Cleantech Investing: Envision Solar, Ze-Gen, Verari

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Envision Solar, Ze-Gen, Verari

Public mentions of planned cleantech financings this morning:

According to VentureWire, Envision Solar has raised $600k of a targeted $2mm Series A round. The company is building "Solar Groves", which are PV-covered parking lots, based on Kyocera solar panels. The initial $600k has been in convertible notes, and current investors were undisclosed.

According to Martin LaMonica of News.com, waste-to-electricity technology developer Ze-Gen is "in the process of securing $4.5 million in financing from venture capital firm Flagship Ventures." The article is worth reading for a general survey of the waste to energy space.

It's a good example of the ways that the cleantech investment thesis can extend to other investment sectors: "Green" data center systems developer Verari has raised an "over $20mm" round of financing, that is targeted at $25mm when closed. Carlyle Venture Partners has led this round, which also includes investments by Voyager Capital, Sierra Ventures, and a strategic investor. Energy efficiency at data centers is a lesser-known but big cost issue, as significant energy has to be expended not just in operating the servers, etc., but also in cooling down the data centers themselves to counteract the major waste heat produced by all those powerful processors. Speaking of the green impacts of IT equipment, David Douglas of Sun Microsystems has a sometimes provocative blog on the subject.

Other news and notes: A new study released by The Carbon Trust suggests that in Europe, clean energy venture capital has been "on a par with European IT, biotech and semiconductor venture capital investment levels," at nearly 2B euros from 2003-2006... Meanwhile, in Israel there's concern that cleantech venture capital is not keeping up with interest... Finally, are the oil companies placing their more serious bets on biofuels instead of hydrogen?

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What is "cleantech"?

The term "cleantech" refers to technologies that:

- Use energy, water and other raw materials more efficiently and productively,

- Deliver equal or superior performance,

- Improve customer profitability, through cost reduction and/or increased revenues, and

- Create less waste or toxicity

...compared to incumbent technologies

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