Portugal, Spain, Italy, Peru and Colombia.
• When the guarantee is a physical asset, we will lend no more than 70% of its value, leaving a margin of safety for depreciation and recovery costs.
• No single promoter, or group of related companies, will represent more than 5% of our portfolio, across all their campaigns.

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What’s ahead

Over the past months, our tech and product teams have focused on strengthening the platform, the integration of users and data resulting from the acquisition of Bolsa Social, and resolving issues with our payment services provider that may have affected your top ups or withdrawals. With those foundations in place, here’s what’s coming in the next quarter:

• More equity offers: with the first one on the table, you can expect a few more offers to be launched before the end of this year.
• Bolsa Social investors will soon follow their equity investments directly on Goparity.
• My Portfolio, in the Goparity app, now shows your Total Return: how what you’ve received and what you’re owed compares with what you’ve lent through Goparity, since your first investment.
• The Christmas giftcards are back: gifting purposeful and wasteless? This is for you!

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The Impact Angels Club is gaining momentum and we’re already more than halfway through the total number of members we aim for. If you’d like to join an investment club with some of Iberia’s most experienced business angels register here to let us know about your interest, your “why” and we will be in touch.

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Credit recovery & portfolio update

Since April, our credit recovery team has recovered 476.996€ for our community. In the same period, 18 more projects were fully repaid, bringing the total amount of fully settled projects to 184 of the 456 projects financed on Goparity.

We have also brought 29 projects out of arrears since April (21 of them fully up to date today) and restructured three loans in order to allow for the project promoters to continue their impactful projects with a new payment schedule that fits their financial projections.

It is normal in crowdlending, and lending overall, to have a share of your portfolio in arrears. It doesn’t mean capital is lost. I know waiting can be frustrating but recovery takes time, especially once cases reach court, but we’re on it, and we’ll keep you updated whenever there’s progress to share. As usual, the most important best practice is to diversify: the more projects in your portfolio the more diluted potential losses get, thus, the higher your return.

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Music note

This time, I’m handing this section over to Mariana, our Head of Marketing, who reviews these letters and brings some data into the mix. While working on this one, the idea of being a silent enabler reminded her of a song she’s been listening to: “With My Own Two Hands” by Ben Harper. For her, it’s a song about ownership, a reminder that we have the power to promote change with our own two hands.

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As always, feel free to reach out to our team if you have any comments or questions.

In August 2025, a fire broke out near A Rúa, in the province of Ourense. By the time it was out, it had burned 44,424 hectares — the largest fire in Galicia's recorded history. Within days, Uña de Quintana and Benuza were burning too. Across Spain, more than 31.000 people were evacuated from their homes.

Spain closed 2025 with 393.079 hectares burned, its worst year since 1994. For the European Union as a whole, it was the most destructive fire season on record, and 43% of everything that burned was in Spain and Portugal. Scientists at World Weather Attribution found that climate change made the fire weather of August 2025 around 40 times more likely. Seasons like these are becoming the pattern.

What a fire leaves behind

The flames are gone within days. What they leave behind lasts far longer. Soil that once held rainwater and fed new growth is left bare and exposed. Animals lose their shelter and their food. Hillsides that sustained life for generations lose much of their capacity to recover on their own.

The damage lands hardest where the fewest people remain. In much of rural Spain, villages are emptying and land goes unmanaged, which leaves more fuel for the next fire. When a fire comes through, it destroys the landscape and pushes out the people still holding on.

Why Bosquia takes its time

Bosquia Nature, a company from Asturias, has carried out more than 400 forest restoration projects since 2019, for clients including AstraZeneca and Redeia. Its approach starts with patience. Each site is studied first to decide when and how to intervene, and the soil is given its natural regeneration time before anything is planted.

The company is seeking financing to reforest about 50 hectares in Asturias, Galicia and Castilla y León — the regions at the heart of these fires. The estimated cost is 10.000€ per hectare, covering every step: the landowner agreement, site assessment, land preparation, certified seedlings, planting, maintenance and official registration.

The fires were front-page news. Restoring what they took is slower, quieter work: years of planting, tending and waiting for a forest to take hold.

From tree to credit

Every tonne of CO2 a forest captures can be measured, certified and sold. That is the business model behind Bosquia Nature, and it is at the heart of how the company plans to repay the loan it is seeking on Goparity.

