Meet Marissa Cuevas, CEO of MicroTERRA

Invest in startups like microTERRA alongside Climate Capital here.

Founders: Marissa Cuevas

Motto: At microTERRA, we produce a high-quality, clean-label texturizer upcycling nutrient runoff, the biggest water pollutant. Ingredients that instead of using water, are cleaning water. 

Year Founded: 2019

Stage: Seed

Location: Mexico

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Climate Capital: What made you want to solve this problem?

Marissa:  In 2017 at Singularity University, I learned about the water crisis, how the next world war is expected to be about water, and how that is linked to our food system. So I concentrated all my effort on solving agricultural wastewater (nutrient runoff). Then, learning about biomimicry, I realized that if we use living organisms to solve this problem, then the solution becomes as exponential as the challenge. Plants naturally absorb these nutrients, thus cleaning water. 

The way we produce food is killing our planet. 70% of the world's freshwater goes into agriculture.

According to the FAO, agriculture is the biggest water pollutant due to the excess of nutrients. These nutrients end up in our waterbodies, in rivers, lakes and eventually oceans creating dead zones. As our population and food demand increase, our water bodies will be pushed to their limits. Even though this is the most pressing water issue, there are no commercial water treatment systems for Agriculture/ nutrient runoff.

As a circular economy fanatic, my vision is to take those nutrients out of the water to create more food for our planet, and most importantly to incorporate this solution directly into our food system to stop pollution at the source and preserve our environment. Throughout these years, we have navigated many pivots, to finally be experts in this problem, and bring a solution that can serve every stakeholder.
Climate Capital: What are you building?

Marissa: We are cleaning water and feeding the planet. We use Lemna, an aquatic plant, that grows by absorbing nutrient runoff. This plant is fast-growing, low maintenance, and extremely effective at cleaning water. 

We partner with farms to grow lemna with their wastewater, in a scalable, affordable, and sustainable way. 

Then, we extract valuable compounds of lemna and sell them to the industry. Our current product is Pectin, a texturizer used in the food industry. Our revolutionary way to produce it, allows us to protect our waterways and produce sustainable food. 
Climate Capital: What is next?

Marissa:  From 2023 until 2026, every step of our process will be optimized in order to decrease production costs to a minimum, reaching an optimization level of -36%. 

By 2026, we plan to have:

- 55 farms producing Lemna

- A total of 75 Ha cultivated

- 3000 Tons of dried Lemna produced

- After the extraction process, we will end up having 690 tons of Category 1 product + 101 tons of Category 2 product to be sold

- Leading us to revenue of $15M by 2026

- More importantly, we will clean 21Mio M3 of water which is the equivalent of 15Mio people´s yearly water consumption. On top of that, we will absorb about 12K tons of CO2."
Climate Capital: What are the core elements of the culture you are building at your company?

Marissa: As a Latina woman working in STEM in an agriculture/rural context, I am sensitive to inclusion and I want to see change. We have a lot of representation of women, both in our leadership team and in our Science/Technical team, we are always open for dialog and reflections and hold the proper spaces for it. But diversity goes beyond this, diversity is having members of very different cultural contexts (farmers, operators, scientists, business people, etc.), different nationalities (Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Spain, Belgium), and finally, different ages (20- 55 years). This is to me what inclusion looks like.

Climate Capital: What are the key challenges as you scale your company?

Marissa:

- Scaling at the farms: we are launching our first 5Ha project this year, this will mean a scale of 5x, which in biological systems can be risky. We have designed our ponds with separations so that we can stop any plague outbreak, and mitigate it in the best way. 

- As we scale we have to ensure the quality of the feedstock from our farmers. To prepare for this we are running capacity building courses to improve this. 

- Scale up the product extraction. We have currently tested our extraction at 50kg, in the coming Q we will reach extraction per batch of 200kg. And we know that by Q4 we have to reach a one-ton capacity for batch extraction, this comes with a lot of technical challenges. We are partnering with manufacturing for this to bring their expertise along and be prepared for this challenge. "
Climate Capital: What have you learned that you want to share with other founders?

Marissa: A mentor once told me that the greatest quality to be an entrepreneur is the ability to learn from your environment. Today I am convinced that always adapting is a constant process and it's a key part of starting a business.
Climate Capital: How can the broader climate community help you on your mission?

Marissa: As we get closer to our final product functionality (low methoxyl pectin), here comes the time to spread it and share samples to reach potential customers. Therefore, we are starting empathy interviews to identify our value proposition and better understand their pain points.

We want to connect with companies using Pectin in their final products (dairy, bakery, or confectionary) to understand what their challenges are. Their size is not limiting as both big and small companies would be interested to validate certain assumptions of ours. We are looking for contacts in any of these departments: R&D, Innovation, Product Development, Marketing, Venture groups (if they have any) e.g. Danone Ventures, Nestle Ventures & for sure many more that we might not be aware of.

For potential intros reach out to paola@microterra.com