MIT Elevator Pitch Contest

There’s a lot of uncertainty right now about how the global financial turmoil will affect cleantech VC over the near to medium term.  I’ve seen news stories (mostly looking at backward data) talking about how cleantech has been insulated from the downturn, and I’ve also seen news stories suggesting the sector is about to drive off a cliff ala Toonces.

So in the current context, it was a real joy getting to be one of the judges for the energy track of Saturday’s MIT Elevator Pitch Contest.  A bit of a different format from the many other bplan contests I’ve judged in the past—in the EPC, we blitzed through over 20 presentations in under an hour, as each student/entrepreneur had 60 seconds to make their best pitch and then the three judges got to ask 2-3 quick follow-up questions.  The presenters in the energy track weren’t all from MIT, but were all students, typically grad students either at the business school or in labs somewhere, and often representing a team with a mix of both.

What made it so fun for me was how impressive many of the ideas were.  Granted, we didn’t get a chance to dig into the details, but in terms of seeing a couple of dozen young entrepreneurs who’ve come up with some potentially exciting and lucrative and innovative business concepts, it was quite encouraging to see.  And a great variety of details—from nifty combinations of distributed computing with heating/HVAC to waste-to-energy to ultracaps, while solar and fuels were represented, the breadth of innovation was terrific.

So while the sector seems like it’s going to slow down a bit here over the near term, at the innovation stage things looked really healthy this weekend, at least.

Meanwhile some more numbers came out and confirmed that Q3 was pretty solid for cleantech VC in the midst of a general VC slowdown.  VentureSource tracked 583 US financing rounds totaling $7.3B in the quarter, of which 32 financings were in cleantech, totaling $1.1B.  Obviously the cleantech totals were dominated by a few huge deals, which was a consistent message across the other tallies we discussed a couple of weeks ago as well.  But in this VentureSource survey it’s still remarkable to see 5.5% of deals but 15.1% of dollars attributed to the sector.  It’s also remarkable to see that the Cleantech Group tracked 77 US cleantech deals while VentureSource only tracked 32.  Then, too, the Moneytree survey came up with 73 cleantech deals in the quarter...  It remains very difficult to tie together the various data trackers in the sector…

Deal announcements were pretty slack over the past week.  A sign of things to come?  We’ll have to see.

• GTM’s latest Funding Roundup here.

• Lighting controls developer Adura Technologies raised a $5mm Series A, co-led by VantagePoint and Claremont Creek.

• CPV startup Soliant raised a $21mm round led by Convexa Capital and including $2.5mm from GE Energy Financial Services and investments by existing investors RockPort, Nth Power, Trinity Ventures and Rincon Venture Partners.

• PV startup Innovalight took in $5mm in debt and equity financing from Leader Ventures and SVB.

• CleanScapes, a revenue-stage waste collection company, took in a $10mm Series A, including $1.6mm provided by SJF.

• Downturn watch:  Tesla is scaling back and Elon is taking the helm, with the goal of being cashflow positive within 6-9 months…  In this survey, 55% of tech leaders feel the IPO window won’t re-open until 2010...  And CTI reported last week that Global Solar has canceled a planned private equity round.

Other news and notes:  It is well worth reading this “tough love” column from Neal Dikeman, cautionary words for VCs in the sector…  And here’s a good article regarding the Transmission capacity constraints holding back growth in wind power.