As the young trees grow, they draw CO2 out of the air and lock it into wood and soil. Bosquia registers its projects with MITECO, Spain's Ministry for the Ecological Transition. Each certified tonne becomes a carbon credit, and 18% of a project's projected credits can be sold shortly after registration, long before the forest reaches maturity.

The buyers are large companies. Since 2026, large Spanish companies have had to calculate their carbon footprint and publish reduction plans under Royal Decree 214/2025. Offsetting remains voluntary, but these companies now have their emissions in writing and plans to act on them. The market also values carbon removal: in early 2026, credits from removal projects such as reforestation averaged about $22 per tonne, against about $6 for avoidance credits.

What the repayment plan relies on

Repayment of the Goparity loan is planned to come from more than one source. One is the credits from these forests that Bosquia can sell in the loan’s first year. The other is the services Bosquia already sells to companies, such as helping them develop projects and manage their CO₂.Repayments start after a six-month grace period and run for 30 months. The timeline follows how Bosquia earns its best margins: selling certified forest assets parcel by parcel, directly to companies. Those sales take longer to close than selling credits in bulk, so the 30 months give them room to happen.

The loan is also backed by two guarantees. The first is a pledge over the credits of the Forecai Project, a forest in Pontevedra, Galicia, registered with MITECO since 2024 and projected to capture 3,212 tonnes of carbon over 30 years. The second is a pledge over the carbon credits from the new forests this loan will finance.

Each forest Bosquia plants brings life back to land that had lost it. That same forest is what the repayment plan is built on.

Investments in crowdlending carry a risk of partial or total loss of the funds invested.

What does women's leadership actually look like inside a smallholder coffee cooperative in the Peruvian Andes? Not as a policy goal or a certification requirement, but as a daily operational reality, built over two decades by the people who showed up and did the work.

This is the story of the women of the Agrarian Cooperative Sangareni.

The women of Sangareni: producers, managers, and leaders

Rural coffee cooperatives are not always known for women in leadership. Sangareni is a different story.

Of the 379 members of Cooperativa Agraria Sangareni - a Fairtrade specialty coffee cooperative in Pangoa, in Peru's central rainforest - 109 are women. They grow coffee, manage farms, sit on the cooperative's governing board, lead the selective harvesting that determines the quality of every cup, and run a dedicated export line sold directly to a buyer in Germany. In Sangareni's own words, they are "producers, managers, and leaders".

That description means a lot more than what it may seem on the surface. Because in Peru's rural coffee-growing communities, women's economic independence is not a given. Access to land, credit, and markets has historically been harder to reach. The cooperative model, when it works well, changes that. At Sangareni, it has.

Every role in the chain

The most visible role women play in Sangareni is in the field. Selective harvesting (the process of picking only the ripest coffee cherries by hand, at exactly the right moment) is one of the most demanding and consequential steps in specialty coffee production. It's the step that most directly determines whether a coffee scores 82 or 85 on the Specialty Coffee Association's 100-point scale. In Sangareni, women lead it.

Beyond the harvest, two women members sit on the cooperative's governing bodies, participating directly in the decisions that shape how Sangareni operates, invests, and grows. Many more manage the financial administration of their households - tracking income, planning for the next harvest season, deciding how cooperative earnings are reinvested. In communities where these decisions have historically been concentrated in male-headed households, that role carries a weight that goes well beyond day-to-day accounting.

The result is a cooperative where women's knowledge, judgement, and labour are present at every stage of the production chain; not as a diversity initiative, but as an operational reality built over two decades.

A coffee line of their own

The most concrete expression of women's leadership in Sangareni is a dedicated export line managed entirely by its women members - produced, processed, and sold directly to a buyer in Germany.

It didn't emerge from a certification requirement or a corporate gender programme. It grew out of the Comité de Mujeres (the cooperative's women's committee) an active, organised group that advocates for women's participation across every level of Sangareni and administers specific funding within the annual Fairtrade Premium Plan for women's education and training.

The export line is what that advocacy produced over time: a direct commercial relationship with an international buyer, independent income for the women who manage it, and a presence in a global market that has long excluded the people most responsible for growing what it sells. For the women who run it, the line is not symbolic. It is a business; one they built, and one they control.

What economic autonomy looks like in Pangoa

To understand why this matters, it helps to understand the context. Pangoa is a district in Peru's Junín region, in the central rainforest where the Andes begin their descent toward the Amazon. Coffee farming here is a multi-generational activity, tied to land, family, and community in ways that are deeply intertwined with questions of who holds economic power.

