The story behind #SexyTrees: from an Austin pitch to Amazonian reforestation
How the Sexy Trees protocol got named, and why its sexy
In 2022, Savimbo launched with admission to the SputnikATX accelerator from a whitepaper written during a road trip.
All three founders had deep expertise and 10k hours of synergistic domain knowledge. But at first glance, it wasn't apparent. Drea (seemingly an ecotourist), hired Johny (seemingly a hiking guide), and paid him with help from Fernando (seemingly a local fixer). They were sitting at the kitchen table in former FARQ territory in the deep Colombian Amazon when the first $5 in digital money landed in Jhony's first mobile bank account. In that moment, the three of them realized suddenly they had hacked something, a finance problem that Amazon had never solved before. The intersection of Starlink, mobile banking, and digital payments had opened a new horizon to finance conservation precisely on the border of primary forests.
Drea buried herself in a month of writing, Fernando cooked, Jhony thought they both were crazy, and the application that emerged landed immediately with funders who knew something innovative when they saw it.
But the terms of the initial investment required the three founders to split across two worlds. Jhony Lopez and Fernando Lezama were running the first reforestation pilot in the Colombian Amazon — negotiating with a smallfarmer who had cleared his land and was willing to replant. Drea Burbank, the American co-founder, was eight floors up in a downtown Austin penthouse, next to a petroleum microtrading firm, trying to wire investor money down to a windowless hut by a primary forest.
The cultural and economic distance was bigger than the geographic one. Drea was training the first grassroots staff in broken Spanish over Starlink. Jhony and Fernando, who didn't speak the language of carbon markets and venture capital, were taking pragmatic action anyway — supplementing the planting instructions with what they actually knew, and reporting back in photos and pilot data.
They barely knew each other and were almost immediately separated. But they held on to the thread that kept them together and took action anyway. They didn't start with trust; they earned trust. They started with ethics. Each of them independently did what they said they would do.
The first plot went in. A tree at a time. And the photo evidence came back.
Back in Austin, at the end of the accelerator, Drea received the photos the day she was pitching the project to a room of urban investors. The deck was about carbon markets, methodologies, and Indigenous-led reforestation. Halfway through, she lost her footing. Standing in front of a sea of uncomprehending faces, trying to translate an Amazonian reality to a room that had never been below the canopy, facing her own disconnection, she went silent. Then, recalling the photo, said the only thing she could think of:
"If you're nice to me, I'll send you a sexy photo of a tree."
The room laughed - the phrase landing where technical presentations had failed. Then dozens of smiling people approached after the pitch, asking for their photo. Some of them are still Savimbo subscribers today.
The first photo was a .gif of Jhony framing a hand-planted seedling — the opening of Savimbo's first Indigenous-led Amazonian reforestation plot, in a region with a 10% deforestation rate. He was wearing rubber boots. The tree was small.
That was the meme. That's still the meme. #SexyTrees is what we call the trees Savimbo plants and the protocol that pays for them. It's deliberately silly, and it's deliberately tangible. Nature doesn't take payment in the form of talk. Reports, conferences, spreadsheets, AI — none of it gets a single tree into the ground. A photo of a real tree in a real place, planted by a real person who got paid for it, who was trustworthy despite all the reasons not to be, does.
When the accelerator ended, Drea packed her bags. Savimbo was built from below the canopy. It's unabashedly jungle-first — three founders with a shared vision, working to stop deforestation, preserve what was left, and pay the people doing the work.
And that's what makes a tree sexy.
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