Announcing Nori’s $7M Series A financing round
Note: Several weeks of work went into preparing for this announcement, and we originally planned to roll out the news on February 24th. The night before, Russia began it’s reprehensible invasion of Ukraine, and though it was too late to pull our press release off the wire or cancel stories that were in flight, we decided to wait a few days before amplifying anything out of respect for the Ukrainian people and their dire situation. Nonetheless, climate change continues, and we are still quite proud to share this news with you.
Exciting news today! We’re announcing a new $7 million Series A round for Nori! This round was led by M13 and joined by the Toyota Ventures Climate Fund as well as follow-on from Placeholder. Here’s a link to a TechCrunch story about the round.
Why M13 and Toyota? What I really wanted in a Series A lead was a fund that could actually dig in with us as we grow, and that’s exactly who M13 are. Already we’ve gotten help with branding, building our recruiting team and processes, creative direction, and more. They’ve been really great to work with, and I’m proud for Nori to be part of their portfolio.
Toyota Ventures was really interesting to me after I learned that they were investing out of a climate-specific fund. They’re investing in companies who could be potential carbon removal suppliers for our market, and if you haven’t already heard me say this: this market is supply constrained. We need to leverage all possible opportunities to get more carbon removing businesses going on our platform.
But more importantly, getting involved with Toyota is about setting ourselves up for global adoption in the future. Nori’s greatest existential threat is if the legacy institutions like offset registries, environmental consultants, and UN-level policymakers coordinate in blocking disruptive new models like Nori’s from being allowed to participate in any future emissions compliance regimes. Having the support of large multinationals who work with Nori is the best defense against this. It’s why we brought Toyota in to this round, and why we brought Cargill in for our previous Seed round.
What’s the funding for? Almost entirely to grow the team. We started out at a headcount of 16, are now up to 18 people, and are planning to add a dozen more. Mostly on the product/engineering team because we have a really big roadmap we want to deliver on. If you’re looking for a new role, or know someone who would be a good fit, please pass our careers page on!
Company updates
In addition to the excitement around the funding round, we rebranded with a new logo a couple of weeks ago! Here’s the story behind how it was developed. I really loved our original logo, but it was time to redo it in order to make it more reflective of where we are as a company, and to just generally fit better in all those aspect ratios social media companies mandate. I shared my personal reflections on the logo in this thread.
We are gaining really significant traction on both the demand and supply sides of our marketplace. Already we’ve transacted over 75,000 tonnes of CO2 removed, and paid out more than $1 million to farmers for their carbon sequestration!
Part of what we’re trying to build here is the most transparent carbon marketplace in the world. I encourage you to visit our registry page where we share all sorts of information about our suppliers, our purchased transactions, and available supply. And if you scroll all the way down, there’s a link to our sales dashboard where you can view literally every transaction that’s ever happened on our platform.
*Note: since publishing this blog, we changed the name of our regenerative carbon removal credits from “Nori Carbon Removal Tonne (NRT)” to “Nori Regenerative Tonne.” Learn more here.
In recent months we’ve partnered with Rarible so that every NFT minted can automatically pay for Regenerative Tonnes from Nori, done a special NFT launch with The Sandbox, and even partnered with Julian Lennon as he auctioned NFTs of his rare Beatles memorabilia. Not to mention the growth in demand from different crypto protocols like STEPN:
This is what Nori is for! We’re not like all the other carbon credit startups that vie to sell offsets to the same five big enterprise companies. We’re building the API for carbon removal that plugs into platforms and protocols in a way that truly scales the amount of carbon coming out of the air.
Conclusion
The roadmap stretches out to infinity, but that’s ok and is what makes this fun. We are well resourced now to grow our business and I can’t wait for the next milestone steps. Thanks for being a part of the journey with us!
Paul Gambill
CEO, Nori
Want to join our team? We’re hiring!
Did you know that your business can now integrate with Nori for automatic carbon removal? Learn more