For a woman in this environment to manage her own certified farm, lead a harvest team, participate in cooperative governance, and sell coffee under her own name to a buyer in Europe is meaningful in ways that extend well beyond the cooperative itself. It changes what is considered possible -for her, for her daughters, and for the community around her.

Sangareni didn't set out to be a gender equity programme. It set out to be a well-run cooperative. The two turned out to be inseparable, because a cooperative that excludes half its potential leadership is simply a less effective organisation.

A cooperative built by everyone, for everyone

Thirty years ago, the idea of a woman in Pangoa managing her own certified coffee farm, sitting on a cooperative's governing board, and exporting a dedicated product line to Germany would have seemed unlikely. Today, 109 of Sangareni's members are doing exactly that.

The cooperative didn't announce this as a milestone. It happened because Sangareni was built - slowly, deliberately, over two decades - as an organisation where everyone who contributes has a stake. The women's committee, the export line, the governance roles: these aren't add-ons. They are part of what makes Sangareni the cooperative it is.

"In Sangareni, women are producers, managers, and leaders." The cooperative said it simply. The export line to Germany proves it.

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Carbon credits are everywhere in climate conversations, and almost nowhere in plain explanation. Most people have heard the term. Far fewer understand what a carbon credit actually is, how it gets made, or why some cost 50 cents while others cost 55€. We recently co-hosted a webinar with Francesco Musardo, CEO of Radica - Esférico's parent group - on exactly that. What followed was a grounded, honest conversations about the carbon market. Here's what stood out.

Removal vs avoidance: and why the difference matters more than most people realise

The first thing Francesco wanted to clear up was the distinction between two types of carbon credits that often get conflated.

Avoidance credits protect something that already absorbs carbon - a forest, a wetland - from being destroyed. Removal credits create entirely new sequestration, pulling CO₂ out of the atmosphere through practices that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

The gap between them isn't semantic. It's regulatory. As Francesco put it:

"Removals are much more valuable than avoidance, because you can only achieve net zero by using removal credits. This is what the new CSRD and new legislation are going towards."

How a carbon credit gets made

Esférico works with farmers across Italy and Spain to adopt regenerative practices: cover cropping, reduced tillage, agroforestry. Those practices pull carbon into the soil and biomass. Then the measurement begins.

The process combines soil sampling, geospatial analysis, and satellite monitoring. Once the data is collected, an independent Validation and Verification Body (VVB) steps in. Their job is to check everything.

"The VVB will come to the field and will say: I have ascertained that the activities have actually been implemented. So the estimate, all the measurements that Radica have provided, correspond to the truth. And so the credits can then be issued."

It's a circle of accountability: the project developer, the registry, and the independent verifier all check each other's work. Credits are only issued after all three are satisfied.

Why some credits cost 50 cents and others cost 55€

This is the question that gets to the heart of the market's credibility problem. Francesco answered it directly.

Pricing starts with the farmer.  Esférico calculates how much a farmer needs to earn in order to actually change their practices - typically between 150€ and 250€ per hectare. An olive grove, with four to five regenerative practices applied, sequesters around four to five tonnes of CO₂ per hectare. That means the credit can't be priced below roughly 50€ if the farmer is going to be fairly compensated.

"You can find credits for 50 cents in the market. So you can understand that when we are faced with this question - why does your credit cost 55€ when we can find credits for 50 cents - this is where you basically go in and explain the differences between one and the other."

On top of fair farmer pricing, Esférico adds non-delivery risk insurance and third-party ratings. Their Italian project is rated Triple B by BeZero - the equivalent of Standard & Poor's for the carbon market - placing it in the top 5% of all soil-based carbon projects globally.

What makes a credit compliance-grade

Francesco described three hallmarks that any serious carbon credit must meet:

• Additionality - the project creates impact that wouldn'thave existed without it. The carbon sequestered is genuinely new.
• Permanence - the carbon stays stored for a defined period.For Esférico, that's a minimum of 15 years per project, enforced through adouble buffer mechanism: 10% of credits held by the registry, another 10% heldinternally and only released to farmers who stay in the programme long term.
• Conservative measurement - credits are measured after the fact, never overstated, never double counted. As Francesco put it, a credit has to be measured "on an ex-post basis - you adopt the practice and then you measure."

Who buys these credits, and why

Demand spans the full range. Esférico sells to a doctor's office buying two tonnes and to Lufthansa buying at scale. The only filter is values; they don't sell to industries that conflict with their sustainability principles.

