Founders of Portuguese startup Trovador named Canon Young Champion of the Year 2026
Tech Startup News Europe - Founders of Portuguese startup Trovador were named Canon Young Champion of the Year 2026 at the Global Good Awards. Portuguese founders of startup Trovador, Sebastião Mendonça and Marta Bernardino have invented the world’s first all-terrain tree-planting robot. They obtained the Global Good Awards that reward businesses, NGOs, charities and social enterprises worldwide, that are trailblazers for purpose-driven sustainability and ethical leadership. The awards recognize leaders who are achieving practical, real-world impact that is both scalable and replicable – and who have inspiring stories to tell. Sebastião and Marta, both 20 and Portuguese are the founders of Tech Startup Trovador, the world’s first four-legged tree-planting robot, that is backed by National Geographic, UNEP and WWF, and named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list:
¨Half of our country’s forests have burned in our lifetime, and we watched it happen. When we volunteered to plant trees, we were told the slopes that need them most are untouchable: too steep for tractors, too dangerous for people. So we built Trovador, the world’s first four-legged tree-planting robot. The first prototype cost €15. The latest climbs 45° slopes, and plants hundreds of seedlings an hour into burned ground. We’re pulling 500,000+ trees back into reach.¨ - Sebastião Mendonça and Marta Bernardino, founders of Trovador.
The world’s first autonomous all-terrain tree-planting robot:
Portuguese tech startup Trovador is building the world’s first autonomous all-terrain tree-planting robot. Every year, the world loses millions of hectares of forest, while reforestation still struggles to keep up at scale. Trovador is designed for steep, post-fire slopes that tractors cannot reach, where manual planting is slow, risky, and expensive, and where aerial seeding lacks the precision and survival rates needed for true reforestation.
The new Portuguese tree-planting robot has four legs, works on up to 45° slopes and plants around 200 seedlings per hour - each seedling is drilled, planted, and logged with GPS precision. Instead of scattering seeds and hoping, the Trovador robot plants rooted native seedlings, combining smart microsite selection with precise placement to maximize survival while driving costs below €0.50 per tree. A single operator can oversee multiple tree-planting robots, unlocking up to 10 times the productivity of manual planting in the terrain where restoration is hardest.
Built in Portugal by young innovators who are under 21 years old and who grew up watching forests burn, the tree-planting robot makes reforestation faster, measurable, and scalable. Reforestation is not failing because people don’t care - it is failing because the hardest land is still the hardest to restore and the Portuguese startup is here to change that.
Portuguese tech startup Trovador has already secured the planting of over 500,000 trees through signed partnerships backed by National Geographic, the UN Environment Programme, and other leading sustainability and innovation recognitions.
