The healthiest economies will show up with drinkable rivers. That is the image Laura Ortiz Montemayor works backwards from, every Monday morning, every investor meeting, every slide deck.

Laura is a regenerative finance strategist, founder of SVX Mexico, and co-founder of LARIS – the Latin American Regenerative Investment Summit. This is her third time on the show, and a lot has happened since we last spoke. LARIS 2025 sold out. More than 200 people, billionaires, farmers, and practitioners in the same room, conversations moving from spreadsheets to love and frequencies. LARIS 2026 is coming bigger: hosted on a wetland in Bogotá, May 12–14, with WATER as the central theme.

We also talk about the collapse of USAID and the damage it did across Latin America, how the sector is rebuilding with local capital, and the question this whole conversation keeps circling: how do you make investors fall in love with life. One hint: start the spreadsheets.

WHAT THE USAID COLLAPSE BROKE — AND WHAT CAME NEXT

The USAID shutdown hit Latin America’s regenerative ecosystem hard. In some countries, USAID’s budget was larger than the government’s own. For SVX Mexico, contracts vanished overnight, and the grief moving through the sector was real and widespread.

“The actual loss and grief that was going through the whole ecosystem last year was massive and really powerful.” — Laura Ortiz Montemayor

Out of that came a necessary reckoning: if regenerative investing is meant to build sovereignty, why were so many of the funders American? The pivot toward family offices, local development finance institutions, and flexible impact-first capital structures.

LARIS 2025: WHAT HAPPENED IN THE ROOM

LARIS wasn’t just panels and spreadsheets. It brought billionaires, farmers, entrepreneurs, and practitioners together just weeks after the USAID collapse — a moment of deep grief for the sector. What emerged was something more than a conference.

“For me it was mesmerizingly magical, but also it ignited in me the flame of hope that I really needed… In LARIS there was a lot of hugging, and hugs are regenerative in themselves, inherently regenerative. Every time you give it, you’re receiving it. There’s never a win-lose situation. It’s always a win-win situation.” — Laura Ortiz Montemayor

WHY WATER IS OPENING DOORS FOR REGENERATIVE INVESTMENT

Water is now landing directly on corporate desks as operational risk. Recent global reports on water bankruptcy have made that concrete — and as Laura points out, agriculture sits at the centre of the biggest water risks. Corporations are waking up to it, and it is creating conversations that weren’t happening before. As Koen puts it: “water risk is starting to seriously come up because of the reports, because of actual things they see in their supply chain.”

But the literacy gap is real. Most decision-makers still don’t know simple concepts like evaporation, let alone evapotranspiration or small water cycles. And almost no one has connected the fact that more carbon retention means more water retention, more soil organic matter means a bigger sponge.

“We need to rehydrate landscapes, and it is absolutely possible. And it’s all about management.” — Laura Ortiz Montemayor

HOW TO TALK ABOUT LOVE IN A FINANCE MEETING — AND WHY IT WORKS

Why does love matter in an investment conversation at all? Because if you want to finance an alive planet, the people making the decisions need to be connected to life.

“The more the decision-makers of corporations and finance understand ecology — we need them to fall in love with life. It’s always falling in love with life. It’s always biophilia the answer.” — Laura Ortiz Montemayor

Investment decisions are never made by intellect alone — gut signals, emotions, and values all shape risk perception, whether investors acknowledge it or not.

But the sequencing is everything. She doesn’t lead with love, she leads with intellectual credibility. Self-liquidating equity, the financial structures, the hard data. Drawing on Otto Scharmer’s Theory U — open mind, open heart, open will — she earns intellectual trust first. Only once that trust is open does she plant the seed.

“In the same presentation, you need to address self-liquidating equity and all of those terms that are sexy and attractive for finance people… but always we end with the love so that they have already gone through the intellectual part. They already have their intellectual trust open. And that’s where you plant the seed of love.” — Laura Ortiz Montemayor

The concept underneath all of it is Eduardo Galeano’s sentipensante — feeling and thinking simultaneously, never divorcing heart from brain in any decision.

Koen and Laura also talked about:

• Corporate water risk and the disconnect between replenishment pledges and on-the-ground practice
• Why one major berry producer was causing its own drought and didn’t know it
• Shifting from foreign funding to Mexican family offices and local development finance
• Sentipensante — Eduardo Galeano’s concept of feeling-and-thinking as one inseparable act
• LARIS 2026: May 12–14, Bogotá, Colombia, hosted on a wetland, theme: WATER

OTHER RESOURCES:

• GLOBAL WATER BANKRUPTCY REPORT
• Regenerative Economics: Revolutionary Thinking for a World in Crisis – John Fullerton
  

LINKED INTERVIEWS:

• Laura Ortiz – let financiers being seduced by Latin America biodiversity wealth
• Laura Ortiz Montemayor – Ecology without social justice is just gardening
• Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin – Why chickens are the perfect entry point to decolonize our food system

More about our guest:
Laura Ortiz Montemayor is a regenerative finance strategist and founder of SVX Mexico, an ecosystem activator she has been building for over ten years with a focus on making regenerative investment in Latin America real and fundable. She is co-founder of LARIS — the Latin American Regenerative Investment Summit and works at the intersection of ecology, capital, and culture across Mexico and Latin America.

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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.