GreatPoint, Amyris, and other news

The big news today is GreatPoint Energy‘s big financing, as has been reported by VentureWire, PE Hub and others (Earth2Tech has a blurb here).  As reported by Jonathan Shieber at VWire, the $100mm round has been led by new strategic investors Citi Sustainable Development Investments and Dow Chemical.  Other strategic investors AES and Suncor Energy also participated, along with previous investors (which could therefore include ATV, Kleiner, Khosla, DFJ, and the founders’ own GreatPoint Ventures, from a previous $37mm round).  It’s a great example of how interested venture investors and energy giants are in the potential for coal gasification technologies.

Other deals:

• Biofuel developer Amyris Biotechnologies has announced the completion of a first tranche of a $70mm Series B.  DAG Ventures led the round, which also included previous investors Kleiner, Khosla and TPG Ventures.  The funding is intended to help the company come to market in 2010 with biodiesel, biogasoline and biojet fuel.  GTM’s Rachel Barron has more information about the financing, and as well as Solazyme’s debt financing.  Shieber reported on Tuesday that the pre-money on the round was $400mm, and also adds that competitor Synthetic Genomics had previously raised a Series B round of financing from BP and others at a $300mm post-money.  Wow.

• Thin-film solar moves by big corporates:  GE has taken a minority stake in Primestar.  And meanwhile, in Germany Schuco and E.On are forming a joint venture (with $135mm in financing) to launch Malibu, a thin-film manufacturing effort using Applied Materials production equipment.  Feels like the thin-film market is finally poised for some major moves forward…

• Solar Power Partners, a solar PPA developer, has raised a $6mm Series A led by Globespan.  The company has 14MW worth of signed projects to date.

• Danish ammonia-storage technology developer Amminex A/S announced an approx. $7mm Series C (note: link opens pdf), led by Conduit Ventures and including SEED Capital K/S.

Cleantech investors in the news:  When Sevin Rosen pulled out of fundraising their tenth fund a year ago, they broadcast the message that the venture capital model was broken.  Now VWire reports they’re re-launching fundraising, but “opening the aperture” to go later stage, and to move “beyond technology investments” (sic) into healthcare and—relevant to cleantech investors—energy.  It’s an interesting development on one of the most pointed internal critiques of the venture capital industry, and in a small way also points to the way cleantech is getting more generalist VC mindshare these days.