Outsiders are winning presidential primaries, cleantech IPOs are getting pulled, and the big cleantech venture deals keep rollin' in.  It's going to be a fun year... So let's get things kicked off with a few disconnected items:
  •  We talked last week about how 2008 will be a make or break year for the first wave of post-2005 cleantech venture investments, and already the first big relevant news item has come out -- that Imperium has pulled their planned IPO.  We'll let the journalists do their job on these kinds of stories, digging into the details.  But expect a lot more stories like this in 2008:  "Big changes afoot at Company X -- does this spell trouble for the company??"  It's just important to recognize that whenever these stories come out, changes aren't necessarily a true indicator of problems at the company in question.  It's natural for startups to go through senior management changes as they near an exit event or simply progress in their development.  It's even normal for workforces to expand and contract as different technology, product and market development stages are hit.  That's not to say whether things are going well or poorly at Imperium or any of the other companies that have had similar types of stories lately, we'll let the companies share that and let the journalists dig into that.  But readers of such stories should always remind themselves that no reporter's job is to write a "hey, a change happened, but everything's fine" story -- they're paid to discuss controversy and to be professional skeptics.  Since there will be a lot of these kinds of stories in 2008, it's just important to keep that in mind.  And with all that said, sometimes it really will be a company in trouble.  Stay tuned...
A small prediction: The total amount of cleantech venture dollars invested will likely go down in 2007. Why? Because the significant growth in “venture dollars� invested in energy generation technologies from 2005-2006 was in many ways driven by non-traditional investments, such as fundings of solar companies intended to help build out their production lines. While some VCs may have participated in these financings, they do somewhat skew the total dollar figures, since the rounds are necessarily much larger than your traditional venture financing — we saw back in Q3 that a mere 5 deals out of 47 made up 60% of the “venture dollars� tracked in cleantech in that quarter. Such mega-financings have mostly gone into solar and biofuels. And it’s only an educated guess, but while there will be more such large fundings in solar and biofuels in 2007, it will probably be a smaller number. Note that this only refers to total dollar amounts. The number of deals done in cleantech may continue to go up, as LP interest is still strong and more and more investors are getting into the space in one way or another. Oops.  Way off on that one.  The basic assumption, that deal sizes would come down and that mega-deals would stop dominating the dollars going into the sector, was dead wrong.  But I'm sure my predictions this year will all be much more accurate...
  • Lithium ion battery developer Boston Power has raised a $45mm Series C, led by Oak Investment Partners, and including participation by Venrock, Granite Global Ventures, and Gabriel Venture Partners.  Xconomy had a good writeup, with a pretty insightful observation that in energy storage we're still waiting for that game-changing technology...
Other news and notes:  New Energy Finance reported that, across all geographies and investment categories, cleantech pulled in $117B in investments in 2007...  Here's a nice write-up on the recent upsurge in cleantech venture investing in the Seattle area...  2008 to be a year of a big push for more green policy shifts...  Tyler's predictions for 2008...  A highly entertaining post by Joel...  And last but certainly not least, here's a nice column by Neal on how cleantech bloggers are changing the world.
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