Depends on how you look at it, I guess

The initial takes on Q3 cleantech venture funding have come out over the past few days, and really, you can interpret them however you want.

The tallies are so far pretty consistent (haven't gotten most of the tallies, or even most of the details quite yet). They show that Q3 saw more dollars going into the sector than Q2, but that Q3 2009 was way down in comparison to Q3 2008.  Not really surprising, actually.  Things have been picking up a bit, and 3Q08 was a pretty high quarter.

Eric Wesoff's always useful tallies for GreenTech Media totaled up $1.9B in 112 deals globally.  Of that, solar, biofuels and other fuels made up nearly $1.1B and 46 deals, once again dominating the scene.  Big deals Eric tracked included Solyndra ($198M), Synthetic Genomic's funding commitment from Exxon ($300M over multiple years), Tesla ($82.5M), and Serious Materials ($60M).  As always, Eric and I have very different interpretations of the stage data.  He points to his tally of 35 Series A and seed deals and proclaims "a marked trend of a return to early stage deals".  I look at it as 77 late stage versus 35 early stage deals and still wonder how the top of the funnel is going to continue to be filled for late-stage investors.  But on the other hand, we both wonder if the VC model still works in solar... 

Over at the Cleantech Group, they tracked $1.59B in 134 companies worldwide, also with solar and fuels dominating the tallies.  While they celebrate the A123 and other IPOs, they also note that cleantech M&A was down a bit from the previous quarter.

New Energy Finance (note: link downloads pdf) pointed to a bit of a decline from Q2 to Q3 in terms of overall global investments in renewables.  But within that, they show that venture capital activity in the sector did increase. 

So what have we learned?  Don't believe the overly pessimistic ("things are way down versus a year ago!") and optimistic ("things are up on Q2!") headlines.  Instead, it's pretty much just a confirmation of what we have already been feeling and talking about here -- things look to be getting slightly better, but still far from the high-flying days of early 2008.  That's probably a good thing...

In a completely different note, fellow Bostonian cleantech investor Jon Karlen of Flybridge has launched a new blog, check it out!