Since 2021, climate tech startup BlocPower has crowdfunded more than $3 million on the promise to make home electrification affordable for low-income Americans. Five years later, some of those everyday investors risk losing their money.
BlocPower is both negotiating an asset sale and considering a restructuring to repay some of its debt after bleeding cash last year, according to a letter obtained by Latitude Media and a review of SEC filings. A subsidiary holding crowdfunding money reported an annual net loss of nearly $737,000 in 2025, nearly double its revenue, with reserves of just $80,000 and more debt than assets.
Investors received the letter on July 13 from Honeycomb Credit, a crowdfunding platform that held a campaign for BlocPower in April 2025, on behalf of BlocPower’s management team. It said the company had received an initial offer for a portion of its software and intellectual property assets, but that the deal wouldn’t generate enough money to satisfy its total debt obligations. Even if the terms improved, the letter continues, “not all creditors would be made whole.”
“Given the gap between the initial offer and the total obligations owed to BlocPower’s creditors, management is simultaneously exploring a restructuring path,” it said. “This would involve working directly with debt holders — including our crowdfunding investors — to develop a viable go-forward plan for the company independent of, or in addition to, a partial asset sale.”
This is just the latest in a series of setbacks for the former darling of the climate tech world, which financed heat pumps, solar panels, and other energy efficiency upgrades to decarbonize urban homes and buildings. Co-founders Keith Kinch and Donnel Baird, the latter of whom described his mission as “turning buildings into Teslas,” resigned in 2024 as some contracts either flailed, as with Ithaca, New York, or never got off the ground like in Menlo Park, Calif., radio station WSKG reported.
A BlocPower spokeswoman told WSKG in early 2025 that the company had sunsetted many of its municipal programs and shifted its focus to “providing financing services and construction management for energy-saving projects.”
Since then, several investors said on WeFunder, another crowdfunding platform, that they didn’t get paid in 2025 despite being entitled to annual interest payments of 6.5% over 12 years. They also wrote that they were having trouble reaching the company; Latitude Media identified two of those investors but did not receive a response and couldn’t verify their claims.
BlocPower did not return multiple requests for comment.
A complex corporate structure
BlocPower’s corporate structure helps illustrate why people who invested via crowdfunding platforms Raise Green (now part of Honeycomb Credit), WeFunder, and Climatize may be at risk of losses.
SEC filings say that a privately owned holding company, BlocPower Public Benefit Corp., received venture capital and equity from firms like Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund and Andreessen Horowitz, and appears to own the software assets that are up for sale. The parent owns five separate subsidiaries — or “special purpose vehicles” — for various business purposes. One holds debt from Goldman Sachs. Another, named BPES3, holds cash from its crowdfunding campaigns and the more risky, capital-intensive project leases with property owners. BPES3 also can issue short-term construction loans to other BlocPower entities and pays management fees to another subsidiary, BlocPower LLC, for governing day-to-day operations.
BlocPower in its letter said those SPVs “are outside the scope” of the potential software and IP sale. Any proceeds from that would be allocated across the company’s entire debt stack, but senior creditors like Goldman Sachs typically have first-priority claims on corporate assets. It’s unclear what senior creditors are still owed because those transactions are exempt from public disclosure laws.
In 2023, BlocPower announced it had secured $150 million in financing, a sum that included a $130 million debt facility led by Goldman Sachs along with a $24 million Series B equity round led by VoLo Earth Ventures. That followed a $63-million Series A in 2021 led by Goldman Sachs that also combined debt and equity.
Meanwhile, BlocPower’s crowdfunding subsidiary held eight rounds between 2021 and 2025 that totaled nearly $3.6 million. The money was to be steered toward projects at homes and apartment buildings in New York City, Oakland, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Washington, DC, according to SEC filings. A 2025 round led by Honeycomb Credit said BlocPower was raising funds for electric vehicle charging projects in underserved communities in Southern California. That year, the subsidiary BPES3 reported more than $4.5 million debt — including what’s owed to crowdfunding investors — and dwindling cash reserves but about $3.5 million in assets.
Investors in crowdfunding campaigns are warned about the risks, as required by law.
“You should not invest any funds in this offering unless you can afford to lose your entire investment,” BlocPower said in lengthy SEC filings.
Those filings include a long list of potential risks for the business model, including skipped payments or abandoned leases; project delays due to issues with contractors or equipment supply chains; and policy changes impacting federal, state, and local green building incentives. The company explicitly said in those disclosures that lease payments may not cover what it owes to crowdfunding investors, leaving BlocPower without the cash flow to repay them.
To its early supporters, BlocPower touted big plans for all of its funding. In early 2021, it claimed it had already retrofitted more than 1,000 buildings in New York City and had projects underway in 24 cities, including Milwaukee, Oakland, and Philadelphia. Later that year, Ithaca, New York announced its own partnership with the company. By 2023, BlocPower had added Atlanta, Buffalo, Denver, and Menlo Park, California, among others and said it was further developing its proprietary software, such as an AI-powered analytics platform that created digital twins of urban buildings to target energy efficiency projects; a webpage describing that technology has since been removed.
A tricky profit model
Baird launched BlocPower in 2014, but he rose to prominence in the early 2020s with glowing profiles in national media outlets including the Washington Post, TIME, and Business Insider — the latter of which was written by this reporter. This interest came just as global leaders made bold promises about tackling the climate crisis, sustainable investing picked up steam, and Wall Street saw a surge of interest in supporting Black entrepreneurs after George Floyd’s murder by a white police officer in Minneapolis.
Baird was a particularly compelling frontman. He talked about growing up in a neglected building in Brooklyn with unreliable heating and cooling systems, and how to stay warm in the winter, his family would turn on the gas stove and open the windows to help expel air pollutants. His mission was to both mitigate the climate crisis and improve public health by fixing buildings like the one he grew up in.
The building sector accounts for 30% of greenhouse-gas emissions globally, mainly by burning fossil fuels for HVAC systems and other appliances. However, retrofits for old homes and apartment buildings aren’t cheap. Installing electric heat pumps to eliminate emissions and pollution in the home, for example, can yield savings on energy bills over time, but come with high upfront costs. That is untenable for the low-income families and landlords who banks often deem too high-risk for a loan.
To solve that problem, Baird worked with Goldman Sachs to develop a financial product he compared to the mortgage bond market. The model went like this: BlocPower would sign up building owners with 15- to 20-year low-interest leases (similar to a loan) for heat pumps or other energy efficiency retrofits, which in turn could lower their utility bills each month. Those savings would offset what they paid for the equipment lease so the customer didn’t have higher monthly costs. But over time, BlocPower would earn more money on those leases than the initial price of the project. The leases could then be pooled together and sold off to Wall Street as asset-backed securities.
While BlocPower couldn’t guarantee savings on utility bills, they did say customers wouldn’t pay more than they had historically while receiving “substantial additional benefits, like improved indoor comfort, improved indoor air quality, or hazard remediation,” according to SEC filings.
City deals fall through
As Baird’s profile rose and BlocPower lined up more city projects, however, problems brewed. Interest rates rose alongside energy costs, initially triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, squeezing potential profit margins. Republican politicians launched investigations into sustainable investing by banks and asset managers, chilling green capital.
Some cities’ building decarbonization plans were very ambitious, and very expensive. Electrifying buildings on that scale would cost hundreds of millions of dollars that a small startup like BlocPower didn’t have on its own, and required a mix of government subsidies, philanthropy, and investor capital.
Baird, in emails with Latitude Media, blamed Ithaca’s city government for that partnership falling through. He added that the Trump administration’s cancellation of the Inflation Reduction Act clean energy funding for cities and states in 2025 is partly why they can’t meet decarbonization goals and why companies like BlocPower are facing financial difficulty.
According to Baird, Ithaca’s plan to become the first city in the nation to electrify all 6,000 of its buildings would have cost $600 million. To amass the required capital, the city marshaled a consortium of companies and organizations, including the private equity firm Alturus that initially pledged $100 million and a loan-loss reserve fund backed by a New York state energy efficiency agency. BlocPower landed another $3 million loan guarantee from the Kresge Foundation.
But Alturus and the city never actually signed a contract, WSKG reported. The city sustainability director who launched the program in 2021 left the following year, telling The Ithaca Voice that he didn’t have the support of City Hall. Ithaca didn’t respond questions from Latitude Media.
BlocPower ultimately electrified 10 buildings over a two-year period before quietly ending its work in Ithaca, WSKG reported.
Meanwhile, the partnership between BlocPower and Menlo Park announced in 2022, which aimed to electrify 10,000 homes, never advanced at all. Both Baird and Rachael Londer, Menlo Park’s sustainability manager, confirmed that neither party signed a contract. The city said it already had $4.5 million in state funding to finance electrifying 200 homes, and that BlocPower sought to raise upwards of $35 million with a local nonprofit to support the program. Baird said the total cost would have been $1 billion.
“We are focused on electrifying homes across the city in partnership with WestLight Energy, our local community choice energy agency,” Londer said this week, adding that 42 homes have been fully or partially electrified so far on a budget of $2.2 million since launching enrollment in September 2024. “WestLight Energy has leveraged state and federal dollars to make our grant funding go further.”
Erick Shambarger, Milwaukee’s director of environmental sustainability, told Latitude Media that the city never officially signed a contract with BlocPower either. “We did not pay them for work,” he said. “We had some conversations with them on a planning project only.”
Denver did sign a three-year contract with BlocPower in 2022 after announcing a plan with Energy Outreach Colorado to decarbonize 200 low- to middle-income households. Emily Gedeon, a spokeswoman for the city, said it paid BlocPower $826,250 for community engagement and outreach, and for installing heat pumps in one building with 13 units, which gave those tenants access to cooling for the first time.
“A key component of the contract was focused on outreach to hard-to-reach building owners.” Gedeon said. “This outreach work by BlocPower led to enrollment from building owners into a variety of different electrification programs run by Denver or Xcel Energy.”
Gedeon added that Denver’s 200-home goal also involved pooling city funds and a grant from the IRA under an environmental justice program. That grant, however, was cancelled by the second Trump administration.
Federal policy in the last year became another pain point for BlocPower. A nearly $9-billion IRA program for states to fund home electrification had barely started to roll out when President Donald Trump froze it in early 2025. Then the Energy Department in June revised its rules, banning states from using the funds to incentivize homeowners to replace gas-powered systems with electric heat pumps. A Republican-controlled Congress in 2025 also voted to end home electrification tax credits entirely.
Baird said questions about BlocPower’s potential asset sale, restructuring, and financial condition would be best addressed by the management team put in place after he left in 2024. The company, however, did not respond to multiple requests to comment for this piece.
What’s clear is that the BlocPower subsidiary holding both the company’s crowdfunding cash and project leases with building owners isn’t bringing in the revenue needed to cover what it owes to investors. BlocPower said in its letter to investors that its preferred outcome under a restructuring scenario is “a leaner, more focused business” that retains relationships with its existing capital partners.
That said, the company continued, “no final decision has been made. The path forward will be shaped by the outcome of ongoing negotiations over the next several weeks.”
