Spotlight on nature-based enterprise: Radici by Natural Business Intelligence
In January 2026, Storm Kristin tore through Portugal. The team at Natural Business Intelligence (NBI) — a Portuguese consultancy working at the intersection of ecology, EU environmental regulation, and nature finance — was in the landfall region, and caught in the destruction. From that experience, one question lingered: how do you rebuild a more resilient territory? Their answer, launched in April 2026, is Radici.
Radici is a climate resilience tool that draws on decades of ecological expertise to help determine which native species are best suited to a specific hedgerow, stream bank, or urban canopy. Crucially, it delivers those recommendations with hyperlocal precision and makes them freely accessible to the people making everyday land-use decisions on the ground. The tool was built on the conviction that high technical skill should feel simple, and that democratising ecological knowledge requires not only science, but social empathy. The result is a resilience-focused tool used by municipalities, landowners, landscape architects, restoration practitioners, city planners, foresters and farmers alike.
The business model is freemium: a free tier opens expert ecological intelligence to citizens, smallholders and community initiatives that have historically been excluded from this kind of advisory work, while a dedicated services line provides tailored implementation support for municipalities and institutional clients, including restoration project design, additional species selection (for cover crops, for example), and Nature Restoration Law compliance pathways. A future marketplace layer will help close the gap between suppliers and clients of restoration material.
Within weeks of its beta release on 13 April 2026, Radici had registered 2,300 users across 32 countries and was covered by 19 national media outlets. The near-term roadmap focuses on extending its validated recommendations from Portugal into the remaining 26 EU Member States, in step with the implementation timeline of the EU Nature Restoration Law. Looking further ahead, the NBI team sees opportunity in deeper integrations: with public procurement workflows for restoration projects, with climate adaptation planning at city and regional level, and with the emerging architecture of nature credit and biodiversity finance instruments across Europe.