In its first major funding round, disgraced WeWork founder Adam Neumann has hopped on the crypto bandwagon. He raised $70 million for his climate tech startup Flowcarbon.
Neumann is an Israeli-American businessman and investor best known for cofounding WeWork in 2010. Which was a firm once hailed as the future of workspaces.
Disgraced WeWork founder takes back the reins
Flowcarbon hopes to make carbon trading more accessible by putting carbon credits on the blockchain.
Flowcarbon’s co-founders include Adam and Rebekah Neumann, CEO Dana Gibber, and COO Caroline Klatt, co-founders of Headliner Labs. This company builds AI-powered chatbots for large media organizations. Another co-founder of Flowcarbon, Ilan Stern, runs Neumann’s family office.
According to Flowcarbon, Silicon Valley financiers Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s a16z crypto venture capital firm contributed $32 million to the recent 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 (GNT), raised another $38 million.
A bundle of certified credits from nature-based initiatives issued during the previous five years supports GNT. It matches common corporate demand criteria and provides widespread exposure to corporate-quality credits.
WeWork scandal
Meanwhile, WeWork’s effort to go public in 2019 came crashing down, exposing the company’s poor business strategy and dubious leadership behavior. Six weeks after the company was valued at $47 billion privately, Neumann was pressed to resign.
The Neumanns describe Flowcarbon as a cutting-edge climate technology firm focused on developing market infrastructure for the voluntary carbon market (VCM). Flowcarbon hopes to make carbon credit purchasing, selling, and trading more accessible and efficient than current carbon markets by tokenizing carbon credits on the Celo blockchain.