About TerraBridge
Practitioners who have worked on both sides of the transaction.
TerraBridge was founded by a practitioner with over two decades of field and institutional experience, alongside a senior DFI investment professional with thirty years of experience across forestry, land-use, and emerging markets. That combination — field execution depth and institutional investment judgment — is the foundation of everything TerraBridge does.
OUR PURPOSE
The gap between initiative quality and institutional capital is structural. And it is solvable.
Across climate, forestry, regenerative agriculture, and land-use finance, the same pattern repeats. Initiatives with genuine potential — technically sound, ecologically significant, locally grounded — fail to attract institutional capital not because of weak design, but because investment readiness was never deliberately built. Financial logic is undocumented. ESG systems are absent or informal. Governance is fragile. Delivery architecture cannot withstand institutional scrutiny.
TerraBridge exists to solve that problem systematically — through structured methodology, field-verified technical work, and the institutional knowledge that comes from having sat on both sides of the table.
The firm draws on three pillars built over years of practice: deep technical and institutional expertise across climate, forestry, and land-use finance; a founding partnership bringing senior DFI investment experience across Africa, Asia, and Latin America; and a curated network of regional specialists, biodiversity experts, GIS practitioners, and technical partners developed through two decades of field work, corporate sustainability, and development finance engagement across three continents. That network is the product of a career spent doing the work.
Why We Exist
Investment readiness is a structural constraint across climate and land-use finance. Strong ambition and technically sound projects are not enough — initiatives must also demonstrate financial coherence, ESG credibility, governance integrity, and delivery capacity in ways that institutional capital providers can independently assess. TerraBridge exists to build that credibility systematically.
What We Enable
By strengthening investment readiness, TerraBridge supports the conditions under which institutional capital can contribute to climate mitigation and adaptation, nature-positive land use, sustainable food systems, and improved livelihoods. Impact is not claimed by TerraBridge — it is enabled by clearer alignment between field realities and the requirements of responsible capital deployment.
How We Work
We work through disciplined, stage-based processes that respect institutional roles and decision-making boundaries. Our approach emphasises proportionality, selectivity, and integrity — focusing effort where it is most decision-relevant and avoiding unnecessary or premature interventions.
Our Team
The people behind the work.
The TerraBridge core team brings together practitioners with dual experience — inside development finance institutions conducting due diligence and structuring investments, and in the field implementing ESG and delivery systems in complex landscapes.
Jessenia Angulo
Founder & Managing Director
Jessenia Angulo has over twenty years of experience across ESG systems, environmental and social due diligence, sustainability standards, and investment readiness in agriculture, forestry, aquaculture, and land-based value chains across Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia.
Prior to founding TerraBridge, she served as Senior Environmental and Social Specialist at FMO, covering Latin America and Central America across agriculture, forestry, and land-use portfolios. Before FMO, she worked across more than seventy sustainability, quality, and social responsibility standards for primary production and processing — including field-level implementation, capacity building, auditing, and system development across West Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the United States.
Her technical depth includes indigenous peoples engagement, FPIC processes, land tenure diagnostics, biodiversity and ecosystem assessment, regenerative agriculture, and IFC Performance Standards — with particular expertise in PS6 habitat classification, no net loss framework design, and biodiversity offset systems developed through direct field work in ecologically complex landscapes.
Gerhard Engel
Senior Investment Advisor & Founding Partner
Gerhard Engel brings over thirty years of development finance experience across forestry, land-use, renewable energy, and financial sector development in emerging markets. He spent approximately twenty-five years at FMO in senior investment and leadership roles across Africa, Asia, and Latin America — covering the full investment cycle from origination and structuring through portfolio management and institutional strategy.
At TerraBridge, he provides senior investment judgment on structuring, funder alignment, and institutional engagement — bringing a network and perspective built across three decades of DFI practice.
Michel de Jong
Operations & Executive Support
Michel de Jong brings over 25 years of experience in complex, regulated project environments, with a background spanning construction execution, foundation systems, and quality assurance under strict safety and regulatory frameworks. His career includes hands-on project supervision, leadership of large-scale infrastructure works, and company management in the Netherlands.
At TerraBridge, he contributes operational realism and execution discipline across feasibility assessment, delivery risk management, and ESG engagement quality.
Our Network
Global standards. Local accuracy.
TerraBridge engages trusted regional specialists and technical partners embedded in the contexts where initiatives operate. Their involvement ensures that institutional requirements and international standards are applied with local precision — particularly in relation to land tenure, stakeholder dynamics, regulatory frameworks, and political economy considerations that remote advisory cannot adequately address.
Regional Specialists
Technical Network
TerraBridge works with regional specialists across West Africa, East Africa, and Latin America — practitioners with direct field knowledge of the contexts where our clients operate. Their roles are defined within TerraBridge’s delivery architecture from the outset of each engagement and disclosed transparently to clients.
- Environmental and social field assessment
- Land tenure diagnostics and community engagement
- HCV and biodiversity field surveys
- Certification auditing — FSC, RSPO, Rainforest Alliance
- FPIC facilitation and indigenous peoples engagement
- Legal analysis and regulatory interpretation
- Agronomic assessment and production systems
For specialised technical requirements outside the core team’s scope, TerraBridge draws on a curated network of vetted technical consultants and partner organisations — activated selectively, proportionately, and transparently. Clients know from the outset what TerraBridge delivers directly and what sits with a specialist.
Partner expertise spans biodiversity and HCV/HCS assessment, GIS and spatial analysis, social safeguards, legal analysis, agronomic systems, and production auditing — with an accredited biodiversity specialist partnership covering the full IFC PS6 scope across Sub-Saharan Africa.
TerraBridge is selective about the engagements it takes on. That is by design.
We work where the combination of investment readiness methodology, ESG and biodiversity expertise, and institutional knowledge will make a measurable difference to an initiative’s ability to engage with capital. If that describes your situation, we welcome a direct conversation.