By
Chimamanda U. Martha
March 28th, 2024
The biggest investor in the funding round has been Andreessen Horowitz (or a16z). Other investors included General Catalyst, Samsung Next, Invesco Private Capital, and more.
WeWork founder and CEO Adam Neumann has recently launched a new startup Flowcarbon that aims to bring the voluntary carbon market to the blockchain. On Tuesday, the company announced it had raised a total of $70 million in venture capital funding ($32 million) and the sale of its carbon-backed token ($38 million). The money will go to reduce or remove carbon from the atmosphere.
WeWork Founder to Develop Carbon Trading Project
The biggest investor in the funding round has been Andreessen Horowitz (or a16z). Other investors included General Catalyst, Samsung Next, Invesco Private Capital, 166 2nd, Sam and Ashley Levinson, Kevin Turen, RSE Ventures, Allegory Labs, Fifth Wall, Box Group, and the Celo Foundation.
Dana Gibber, CEO of Flowcarbon, stated:
“There are powerful economic incentives to destroy and degrade critical natural landscapes around the world, but the voluntary carbon market is a brilliant financial mechanism that creates a counterbalancing incentive to reforest, revitalize and protect nature,” said Dana Gibber, CEO of Flowcarbon.”
She further added:
“We have a big vision and the stakes are high. We are thrilled to be partnering with the most thoughtful investors in the world, who bring a combined expertise in web3 and key market categories including manufacturing, technology, entertainment and real estate.”
To fulfill its mission and drive billions of dollars directly to projects that reduce or remove carbon from the atmosphere, Flowcarbon has launched the Goddess Nature Token (GNT), a crypto token on the Celo blockchain. According to Flocrbon, a number of certified credits issued over the last five years from nature-based projects are backing GNT, tracking popular corporate demand criteria and offering widespread exposure to corporate-quality credits. There are options for retiring a token as an offset, selling it, using for borrowing and lending, as well as redeeming it for an underlying real-world credit.
How Fighting Climate Change Became a Billion-Dollar Industry
As the world is in a race to combat climate change, governments pressure the private sector to limit greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, the world’s largest companies have turned to a financial product to offset their environmental footprints – carbon credits.
Carbon credits represent a permit that allows the owner to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. One credit is one ton of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere. Companies can meet their climate targets by purchasing credits for their current emissions. Some of them have gone further. For example, Microsoft Corporation (NYSE: MSFT) has committed to using credits to compensate for all their historic emissions. In Microsoft’s case, it is going back 45 years.
Other organizations have cut the bulk of their emissions and used credits to compensate for emissions they can not avoid. According to some estimates, credits worth 2 billion tonnes of CO2 will be necessary to get to the 2030 target.
Meanwhile, some critics say that buying carbon credits does not lower the overall amount of greenhouse gases. It just gives corporations a way to claim they are eco-friendly without reducing their overall emissions. Critics call this “greenwashing.”