... a $350M Series B for Project Better Place. At a pre-money of $900M. And bear in mind, this doesn't include additional financings that have gone into the company's regional subsidiaries, such as in Israel and Australia.
This should really mess up the Q1 cleantech VC tallies when they come out! Because as longtime readers already know, the headlines are driven by dollar totals, not deals.
And we've already got some head scratching results now to think about as Q4 totals continue to come out. Last week saw the release of the MoneyTree survey (US tally from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters), and the results were a little bit at odds with what we'd seen from other early counts we've discussed so far (here and here). Dan Primack at PE Hub described the cleantech results as "particularly sluggish" and I'd have to agree.
The MoneyTree "cleantech" tally showed 2009 to be way down from 2008, with $1.9B into 185 deals showing a decline of more than 50% in dollars and more than 30% in total deals. In their tracking of first institutional dollar rounds (seed or Series A, mostly), they showed a more than 50% decline in the number of deals in "Industrial/Energy" from 2008 to 2009.
Contrast that with tallies like Wesoff's at GTM, which showed much less of a decline in dollars, and in fact a slight increase in the number of deals, from 2008 to 2009. What happened?
It's tough to say, but here's my guess as to why such different results are seen. First of all, I don't blame it on any significant error by any of the analysts -- what we've found in the past when we've seen such different numbers is that it's about methodology and definitions and not any major goofs. And so one obvious definitional difference is that Wesoff's tally is global, whereas MoneyTree and ChubbyBrain are both US-focused. Perhaps international financings helped make up some of what looks to have been a significant drop-off in US cleantech venture financings from '08 to '09.
Secondly, there are usually big differences in inclusiveness (ie: what's a "cleantech" deal, and what's a "venture capital" deal) between the sectoral specialists and the generalists. Wesoff counted Synthetic Genomics' $300M multi-year commitment from Exxon, for example, in his tallies. Willing to bet that the MoneyTree tally doesn't include that one. And then there are always time-based distinctions (timing of dollar flows versus timing of announcement, etc.) that come into play.
So those factors might explain the differences. What's nicely consistent with what we've seen before is that the 2009 US quarterly cleantech deal total numbers in the MoneyTree survey generally match up well with the "green" category deal totals in the ChubbyBrain survey. And in the MoneyTree numbers we again see that Q3 2009 was a bit of a blip, it wasn't that Q4 wasn't really a weak quarter as has been generally reported, but instead the quarter fit the pattern of a weak 2009 overall.
Particularly worrying, however, is that the MoneyTree data suggests early stage financings really fell off, as noted above, from 2008 to 2009. It would be one thing if the 2009 low deal and dollar numbers were mostly driven by delayed follow-on financings, as we've talked about before. But to see the early stage financings fall off so much suggests even more underlying weakness, and suggests even more limited dealflow for growth stage investors even if/when things do pick back up again.
So far in Q1 we're seeing a lot more dealflow and dollars, even leaving aside exceptional examples like PBP's announcement this morning. But with the increasing likelihood of a double-dip in the macro economy, these MoneyTree numbers are pretty sobering.
