WeWork Founder Reinvents Himself with a $70M Crypto Carbon Credit Platform
Neumann is an Israeli-American businessman and investor best known for cofounding WeWork in 2010; a firm once hailed as the future of workspaces. Flowcarbon's co-founders include Adam and his wife, Rebekah Neumann, CEO Dana Gibber, and COO Caroline Klatt, co-founders of Headliner Labs. This company builds AI-powered chatbots for large media organizations. Neumann's family office is run by Ilan Stern, another co-founder of Flowcarbon.
According to Flowcarbon, Silicon Valley financiers Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz's a16z crypto venture capital firm contributed $32 million to the last investment round. General Catalyst and Samsung Next are two more investors. A token sale of Flowcarbon's first carbon-backed token, the Goddess Nature Token, raised another $38 million (GNT).
The firm advertises itself as a leading climate technology firm focused on developing market infrastructure for the voluntary carbon market (VCM). Flowcarbon hopes to make the purchase, sale, and trading of carbon credits more accessible and efficient than the present carbon markets by tokenizing carbon credits on the Celo blockchain.
The voluntary carbon market, according to Flowcarbon, is now "inefficient, opaque, and inaccessible," with brokers and advisers asking up to 20% in fees, many sales done behind closed doors, and inconsistent carbon credit pricing depending on the buyer.
The voluntary carbon market option proposed by Flowcarbon is not unique. Toucan Protocol, JustCarbon, and Likvidi are three other projects that attempt to make purchasing and trading tokenized carbon credits easier. It was a prominent area where blockchain technology could help, according to Arianna Simpson, General Partner at a16z.
