Three years after stepping down as WeWork CEO, Adam Neumann jumped on the cryptocurrency bandwagon, raising $70 million in the first major round of funding for his climate technology company Flowcarbon.
The project aims to make carbon trading easier by setting up carbon credits on the blockchain.
Neumann is an Israeli-American businessman and investor who founded co-working space WeWork in 2010, a company once hailed as the future of the workspace.
However, when WeWork tried to go public in 2019, everything fell apart. Instead, it lifted the veil on WeWork's unprofitable business model and questionable leadership antics. The company was valued at $47 billion in August 2019, but was talking about filing for bankruptcy just six weeks later as Neumann was forced to step down as CEO.
According to publicly available information, Neumann and his wife, Rebekah Neumann, are co-founders of Flowcarbon. CEO Dana Gibber and COO Caroline Klatt are both co-founders of Headliner Labs, a company that develops artificial intelligence chatbots for major media brands. Flowcarbon's other co-founder, Ilan Stern, runs Neumann's own family office.
According to Flowcarbon, the latest funding round includes $32 million in funding from Silicon Valley investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz through their a16z cryptocurrency venture capital firm. Other investors include General Catalyst and Samsung Next.
Additionally, the token sale of Flowcarbon’s first token anchored to carbon credits, the Goddess Nature Token (GNT), raised $38 million.
Flowcarbon bills itself as a pioneering climate technology company working to build market infrastructure in the Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM). Through the tokenization of carbon credits on the Celo blockchain, Flowcarbon hopes to make the buying, selling and trading of carbon credits more accessible and efficient than the current carbon market.
Carbon trading is a market-based system designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.
Businesses that generate carbon emissions can purchase carbon credits to offset their carbon emissions from projects that remove or reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as reforestation projects.
However, Flowcarbon argues that the voluntary carbon trading market is currently "inefficient, opaque and difficult to access", with brokers and advisors charging fees of up to 20%, many transactions taking place behind closed doors and pricing of carbon credits up to buyers.
Flowcarbon is not the only solution to the voluntary carbon market. Other projects aiming to facilitate the trading of tokenized carbon credits include Toucan Protocol, JustCarbon and Likvidi.
Arianna Simpson, general partner at a16z, said this is an area that could clearly benefit from blockchain technology.
“The carbon market is extremely opaque, and we believe that demand for carbon offsets is rapidly outpacing supply, especially for nature-based projects. Tokenization is an obvious solution.”
Weatherly
