GreenVolts, CPV Aspirant, Gets $39M in VC

Second-tier CPV firm with unknown differentiation completes remainder of inside round.

Eric Wesoff June 29, 2011

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.

GreenVolts, a second-tier concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) supplier that came out fast and furious a number of years ago only to recede soon afterward, has closed on its $39 million funding Round C. The firm had raised $22 million of that round late last year.

Here's a link to their SEC form D filing. I spoke with Jerry Gottheil, GreenVolts' Director of Marketing Communications and he said there were new investors, although that's not indicated on the SEC filing. This round brings GreenVolts' VC fundraising total to more than $80 million.

GreenVolts had signed a multi-megawatt Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with PG&E in 2008, one of the more sizable CPV projects at the time. Since then, GreenVolts has had some boardroom carnage -- founder Bob Cart left to spend more time with his family and the industry passed GreenVolts by.

Amonix, Soitec, and SolFocus have emerged as the leaders in the CPV sub-sector, with hundreds of megawatts in their PPA pipeline. GTM Research has profiles of all of the relevant industry players and a thorough analysis of the sector here.

The new CEO, Dave Gudmundson, hails from optical networking firm JDSU and brought several of his JDSU colleagues along with him. Brian Hinman of Oak Investment Partners said in an email that "GreenVolts is installing a lot of hardware now, and it works exactly as designed. We have 18 months of operating history on the new architecture."

GreenVolts is in the process of installing a one-megawatt CPV system in Yuma, Arizona at Arizona Western College, scheduled to be completed this summer, and Gottheil cites several other installations in the Southwest. The product had gone through a major redesign because of issues with accuracy, tracking and scalability, according to our sources.

Greentech Media Research has forecast CPV installations to exceed one gigawatt per year by 2015.

Here's a partial list of VC-funded CPV firms including system and component vendors.

Ahura Energy
Banyan Energy
Circadian Solar
Concentrator Optics
Cool Earth Solar
Covalent Solar
Cyrium
Energy Innovations
EnFocus
EverPhoton
Extreme Energetics
Greenfield Solar
GreenVolts
MegaWatt Solar
Microlink Devices
Morgan Solar
MST
Netcrystal
Optony
Phostor Solar
Prism Solar
Pyron Solar
Pythagoras
QuantaSol
QuNano
Scaled Solar
Skyline Solar
Solaris
Solaria
Solbeam
SolFocus
Solandis
Solar Junction
Solar Systems
Soliant (acquired in fire sale by Emcore)
Stellaris
Sunovia
Sun Phocus
Sunrgi
SV Solar (out of business)
Wakonda (out of business)
Zenith Solar
Zytech
Whitfield Solar