Flora Growth secures $401 million for Zero Gravity treasury ahead of Monday's 0G token airdrop

Flora Growth, a Nasdaq-listed firm that works in the cannabis industry, is set to secure $401 million in cash-and-token financing in a private placement as it pivots to become the first publicly traded company to hold 0G, the native token of forthcoming crypto-AI blockchain Zero Gravity (0G). 

The offering is led by DeFi Development Corp., the Solana treasury firm which holds around $480 million worth of SOL, alongside Hexstone Capital, and Carlsberg SE Asia PTE Ltd. The deal consists of $35 million in cash and $366 million in in-kind digital assets, principally 0G, valued at a price of $3 per token.

0G is set to list on major exchanges following an airdrop on Monday, and would have an implied fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $3 billion at the $3 price. As part of the deal with DeFi Development Corp, Flora "will be holding a small portion of its treasury holdings in SOL tokens," per a statement .  

Flora plans to rebrand to ZeroStack following shareholder approval of the deal, though it will keep its FLGC ticker on Nasdaq. The deal is expected to close on Friday, Sept. 26, and had additional participation from firms such as Dao5, Abstract Ventures, Dispersion Capital, Blockchain Builders Fund, and Salt. Some buyers receive pre-funded warrants exercisable after shareholder approval, per the company.

Amid a rise in digital asset treasuries , the Flora deal is notable given the 0G token has yet to launch, though Zero Gravity Labs (0G Labs), the firm behind the blockchain, has already secured $75 million in seed funding and a $250 million token purchase agreement from the 0G Foundation, the independent governing body for the 0G protocol. A $3 billion FDV would value the project similarly to Pudgy Penguins and Trump-backed World Liberty Financial, at current prices. 

0G Labs is building a decentralized operating system that will allow for distributed training of advanced AI models, currently in testnet. The firm has "successfully [trained] a 107 billion parameter model using distributed clusters over low-throughput internet connections," according to the statement. The firm has not disclosed a date for the launch of its mainnet, though Michael Heinrich, told The Block in November of last year that the mainnet is expected to launch around the same time as the token. 

"This treasury strategy offers institutional investors equity-based exposure to the foundational infrastructure enabling transparent, verifiable, large-scale, cost-efficient, and privacy-first AI development," incoming Flora Growth CEO Daniel Reis-Faria said. 

The price of FLGC has increased by 69% in after-hours trading following the announcement of the deal, according to Yahoo Finance data , reversing its 32% year-to-date decline. 

"We did not sell any SOL to do this deal, and we still maintain full SOL exposure + additional upside with the SOL we deployed here," DeFi Development Corp. COO and CIO Parker White wrote on X . "We will share more details on this in the next few days."

It is unclear if 0G Labs or 0G Foundation contributed to the deal; The Block could not immediately reach either organization, or Flora, for comment.