A Seattle-based Carbon Removal Marketplace That Raised $17M, Shuts Down After 7 Years *

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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.

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.

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.

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.