Post Detail

Seattle-based carbon removal startup Nori has shut down after operating for seven years and raising $17.25 million from investors.

Nori managed an online marketplace for buying and selling carbon credits generated by farmers who used sustainable practices that capture and hold carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere. It tracked the sales using blockchain technology.

Alexsandra Guerra, a Nori co-founder and former director of sales and business development, shared news of the closure in a LinkedIn post.

“In a heartfelt email, CEO Matt Trudeau acknowledged Nori’s vision and impact, but the challenges of a stagnant Voluntary Carbon Market and tough funding environment proved too great,” Guerra wrote.

The Nori website says that the company this year was on track to remove more than 700,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere, directing $6.5 million to farmers.

GeekWire reached out to Nori leaders for additional comment and will update this story when we hear back.

Last year Nori raised $6.25 million from existing investors M13, Toyota Ventures, Placeholder and Cargill.

The year before, it secured a partnership with Bayer, a global leader in agriculture, which is providing “hundreds of thousands of verified carbon removal offsets” to the Nori platform. At the time, the demand for offsets was outstripping the supply side from farmers.

The carbon removal sector, however, is mercurial.

Scientists largely agree that carbon removal will be essential to preventing the worst climate outcomes, and tech giants including Microsoft and Amazon have spent millions of dollars on carbon credits. A report released in June said the carbon credit market could hit $100 billion a year by 2035 — which would mark massive growth from its current value of $2.7 billion last year.

But there has also been significant uncertainty and disruption in the field as participants have struggled to create accepted standards for how to quantify and credit carbon removal to ensure it’s valid and having the intended climate impacts.

The uncertainty and general economic headwinds buffeted Nori.

In April 2023, the startup cut 10 employees, or 37% of headcount, leaving it with 17 employees. The layoffs were necessitated by tighter market conditions, co-founder and former CEO Paul Gambill said, at the time.

The next month, Gambill stepped down as CEO, shifting to chief product officer. He left the company in March of this year, but remained on the board.

“Now, I look to the new generation of climate-tech entrepreneurs,” Guerra wrote in her LinkedIn post. “May you learn from our victories and mistakes as you continue the vital work of scaling global carbon removal. The voluntary carbon market still has challenges, but the mission must go on.”