Café Selva Norte showed how in the Global South, the entity that sits between fragmented smallholders and large-scale investment capital is where NbS becomes investable for institutional capital. Two deals from July 2026 bolster the model, but asks a central question of the architecture of that enterprise layer: When that enterprise layer forms, does it form as a single integrated company, or as a consortium of specialists who each own one piece of it?

Thryve.Earth and Rize operate in different countries with different commodities underneath the common interest in carbon. A comparison presents two different architectures that flesh out how a “commodity core+carbon upside” model to scaling NbS could look like.

The business under the deals

Thryve.Earth, a Singapore-based project developer, announced its first corporate carbon offtakes in July: over 335,000 tonnes to Google and McKinsey through the Symbiosis Coalition, and a separate 300,000-tonne deal with Tencent (its first nature-based credit purchase outside China). Both are ten-year agreements funding restoration of 6,000 hectares in North Sulawesi, with potential to expand to 10,000 ha. Thryve is a carbon project developer supported on the ground by Masarang Foundation, its implementation partner. Masarang Foundation and its commercial arm, PT. Gunung Hijau Masarang, have run a commercial Arenga sugar palm operation in North Sulawesi for close to two decades, with a geothermal-powered processing facility built alongside Pertamina Geothermal Energy. They export to customers across Europe and, more recently, Bulgaria, Malaysia and the UK. The commodity business in sugar palm remains the core source of income for the landscape actors. PT. Gunung Hijau Masarang will continue to offtake sugar palm extracts from the farmers of the region. The agroforestry carbon project layers a tree-based agriculture model that mixes plantations of timber, fruit trees and other commodities like chilli that has a domestic market, making the landscape more resilient. Revenues from the carbon project support clearing invasive Imperata grass, helping also establish new stands in previously unproductive areas. This mirrors the consortium shape I described in Café Selva Norte, where Ecotierra, URAPI and ElevaFinca each own a distinct function rather than one company owning all of them.

Rize is a single enterprise layer, a company that offtakes rice from farmers and supports them reduce emissions from rice cultivation by applying the Alternate Wetting-and-Drying (AWD) method. The company closed a $31 million Series B in July 2026, split $20 million equity (led by BNP Paribas Asset Management Alts, joined by The Rockefeller Foundation, Temasek and Breakthrough Energy Ventures) and $11 million debt (BIDV, Temasek Foundation, UOB). Rize runs agronomy, export market access, and AWD-linked carbon credits under one balance sheet, for 17,000 smallholders across Vietnam and Indonesia. BNP Paribas’ Alexandre Martin-Min described Rize as sitting “at the intersection of sustainable agriculture, carbon finance, and verified commodity trade.” Rize has shipped 1,500 metric tons of low-emission rice so far against a target of 300,000 hectares by 2030. Both revenue streams, low-carbon rice and carbon, are still pre-scale.

What each deal is actually underwriting

The two deals are not underwriting the same risk, even though they are built toward the same eventual structure.

On the carbon front, the two companies are building on different project methodologies. Thryve’s agroforestry-type credits sit inside a category already underwritten at hyperscaler scale by Chestnut Carbon, re.green and Mombak. Rize’s carbon credits sit on VM0051, a 2025-vintage rice-methane methodology that replaced AMS-III.AU after most of the previously issued rice-methane credits were invalidated on additionality grounds.

The two companies are at different stages of carbon project development. Thryve’s 635,000 tonnes are contracted to named buyers and project implementation is underway with a reliable and known implementation partner in Masarang Foundation. Rize’s projected one million-plus credits over five years is a supply-side estimate, and the carbon project is at pre-registration stage with Gold Standard.

There is a failure-mode asymmetry in the enterprise models each case uses. If Thryve’s carbon financing stalls for any reason, Masarang’s sugar business, which predates Thryve by two decades, keeps running regardless. Rize as a company absorbs both the profits and losses from both rice-export and carbon credit sales. If one fails, the company may not be able to survive independently on the other as they run on the same balance sheet with the same landscape actors.

Rize’s model demands a single investor base to get comfortable with two completely different revenue engines running simultaneously rather than one proven engine carrying a new one.

Speed versus ceiling

The consortium route scales faster right now because it lets specialist capital underwrite its own segment. Impact or carbon-focused capital can back a Thryve-equivalent without needing to evaluate a Masarang’s commodity execution, and agribusiness capital can back Masarang without needing underwrite carbon credit price forecasts. It mirrors the Café Selva Norte model and validates it in a different geographic and regulatory context.

The integrated route asks more of any one investor base, making it riskier at this stage. But if the integration holds, there is no margin split across separate entities and no coordination bottleneck between partners. In a consortium, no single entity captures the full value the enterprise layer creates; it gets divided across the specialists who built it. In an integrated model, one company keeps all of it, assuming it can run agronomy, export and carbon MRV well enough at the same time.

The integrated model has the potential to reach a much higher ceiling, but needs patience and long-term capital backing it. As agribusiness PE, commodity trading desks, and growth capital begin to understand and underwrite carbon revenues with other commodities, they will become the investor base that encourages businesses to diversify revenue streams within the same umbrella. Weyerhaeuser demonstrated this in North America. I didn’t think it could translate very well to the Global South, but Rize is taking that model to the test.