Nori, a Seattle-based startup striving to help reverse climate change, announced Thursday that it has closed a $4 million fundraising round.
The seed round was led by New York’s Placeholder, a blockchain-focused venture fund, which was joined by North Island Ventures, Tenacious Ventures, and others, including an unnamed agriculture giant.
Using cryptocurrency, Nori sells carbon credits to individuals and businesses to offset their carbon emissions. The startup, which launched in 2017, pays farmers to use verifiable, sustainable practices that store carbon dioxide, such as reducing the tilling of their soil and by planting off-season cover crops. The marketplace has sold offsets totaling nearly to 13,000 metric tons of CO2, with plans to sell an additional 20,000 tonnes by the end of the year.
The demand for offsets is seemingly vast. An increasing number of companies are pledging to shrink their carbon footprints, including Microsoft’s vow to become carbon negative and Amazon’s promise to be net carbon zero. Reaching these goals will require investments in carbon-removal programs. Amazon alone has a carbon footprint of more than 51 million metric tons.
CEO and co-founder Paul Gambill said that the new funding will be used to hire employees, add farmers to the platform, and expand their marketplace.
“Climate change is caused by too much CO2 in the atmosphere, and farmers have the potential to store billions of tonnes of CO2 in their soil by using regenerative practices,” Gambill said in a statement. “Our marketplace creates significant financial incentives for them to adopt these practices.”
Farmers that typically participate in carbon programs grow commodity grains such as corn, soy and wheat. Nori features profiles of two farmers selling credits, one in Maryland and another in Iowa. One of the company’s big improvements internally, Gambill said, has been reducing the time needed to enroll farmers on the platform.
Nori raised $1.3 million in a “pre-seed” round earlier this year. The company is a Techstars Sustainability Accelerator graduate and has a weekly podcast featuring conversations with leading voices in carbon removal.
Nori was featured in GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight in 2018.
