Climate change reversal startup Nori raises $4M for its CO2 offsets marketplace

Nori CEO Paul Gambill. (Nori Photo)

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.

Paul Gambill, CEO and one of seven co-founders of Nori, a startup working to reverse climate change. (Nori Photo)

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.

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Looking at long road ahead on climate change, Bill Gates champions electric vehicles, alternative fuels

(GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)

With fewer people on the move during the pandemic, Bill Gates is taking the time to think about better ways to get around when we can again. Specifically, the Microsoft co-founder is sharing his thoughts on electric vehicles and alternative fuels that could help address a crisis beyond COVID: climate change.

In a new GatesNotes blog post, Gates said we’ve made great progress on electric vehicles. Batteries are getting cheaper and increased competition has created more choices for consumers. But even if the short-haul travel option further develops into a long-haul answer, EVs “will probably never be a practical solution for things like 18-wheelers, cargo ships, and passenger jets.”

Gates said this is where cheap alternative fuels come in, such as biofuels, which many people have heard of, and electrofuels, a very expensive option that uses electricity to combine the hydrogen molecules in water with the carbon in carbon dioxide, creating a liquid fuel that works in existing engines.

“Zeroing out all transportation emissions is going to require massive breakthroughs in these two areas,” Gates wrote, adding that while he’s inspired by progress made so far, “to prevent the worst effects of climate change, we need to get to zero net greenhouse gas emissions in every sector of the economy within 50 years.”

The billionaire philanthropist’s concerns mirror those of the company he founded. Microsoft pledged in January to become carbon negative by 2030 and remove more carbon than the company has put into the atmosphere since it launched by 2050. And Amazon for its part has set ambitious goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, establishing a Climate Pledge aimed at addressing its vast carbon footprint.

Read his post for further insight.

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