Interesting contrast to an earlier greentech post about Vinod Khosla and his VC firm; these guys talk about incremental change. It really highlights the differences in VC strategies:
From GigaOm:
When it comes to clean-energy investing 2.0, venture capitalists are beyond looking for the silver bullet — or the magic battery –- they spent the last decade hunting and hoping for.
Today, VCs are more likely to invest their dollars in slightly less ambitious energy-efficiency projects, Paul Kedrosky, senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, told the audience at GigaOM’s Green:Net conference. Kedrosky sat down with a panel of VC heavy hitters for a discussion on what’s hot and what’s not in the second wave of clean-tech investing.
And what’s hot, they all agreed — is incremental improvements.
“Obviously we’ve known how to insulate a house for a long time and close the gaps underneath your door. It’s certainly about incremental improvements. The question is how to build that to scale and extract revenue from it,” said Nat Goldhaber, managing director of Claremont Creek Ventures. “We keep this in mind every day as companies visit us.”
Another interesting start-up idea:
San Francisco-based CrowdFlower, which helps big companies crowdsource tasks such as correcting business listings and categorizing e-commerce products to a globally distributed workforce, has collected $7 million in new venture financing, according to an announcement today. Harmony Partners led the Series B round, which was joined by existing investors Trinity Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners and brings the four-year-old startup’s total venture pot to $13 million.
Also an interesting startup. TechChrunch article here, details below:
Chicago-based startup GrubHub, a service that lets you order food for delivery or take out from local restaurants online or by mobile phone, has raised a whopping $20 million in Series D funding led by DAG Ventures with Benchmark Capital participating in the round. The startup raised $11 million in funding in November 2010, $2 million in March 2009, and has raised $34 million to date.
Interesting article on Vinod Khosla; his and an environmentalist's views on climate change and green tech and state of green tech in silicon valley, excerpt below:
Mr Khosla has a different plan to save the planet. He is investing over $1 billion of his clients’ money in “black swans”—ideas with the potential for sudden jumps in technology that promise huge environmental benefits, easy scalability and rapid payback. The catch? Mr Khosla expects nine out of ten of his investments to fail.
...This sort of talk does not exactly endear Mr Khosla to environmentalists. “The solution to our energy problems is almost the exact opposite of what Khosla says,” declares Joseph Romm, who is the editor of Climate Progress, an influential climate blog, and a senior fellow at the Centre for American Progress Action Fund, a think-tank. “Technology breakthroughs are unlikely to be the answer. Accelerated deployment of existing technologies will get you down the cost curve much more rapidly than a breakthrough.”
Fierce Biotech has put together a list of top biotech investments from last year:
Last year biotech venture capital investing began to recover from its 2009 low, growing three percent in the number of dollars raised and eight percent in the number of deals which were struck. That represents a significant bounce-back from 2009, which saw biotech investing plummet 19 percent during the worst of the economic crisis...
1. Pacific Biosciences - $109M
2. Reata Pharmaceuticals - $78M
3. Relypsa - $70M
More after the jump:
