Climate Tech Startup With Celebrity And Billionaire Backers Files For Bankruptcy
Steve Ballmer's L.A. Clippers are owed $30 million after climate tech firm CTN declared bankruptcy.
AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill
CTN Holdings, a San Francisco company focused on selling carbon credits that is an offshoot of digital bank Aspiration, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. CTN has an estimated $170 million in outstanding debt, according to court filings, and an accumulated net operating loss of $580 million for federal tax purposes.
Founded in 2013 by entrepreneurs Andrei Cherney and Joe Sanberg, Aspiration began as an environmentally friendly digital bank that offered consumer bank accounts and green investment options. It reached a peak valuation of $2.3 billion in 2021 and was backed by high-profile investors including billionaire Steve Ballmer, Leonardo DiCaprio and Drake. As growth for its digital bank slowed, the company largely shifted its focus to selling carbon credits to other businesses, a strange pivot Forbes covered in 2023.
The basic idea of carbon credits: Any company can mitigate the damage its business does to the environment by funding initiatives that will remove carbon from the atmosphere, such as planting trees. Among Aspiration's most prominent carbon-credits customers were the L.A. Clippers (owned by Steve Ballmer) and Meta.
Earlier this year, CTN was still receiving funding from entities affiliated with cofounder Joe Sanberg. But Sanberg was arrested in early March 2025 on a criminal complaint alleging he conspired to defraud investors of at least $145 million in connection with two personal loans he took out against his shares in CTN. The investors affiliated with Sanberg stopped providing funding to CTN in February 2025, and then CTN had trouble finding sufficient funding to keep the business afloat, according to bankruptcy filings.
The charges against Sanberg relate only to his personal conduct; CTN isn't implicated, according to a court filing. Sanberg's lawyer Mike Mukasey told us in a statement: 'Mr. Sanberg has pleaded not guilty to the charges. We will buckle down and defend him with vigor and zeal.'
CTN aims to auction its assets over the next 45 days to repay creditors. Its executives were unaware of Sanberg's alleged misconduct, according to a court filing from Miles Staglik, a managing director at turnaround firm CR3 Partners who is now chief restructuring officer of CTN. Staglik also wrote that Sanberg 'no longer holds any positions or roles' with CTN and 'is no longer involved in any capacity' with its operations.
CTN's largest creditors are the L.A. Clippers (owed $30 million) and Forum Entertainment (owed $11 million), both of which Steve Ballmer owns. Other creditors include the Boston Red Sox (owed $5 million), fintech fraud prevention companies Socure ($4 million) and Feedzai ($930,000) and consulting company Slalom ($2.6 million). Bloomberg earlier reported the news of CTN's bankruptcy.
In April 2024, Mission Financial Partners, which was incorporated in November 2023, acquired the Aspiration digital banking brand in a licensing spinoff. 'Aspiration is not affiliated with CTN Holdings, and Aspiration's family of green financial products are unaffected by this filing or any related legal matters,' says a Mission Financial Partners spokesperson.
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