Troy Wiseman.

Serial entrepreneur, restless optimist, and co-founder of EcoPlanet Bamboo. A man who spent his life building things, and decided the best thing he could build was a forest.

Troy had spent his life building things. A clothing company he co-founded at twenty that grew from nothing to nine figures. A private-equity and advisory firm after it. Then an impact fund, built on the belief that capital markets could be pointed at the world’s hardest problems rather than excused from them.

By 2010 he wanted to stop backing the work from a distance and get his own feet on the ground. Bamboo became the answer: a plant that could bring degraded land back to life, pull down carbon at real scale, put rural communities to work, and still stand on its own as a business.

He was honest about what it would take. Bamboo, he liked to remind people, was not a get-rich-quick scheme. It was a patient bet that science and care could turn worn-out land into working forest, and it would take years before anyone could tell whether he was right.

“When we first started in 2010, no one was really talking about alternative fibers.” — Troy Wiseman

The instinct that put communities at the center of every project he built showed up long before EcoPlanet existed. Earlier in his life Troy founded and supported a global network of orphanages for children in need, and he never treated it as the charitable footnote to a business career. It was the same conviction, applied earlier.

He believed, simply, that the people who tend the land should share in what it creates. Then he built a company that lives by it, and community was never an afterthought bolted on at the end of a project plan.

Troy Wiseman surrounded by children at one of the orphanages he founded and supported — Troy with children at the orphanage network he founded and supported, years before the first bamboo went in the ground.

A private-sector path to bringing land back to life

Troy speaking on Initiative 20×20’s goal to restore twenty million hectares of Latin American land, and the part he believed business could play in getting there.

On one of his last trips, Troy spent a week in the Philippines with the EcoPlanet team, doing what he loved most: walking the land, getting to know the people who work it, and seeing the difference up close. It was exactly how he had always led.

We lost Troy in 2024, and everything he started keeps right on growing. Under Camille’s leadership the company carries his life’s work forward, and the forests he helped plant will outlive everyone who planted them, lifting communities and cooling the planet for generations. That was always the point.

A private-sector path to bringing land back to life

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