...but a pretty big drop-off nonetheless.
As we've discussed ad nauseam here on this site, every tracker has a different tally for cleantech venture capital dollars and deals, for a wide range of geographic, definitional, and methodological reasons. But it's still really useful to be able to be able to compare one tracker's quarterly tallies against their own earlier results, to get a good sense of overall market trajectories.
The Cleantech Group released preliminary Q4 figures this week, which are largely consistent with Eric Wesoff's tally that came out a few days back. Here's the key part:
Q3: 158 deals totaling $2.7B.
Q4: 99 deals totaling $1.7B.
The Cleantech Group puts a positive spin on it, but that's a heck of a drop-off, both in deals and dollars. Still, given how heated things were in Q2 and Q3, it's probably a very healthy thing to see the industry take a bit of a breather -- and hey, it's not like 99 deals isn't still a lot of activity. Less healthy?
40% of the cleantech VC dollars in 2008 went into solar alone.
Yikes.
Some other news and notes:
Rob Day is a Partner with Black Coral Capital, based in Boston. He has been a cleantech private equity investor since 2004, and acts or has served as a Director, Observer and advisory board member to multiple companies in the energy tech and related sectors. Rob was a co-founder of the Renewable Energy Business Network (www.rebn.org), a non-profit organization which was acquired in 2009 by the Clean Economy Network. The views expressed on this blog are those of Rob, not necessarily the views of any of his colleagues and affiliated organizations. Contact Rob at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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