That demand is already outpacing supply. In Francesco's words:

"We have already sold more credits than we have actually generated so far, for future delivery."

What comes next

The EU's Carbon Removal Certification Framework (CRCF) is approaching, and registries including Esférico's are already adapting their methodologies to align with it. Full regulatory alignment is expected around 2027. Esférico is preparing now.

The programme is also shifting from individual farmer onboarding to a cooperative model, allowing hundreds of farms to join at once through a single partnership, rather than one farmer at a time. It's how they plan to reach 500.000 hectares by 2030.

The carbon market has a credibility problem that won't be solved by better marketing. It'll be solved by projects that are rigorous, built on real farms, verified by independent bodies, rated by agencies with no stake in the outcome, and designed to pay farmers fairly for work that actually matters.

That's what a high-integrity carbon credit looks like. And that's what Esférico is building.

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Dear community,

Three years ago I published an article in a Portuguese newspaper called Welcome to the future we created. I wrote it in March when it was snowing, but the forecast for the following weekend was 27ºC, and the public water fountains in Barcelona had been sealed because of the drought.

Decades of ignoring scientific-based warning have led us to where we are, and it doesn’t look like it will get better anytime soon. Neither climate nor policy wise.

The consecutive years of “the hottest summer ever” in the news have not been enough to foster global action: the Economy  always prevailed, as if one thing could exist without the other, and the “record breaking” speech carries a feeling we have reached some sort of peak that won’t easily be reached again.

Catarina Barreiros, a Portuguese sustainability content creator and entrepreneur, put it in an ironic manner: “Don’t always see the glass half empty, think of it as the coolest summer of the coming years.”.

Science says we are about to reach a new tipping point from which there is no return: when system alterations are so significant that self-reinforcing feedback loops start to drive unstoppable major changes on their own. It starts with climate, impacts nature, disrupts society and ultimately erodes the economic system decision-makers were trying to protect in the first place. 

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In recent years, most extreme forecasts, such as droughts, forest fires, and floods, have become reality. Because of the urgency, adaptation is now the main priority, but crisis solving, as opposed to prevention, poses the risk of excluding the most vulnerable.

Barcelona built its own climate shelter network - climatized, accessible and free interior spaces such as public libraries or community centres - and many other cities are following. In Sweden, there are new regulations on indoor temperature in the work environment, public buildings, or elderly homes. And if we look at other cities in different parts of the world - like Medellin, Linz or Istanbul - they have turned to planting trees to mitigate rising temperatures. New York has just announced it will do the same.

Regeneration is also growing as part of the solution since it’s no longer enough to use less than the planet can generate. We need to recover degraded environments. But can we meet our production and lifestyle needs while fostering nature’s recovery? I believe so, and on this topic, I saw two hope-filling documentaries worth watching: Groundswell and Kiss the Ground.

Where we decide to put our money is not apart from all of this, and as Antonio Miguel, founder of Maze, often puts it, “Impact is the greatest investment opportunity of our time”. That’s because climate isn’t the only problem our money can solve. Every euro invested is also a choice about the social, economic and environmental future we want to build. This quarter, we saw once again what that money, moved with intention, can achieve.

Highlights of the quarter

Focusing now on the positive, the last quarter gave us plenty to be proud of, and a few signs of where Goparity is heading next:

A community that shows up fast - six campaigns this quarter were fully funded in under 24 hours. Behind each of those numbers is a promoter ready to make a difference, and a community that keeps proving it wants to see positive change without hesitation. It is one of the clearest signs we have that trust in this mission keeps growing.

The impact behind the operation - every project funded this quarter adds up. Across 11 projects, our community helped avoid more than 1800tonnes of CO2, generate over 4800 MWh of clean energy, and support progress across 12 of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.  It's a reminder that this diversity, of sectors, of goals, of people involved, is exactly the point.

A new look and a new home page - our new website shows how we keep progressing and rethinking the way we communicate to better reflect who we are, why we’re here and where we're going. You will find the same logo, same values, same mission, but the voice, the look and the way we tell our story needed to catch up. All the images used are real photographs of projects we've financed together. Goparity is becoming a platform where you can find every way to invest sustainably.

