Our History

Our project of forestation and, more recently, of reforestation to recover degraded areas, arises from a childhood dream in the 1970s, when Marcello Guimarães, founder and current chairman of the board of directors of the iPlantForest Group, studied at an agricultural boarding school, studying and working in the field daily for a couple of years, in those early years of his childhood, he developed a love for the land, the countryside, agricultural production, respect for the environment and the people who live off the land. At the age of 18, he began his career in the technology area, where he worked as a programmer, project analyst, systems analyst, founded his first company, and launched in 1993 the best-selling software in the history of microcomputing in Brazil to this day. , the Visual Kit 5, generator of systems for lay users, sales champion throughout Brazil, and which for years was the best-selling product on the Shoptime.com channel, among other TV malls, and resellers throughout the country, in Europe and in the United States, where in 1997 he expanded his business, lived and worked for 5 years.

Visual Kit 5 Book, version 8 (4th Edition/2004)

In 2012, he visited Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima, to where he moved, got married and formed a new family, choosing the state as the base for yet another successful venture. After much study and testing, he founded the company Mahogany Roraima, a company specialized in planting African mahogany, which is currently the largest enterprise for planting African mahogany in Brazil.

Beginning of the mahogany project. Same plant January/17 and July/17.

Right at the beginning of this project, thanks to the studies of his brother and partner Eduardo Guimarães, he understood the need to plant forests (multiple species forming a set of native and exotic trees) and began the first research and studies to find a solution to the gigantic task to plant forests on an industrial scale, as it had been doing with African mahogany. It turns out that planting a single species, for example African mahogany, is much easier than planting and achieving success in a forest with multiple species. During the following years of research, he created and built the first machine for planting forests on an industrial scale, with quality and speed superior to the method he had created to plant trees, the method used by Mahogany Roraima. The method developed by him and his team was already extremely fast and difficult to overcome, the new machine for planting forests, developed over almost 6 years, did the job, and currently plants with fewer people, and much faster than the method they had created.

Studies for machine construction.

Recently, his brother and partner Eduardo Guimarães, who was one of the creators of the Visual Kit 5 project, Kit 5 Mobile, BCyou, among other successful projects, joined the project, which originated the iPlantForest Group, at its request, and has contributed significantly for the development of all the intelligence, both in the forest planting machine and in the management systems, monitoring and detection systems that use artificial intelligence and the entire automation part of the company. Eduardo Guimarães and his son Nicholas Guimarães developed all the artificial intelligence and automation that the company uses today and which made our machine a machine with Industry 4.0 characteristics. Right at the beginning of the creation of the planting method developed by Mahogany Roraima, we invited and incorporated into our team, an old partner of many years, our partner and adviser Rodrigo Pereira, who for years worked alongside us in the technology company, where he started his career and to this day he has been with us in all of our endeavors for more than 24 years. Then important partners were incorporated into the projects, people who have been with us for many years and who have always believed in our creative strength, our determination to face the difficulties along the way and, above all, who understand the importance of reforestation to save the world from the problems that come living and that will get worse every day with climate change.

Concerned with taking reforestation to scale, they developed a SAAS (Software as a Service) system that manages all the company’s activities, divides each task by SOI (Standard Operational Instruction), mapping each activity and standardizing everything, controlling all services, from smallest to most complex with SO (service order), georeferencing everything, so that any employee, investor, or partner can follow and know exactly where and how each activity of the company is being performed, in real time. In this way, we make the management of the entire forest cycle transparent, we organize it like a “McDonalds”, and we guarantee that everyone can follow and know exactly how the resources are being used and where. In this way, we can undertake large reforestation projects anywhere in the world, providing accurate information to all project participants.

Our concern since the beginning was to guarantee scalability to reforestation projects or recovery of degraded areas, and transparency for all involved.

This is iPlantForest, a transparent and scalable initiative for planting and managing large forests anywhere on the planet.

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