Climate Change Startup Nori Closes $4 Million Round From Placeholder, North Island Ventures, Tenacious Ventures, and Others, to Launch Blockchain-Based Carbon Marketplace

Nori, a Seattle-based startup developing a marketplace for carbon removals, recently closed a $4M round from Placeholder, North Island Ventures, Tenacious Ventures, and others. The funds will be used to expand the team, onboard more carbon removal suppliers (i.e. farmers), and launch an industrial-grade carbon marketplace.

“Nori’s mission is to reverse climate change. 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. Our marketplace creates significant financial incentives for them to adopt these practices and pull meaningful quantities of carbon dioxide out of the air,” said CEO Paul Gambill.

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Nori’s first supported method of carbon removal is soil carbon sequestration on croplands, which can be achieved through practices such as planting cover crops and reducing tillage. Among the investors in the round is an unnamed agribusiness giant.

“Large corporations like Microsoft, Amazon, and others have made commitments to become carbon neutral, and to do so they need a marketplace like Nori’s to provide ample supply and fair pricing of carbon that cuts out costly middlemen,” said Gambill.

Nori uses blockchain technology to create transparency, auditability, and solve the “double counting” problem in the carbon offset market. Double counting occurs when buyers of carbon offsets resell those offsets to secondary buyers, and the total reported volume of credits purchased increases without actually decreasing atmospheric CO2.

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The investment round was led by Placeholder, a blockchain-focused venture fund based in New York.

“With Nori, farmers can adopt regenerative practices like planting cover crops in empty fields over the winter and g******* for doing so, as the same process that rejuvenates the soil also sequesters carbon. In pursuit of an elegant solution to a tough problem, Nori has employed a host of cutting edge technologies, including blockchains, to account for and audit the carbon-backed assets produced by farmers. As one of Placeholder’s first investments that bridges the gap between crypto and the ‘real-world,’ we couldn’t be more excited to see how Nori scales the trust and utility of carbon markets,” said Chris Burniske, Partner at Placeholder.

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