WeWork founder reinvents himself with $70M crypto carbon credit platform

cointelegraph.com:

Three years after being ousted as CEO of WeWork, Adam Neumann has jumped on the crypto bandwagon, raising $70 million in the first major funding round for his climate tech venture Flowcarbon.

The project aims to make carbon trading more accessible by putting carbon credits on the blockchain.

Neumann is an Israeli-American businessman and investor famous for his role in founding coworking space provider WeWork in 2010, a company once heralded as the future of work spaces.

However, it all came crashing down in 2019 when the company attempted to go public, which instead lifted the lid on WeWork’s unprofitable business model and questionable leadership antics. The company went from being privately-valued at $47 billion in August 2019 to talk of filing for bankruptcy just six weeks after, with Neumann pressured to step down as CEO.

Adam and his wife, Rebekah Neumann have been listed as co-founders of Flowcarbon, along with CEO Dana Gibber, and COO Caroline Klatt — both of whom are co-founders of Headliner Labs, a company building AI-powered chatbots for major media brands. Ilan Stern, another co-founder of Flowcarbon, heads up Neumann’s own family office.

According to Flowcarbon, the recent funding round includes $32 million in funding from Silicon Valley investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz through their a16z crypto venture capital firm. Other investors include General Catalyst and Samsung Next.

Another $38 million was raised in a token-sale of Flowcarbon’s first carbon-backed token, the Goddess Nature Token (GNT).

The company describes itself as a pioneering climate technology company working to build market infrastructure in the voluntary carbon market (VCM). Through the tokenization of carbon credits on the Celo