The archive · Climate & Energy · Strategic decision · 2017–2024
Nori's blockchain carbon-market bet: $17.25M raised, marketplace shuts down in 2024
Nori built a marketplace that paid farmers for soil-carbon removal, raised $17.25M, then shut down in 2024 when voluntary carbon demand stalled.
Nori
What the business is
Nori ran an online marketplace where farmers were paid for verified soil-carbon removal and buyers could offset emissions, with every tonne of CO2 tracked on the blockchain.
Starting capital：$17.25M raised over seven years, including a $4M seed in 2020 and a $7M Series A led by M13 in 2022.
How it started
Paul Gambill left Deloitte in 2015 and founded Nori in Seattle in 2017 with Alexsandra Guerra, arguing that blockchain bookkeeping could make carbon credits trustworthy. It raised a $4M seed in 2020 from crypto-focused investors including Placeholder, North Island Ventures and Tenacious Ventures, with Shopify among its first buyers.
What happened
A $7M Series A led by M13 — with Toyota Ventures as a first-time climate investor — arrived in 2022, when Nori had about 10 farms, 2,200 credit purchases and $1M paid out to farmers; it moved off Ethereum onto Polygon and in 2023 signed a $14.4M agreement with Bayer covering 400,000 acres of farmland.
How it ended up
Nori shut down in September 2024 after seven years. CEO Matt Trudeau blamed a stagnant voluntary carbon market and a tough funding environment; co-founder Alexsandra Guerra announced the closure on LinkedIn.
Background
Nori was a bet that carbon credits were failing for a fixable reason: double-counting, opaque resale and no direct line between the person who removes carbon and the person who pays for it. Founder Paul Gambill left Deloitte in 2015, started Nori in Seattle in 2017 with Alexsandra Guerra, and raised a $4M seed in 2020 from crypto-focused investors to build a blockchain-tracked marketplace where farmers are paid for soil-carbon removal.
The design was specific: a Nori Carbon Removal Tonne represented one tonne of CO2 removed for at least ten years, every credit was registered on-chain and immediately retired on purchase, and farmers were paid in NORI tokens that vested as verification held up. By 2022 the company had about 10 farms, 2,200 credit purchases and $1M paid out to farmers, and it raised a $7M Series A led by M13 with Toyota Ventures participating.
The supply side kept growing — in 2023 Nori signed a $14.4M agreement with Bayer covering 400,000 acres — but the demand side never followed at the scale the business needed. CEO Matt Trudeau cited a stagnant voluntary carbon market and a tough funding environment when the company shut down in September 2024.
Nori's end mirrored the wider market: ocean-removal startup Running Tide also shut down in June 2024, and carbon-credit buyers remained cautious about quality. Seven years and $17.25M after founding, the marketplace that set out to fix carbon accounting closed its doors.
What has to be true
- The founders diagnosed a real flaw — double-counted, resold carbon credits — and built an elegant accounting fix on the blockchain, which generated press but not purchase orders.
- The wedge into agriculture secured the supply side: farmers, a USDA-built accounting methodology and later a 400,000-acre Bayer agreement.
- Corporate demand for voluntary credits stayed weak and reputation-sensitive, so the marketplace could not reach the volume its fixed costs needed.
- When the funding environment turned, a company with real supply but thin demand had no way to raise — the market, not the product, was the missing piece.
What can be applied
A marketplace needs both sides: Nori built supply — farmers, methodology, blockchain accounting — but carbon buyers never arrived in volume, and supply without demand is just an expensive ledger.
Aftermath
As of 2026-09-02 Nori no longer operates. The company shut down in September 2024 after seven years and $17.25M raised, with CEO Matt Trudeau citing a stagnant voluntary carbon market and a tough funding environment. Its end came as the broader carbon-removal market contracted — Running Tide shut down the same year — and soil-carbon crediting moved on to other registries and marketplaces.
Sources
- Carbon Marketplace Nori Shuts Down
- Beware shiny object syndrome… What went wrong for carbon marketplace Nori?
- Immune to irony, Nori puts a carbon market on the blockchain
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