Flowcarbon raises USD$70M putting carbon market on the blockchain

Climate tech company Flowcarbon has raised USD$70 million in venture capital funding as it creates the first open protocol for tokenising live, certified carbon credits.

Backed by lead investor a16z crypto, as well as through the sale of its carbon-backed token with participants including Fifth Wall, Box Group and the Celo Foundation the organisation allows project developers to access a marketplace of carbon credit buyers on the blockchain.

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Flowcarbon is working to build market infrastructure in the voluntary carbon market (VCM), by tokenising carbon credits and allowing the VCM to scale.

These tokenised credits are designed to drive funding to projects that either remove or reduce carbon from the atmosphere, the company said.

Flowcarbon’s carbon-backed token, the Goddess Nature Token (GNT) is backed by certified credits derived from nature-paced projects, and can be either retired as an offset, sold, or leveraged for borrowing and lending.

According to Dana Gibber, CEO of Flowcarbon, “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, revitalise and protect nature.”

Gibber said that the investment partners including a16z crypto, General Catalyst, Samsung Next and Invesco Private Capital among others, have expertise in web3 across manufacturing, technology, entertainment and real estate.

“The carbon market is extremely opaque and we believe demand for offsets is rapidly outpacing the speed at which supply can be increased, especially for nature-based projects,” said Arianna Simpson, General Partner at a16z crypto.

“Tokenisation is an obvious solution. We've explored the on-chain carbon space extensively and feel confident that Flowcarbon’s team and model are best in breed.”

Flowcarbon has also made a number of partnership announcements including a collaboration with DeFi lending protocol, Centrifuge protocol, which the company said will “unlock the debt markets for carbon project developers”.

The collaboration with Layer 1 blockchain Celo will provide USD$10 million world of GNT as an offset for Celo’s emissions, with the GNT token launching on Celo.