Infographic: Cleantech VC and the Press

Does action in the press accurately track activity in cleantech venture capital?

Eric Wesoff June 07, 2013

Eric Wesoff

Editor-at-Large
Greentech Media

Eric Wesoff is Editor-at-Large at Greentech Media. Prior to joining GTM, Eric Wesoff founded Sage Marketing Partners in 2000 to provide sales and marketing-consulting services to venture-capital firms and their portfolio companies in the alternative energy and telecommunications sectors. Mr. Wesoff has become a well-known, respected authority and speaker in these fields.

His expertise covers solar power, fuel cells, biofuels and advanced batteries. His strengths are in market research and analysis, business development and due diligence for investors. He frequently consults for energy startups and Silicon Valley's premier venture capitalists.

Dow Jones VentureSource and Factiva combined their data sets to compare the number of venture deals across cleantech sectors to media mentions in those same sectors. The time frame is 2007 to 2012.

According to the comparison, energy efficiency doesn't get written about relative to the high level of venture capital interest, while everyone talks about water but no one invests. Though there are a sizable number of cleantech deals done in China, there is, somewhat unsurprisingly, relatively scant press coverage of them.

It's an interesting analysis, blunted perhaps by the assumption that all media mentions are alike and the always imprecise and ambiguous categorization of cleantech deals and sectors.

Here's the graphic. Click to enlarge.