The climate tech startup BlocPower is shutting down and liquidating its assets, according to a letter sent to investors on Tuesday. It marks a shift from last month, when BlocPower told investors that it was attempting a corporate turnaround by negotiating a sale of its software and IP and potentially restructuring its debt, as Latitude Media reported.
The decision means that everyday investors who collectively poured more than $3 million into the company via crowdfunding campaigns likely won’t get their money back, despite being promised annual interest payments over a decade or more. That’s because senior creditors like Goldman Sachs and VoLo Earth Ventures, each of which led financing rounds for BlocPower, will be paid back first — and probably won’t be made whole either.
“Management does not currently expect that any assets will remain available to distribute to unsecured creditors after payment of senior secured creditors, who may themselves face a deficiency,” BlocPower management said in a letter seen by Latitude Media. “This is an estimate, not a guarantee, and actual outcomes may differ.”
“This is not the outcome that we wanted, but having investigated all reasonable alternatives, an orderly wind-down is what is now required,” the letter continued.
It’s also unclear what will happen to BlocPower’s remaining leases with property owners, who signed long-term contracts with the company for installing heat pumps and other energy efficiency upgrades. In 2023, BlocPower claimed it had completed energy projects in more than 5,000 households, commercial buildings and houses of worship.
BlocPower didn’t return a request for comment.
The wind-down of BlocPower follows a whirlwind rise and fall over the past six years. While Donnel Baird and Keith Kinch cofounded the company in 2014 to decarbonize low-income homes in cities across the U.S., BlocPower didn’t attract national attention until early 2020 as global leaders made ambitious pledges to combat the climate crisis, sustainable investing gained momentum, and Wall Street’s interest in supporting Black entrepreneurs surged after George Floyd’s murder by a white police officer in Minneapolis.
BlocPower raised a $63-million Series A in 2021 led by Goldman Sachs, followed by another $150-million financing round in 2023 that included a debt facility also led by Goldman Sachs and a $24-million Series B led by VoLo Earth Ventures.
The company raised another $3.6 million from eight crowdfunding rounds between 2021 and 2025 on platforms including Raise Green (now part of Honeycomb Credit), Wefunder, and Climatize. The money was to be steered toward electrifying homes and apartment buildings across New York City, Oakland, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Washington, D.C. A 2025 round led by Honeycomb Credit also said BlocPower was raising funds for electric vehicle charging projects in underserved communities in Southern California.
But as Baird’s profile rose and BlocPower lined up larger projects with cities, problems brewed. Some contracts either flailed after work began, as in Ithaca, New York, or else never got off the ground at all, like in Menlo Park, Calif. and Milwaukee. Interest rates and electricity prices rose — squeezing potential profit margins — and the Trump administration froze or cancelled billions of dollars in funding for states’ home electrification efforts authorized under the Inflation Reduction Act.
By 2025, a BlocPower subsidiary holding crowdfunding money reported an annual net loss of nearly $737,000 in 2025, nearly double its revenue, with cash reserves of just $80,000. Its debt totaled more than $4.5 million, including what BlocPower owes to crowdfunding investors, with about $3.5 million in assets. It’s unclear what the company owes to senior creditors because those transactions are exempt from public disclosure laws.
Adam Montgomery, a former fundraising manager at Wefunder who helped organize BlocPower’s crowdfunding campaign on the platform in 2023, invested $10,000 of his own money in the company. He told Latitude Media that he received interest payments worth 6.5% of his initial investment in 2024 and 2025, but nothing this year.
He understood the risks — including that he may not recoup his investment — which were outlined in SEC filings ahead of BlocPower’s crowdfunding rounds. But Montgomery believed in BlocPower’s mission and thought it would be successful.
That said, he wished the company was more transparent about how it spent the money, and about its ensuing financial trouble.
“I knew who to email and who to call and pester,” Montgomery said, noting that he worked directly with BlocPower’s leadership team to set up the Wefunder raise. “But it always felt like investor communication was a low priority for them. They weren’t super responsive.”
BlocPower in its latest letter to investors said no payments are being made to any creditors yet, pending the liquidation of assets and an analysis of the company’s capital stack and debt obligations.
