Nori raises $4M funding round from some fantastic investors to scale up the carbon removal marketplace!
Back in 2015, I decided that I wanted to work on something bigger and more important than the consulting job I was in. Climate change seemed like an obvious choice, because of course more people were going to pay attention to this ever growing issue. Once I made that decision, I started asking the question, “How do we solve climate change and make it just go away?” It seemed sort of obvious to me that if the problem is that there are too many greenhouse gases in the air, then the solution is to pull those gases back out and store them safely in the earth. Under that framing, solving climate change is just an engineering project. The carbon dioxide is in the wrong location, and we need to move it.
In 2017, after putting together a team of cofounders with deep experience in carbon markets, carbon removal policy, renewable energy, and software development, we launched Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. Since then, we’ve hosted the first Reversapalooza conference, formed some key partnerships, and gone through the Techstars Sustainability program. Last fall, we officially launched with our first pilot project, and we are now scaling up our pilot program for carbon farmers.
Today I am thrilled to announce a $4 million investment in Nori by some truly awesome investors! The round was led by Chris Burniske at Placeholder, a blockchain-focused fund in NY, and followed by North Island Ventures (also blockchain), Tenacious Ventures (agtech in Australia), Josh Felser, our past angel investors, and an unnamed large agribusiness.
Our focus for the coming months is two-fold: first, we will be greatly improving our software platform that farmers and their data managers use to enroll their projects. The easier this is to use, the more farm projects will enroll, and the more NRTs (that’s Nori Carbon Removal Tonnes, the brand name for our carbon certificates) we can sell. Second, we will be working towards the next stage in our market design, namely, launching the NORI token and our forward contract auctions (see the Nori White Paper, page 55).
With this new investment, Nori plans to make several hires, including engineers, a designer, and account managers to work with farmers, so please check out our careers page!
Our vision for the future is that there will be millions of NRTs transacting across the Nori platform in sales to individuals and businesses, and most of all via API. Every industry that has moved to ecommerce has inevitably shifted to more automated purchasing of goods, and what Nori is building for is an API that can be dropped into any application or platform so that carbon payments can happen seamlessly in the background.
We believe that emitting CO2 is like throwing away garbage. When you go to a restaurant and produce waste, you don’t get a “garbage offset” line item on your bill. The restaurant just pays for the cost of collecting the garbage and storing it responsibly. Businesses should treat carbon emissions the same way. They’ve just never had the technology or option to do so before now. That is what Nori is making possible.
Paul Gambill, CEO