Bolsa Social integration is in motion - integrating Bolsa Social in Goparity has reached an important milestone. After the acquisition, we ran three equity campaigns that mobilised over 365.500€, backed by more than 100 investors. Bolsa Social has now closed registrations for new users and will not open further campaigns of its own, with all new investment opportunities, in loans and equity alike, now concentrated on the Goparity platform.

News from promoter

One of our promoters has some news worth celebrating. Code for All, the Portuguese tech education company, has just been ranked 19th in the world in TIME and Statista's ranking of the top 500 EdTech companies globally, sitting alongside names like Duolingo and Coursera. It's the only Portuguese company on the list, and the 4th best in Europe.

It's a well earned recognition for a mission that's been running for over a decade: making relevant, up to date tech skills accessible in a fast-changing job market. Since 2025 alone, Code for All has trained more than 5.000 professionals in AI and supported over 60 companies in building those skills internally.

A great reminder of the kind of impact that keeps growing quietly, project by project, long after the initial investment. Code for All has funded 500.000€ throught Goparity in 4 successful campaigns: Code for All, Code for All II, Code for All III, and Code for All IV.    

Congratulations to the whole team. 🎉

What's coming up

Very soon, you can expect a campaign from Cooperativa Agraria Sangareni, a smallholder coffee cooperative in the Peruvian Andes. Founded to serve farming families along the Ene river basin, it brings together 379 families across six communities, growing organic speciality Arabica coffee. A third of its members are women, who manage their own Fairtrade organic volumes. The funds raised will finance the purchase of green coffee during the 2026 harvest season, ensuring smallholder families in the Peruvian Andes receive prompt, fair payment for their harvest.

The campaign will offer a 6-month maturity with a 9,95% yearly interest rate. More details soon.

You can simulate your investment here.

The Impact Angels Club is open

As you may know, Bolsa Social had a history of equity investment, including successful exits, which we'll build on with Goparity by launching equity investments on the platform, alongside a new edition of the Impact Angels Club.

Goparity's Impact Angels Club, starting to operate in Q1 2027, is a private investor club making equity investments in early stage startups with high growth potential and impact well embedded in their business model, meaning companies that generate societal and environmental benefits as they grow.

We're not starting from scratch. This will be the second edition of the club, building on Bolsa Social's Impact Angels Club, one of the most distinctive initiatives in Spain's impact investing space, gathering some of the country's leading angel investors and much loved startups.

Over four years, the club made 11 investments, including companies like CoCircular, Recovo, Orygen, Leemons, Banbu, Showee, Robopedics, MiniTales, Visualfy and Naria.

It is a 30k€ commitment, spread across 4 years in 4 capital calls, with quarterly demo days to get to know and vote on pre screened investment opportunities.

Members get priority access to impactful investment opportunities, quarterly investment committee meetings (virtual or in person), network events, webinars, and one yearly gathering.

The last edition had 40 participants and was oversubscribed. This time, it will be limited to the first 100 members. It's important to mention that those who were part of the previous edition will be given priority in the new club, and the first confirmations have started to come in.

If you're interested in learning more, please fill out the form below and I'll schedule a meeting with you.

Join the Impact Angels Club!

Musical note

When I was younger, I used to DJ, mostly electronic music, and I still listen to it a lot. Here’s a song I’ve been playing lately: The Adventurer by French 79. It caught my attention for the lyrics and stayed for the bass: "It’s time to see the bigger game. We need to kick those bloody self-absorbed thoughts to the curb. It’s time to stop thinkin’ just about ourselves and start givin’ a toss about others."

As always, feel free to reach out to our team if you have any comments or questions.

Portfolio Performance

We measured Goparity's loan portfolio since the creation of the company: it has delivered an average annual return of 8,71% to investors. That figure accounts for every euro invested, every repayment of principal and interest received, and the value of the loans outstanding at the end of December 2025, deducting the losses.

To test how solid that number is, we ran two deliberately pessimistic scenarios:

a) If 30% of the loans currently flagged as at-risk were never repaid, the return would ease to 7,60% per year.

b) Even in the extreme case where every single at-risk loan was written off completely - something the guarantees behind these loans make virtually impossible - the portfolio would still have returned 4,86% per year.

In other words, the returns hold up well even when we assume the worst, without mentioning the impact achieved.

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Don’t just take our word for it

Pedro Andersson, a well-known Portuguese journalist and author specialising in personal finance, creator of the Contas-poupança project, invested 1.000€ in Goparity, in another P2P platform and in Portuguese state savings certificates. Every month, he reports transparently on the results.

Read more - his July update here