Friday, June 10, 2005

Now that the cat's out of the bag...

...as per SiliconBeat, we're free to cite Matt Marshall that:
  • Nanosolar raised a $20M round led by Mohr Davidow, and including Mitsui, Benchmark Capital and the US Army venture capital fund OnPoint.
  • Miasole raised a $16M round led by Kleiner Perkins with participation by existing funders.
Matt Marshall's post at SiliconBeat is worth checking out -- he's right that the big news is that these thin-film solar manufacturers are getting close to ready for full production runs. Miasole in particular is getting close to ready for prime time (full disclosure: I am a minor shareholder), while Nanosolar is looking for commercialization in 2006.

Look for big news down the road from these and other thin-film upstarts. Silicon is just very expensive...

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Rob,
How can I invest in Miasole?
Bob

9:34 PM  
Blogger Rob Day said...

Thanks, Bob -

It's a common question about venture capital investing. The thing to remember is that these are privately held companies, not publicly traded companies. Thus, there is no open market where you can purchase the stock. With any privately held company, you need to purchase ownership (ie: invest) directly from the company in most cases. For the individual investor, this is very difficult once the company is past the "angel round" or seed stage. There are often restrictions around what kinds of investments can be offered to individual investors who are not "accredited" (per SEC definitions and regulations).

So I'm sorry to say I don't have a good answer for you, except that you'll likely just have to wait until MiaSole goes public, if ever.

If it's any consolation, there are a lot of companies out there that I would like to invest in as well, but for which the opportunity is just not there.

-rd

5:45 PM  

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