Seattle-based carbon removal startup Nori is thinking big after raising a $7 million Series A round Thursday.
The company allows consumers and businesses to buy carbon offsets directly from farmers. Although the company has sold more than 75,000 metric tons of carbon removals from the air through its marketplace, Nori wants to go further and create both a commodities-type market for carbon removal as well as a standard way for businesses to help consumers offset their carbon.
"Last fall we partnered with Rarible, which is I think the second-largest NFT marketplace, so that anyone who mints an NFT on there can just check a box and then automatically go pay for removing a (metric ton) of CO2 for their NFT," said Paul Gambill, CEO of Nori. "That's really what our long-term vision for this is, to be kind of like Stripe for carbon removal."
Nori, founded in 2017, works with farmers, who avoid tilling and plant low-lying cover crops to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. The company uses a third party to verify and quantify the amount of carbon to ensure customers are buying the right amount of carbon. According to Gambill, Nori ensures customers are actually buying past emissions that have been taken out of the atmosphere, while many who sell carbon credits are actually selling carbon avoidance in future projects.
In addition to its partnership with Rarible, Nori has worked with the musician Imogen Heap to offset carbon created from NFT purchases. The company also works with Shopify to remove carbon created during Black Friday and Cyber Monday shipping. In general, Gambill said, the company's long-term vision is to create a way for consumers to opt in at checkout to pay for carbon removal or for businesses to just bake that into their prices.
Gambill said Nori also wants to standardize the purchase of a metric ton of carbon much like a commodities market does for gold or oil. The company in the coming months aims to create its own cryptocurrency token, called a NORI, to set a standard price for 1 metric ton of CO2 removed.
Nori currently has 18 employees, Gambill said, but aims to hit roughly 30 by the middle of this year. The majority of the company's employees are based in the Seattle area. The company has an office in Ballard, but Gambill said the company will likely need to expand by the end of the year.
"We're starting to look into that and where we might go or expand," Gambill said. "We're very committed to having a central core in Seattle."
