Green Building VC Mystery Solved, and the Green Building Mafia

A few days ago, I posted a story about a fund that will target green building technologies. I said it began with an N, but didn’t have the complete name because I lost the piece of paper I wrote it on.

The fund turns out to be part of Navitas Capital, the investment arm of the Zeeman family. Jan Zeeman founded a successful chain of textile outlets and now wants to invest in sustainable technologies, particularly green building technologies. Navitas comes out of the Netherlands, but Travis Putnam out of Los Angeles is the managing partner.

“Entrepreneur/investor focused on sustainability in the built environment, in particular by accelerating the adoption of advanced green building practices,” reads his LinkedIn profile. Navitas has started to make investments but not made a much of a public splash yet.

The firm is already an investor in Integrity Block, which makes building blocks out of rammed earth instead of cement. It’s the same technology that several pre-Colombian civilizations in North and South America used, but Integrity Block has refined it and made it more waterproof, durable, and able to withstand modern construction requirements. It is quite interesting. (Virginia, in the reader comments to the first story, tipped me onto that and I confirmed it on Integrity’s Website. She also said that Navitas is an investor in Serious, but the firm isn’t listed publicly as an investor yet. Will check up on it.)

These stories and the research, however, also further solidified in my mind another trend that is taking place. That is, we are seeing the formation of a green building mafia, right in our midst.

Kevin Surace, the CEO of Serious, is a board member of Integrity Block. He is also involved with Zeta Communities, a green building developer. Zeta’s CEO is Naomi Porat, whose brother, Marc Porat, runs Cal-Star Cement, which has been also linked with Serious. And Serious and Cal-Star both have received investment from Foundation Capital. Serious also bought a window company, Alpen Windows, earlier this year. Insulation is next for serious. That covers structures and most of the materials needed for construction.

It’s similar to the conglomeration of companies that make ethanol and fuel from microbes that has formed at Khosla Ventures.

We’re just ordinary businessmen; leave us alone, I half expect Surace to say. Do you want a mouthful of Chicklets? Just go home and take these steaks to your wife.

But it’s something to keep your eye on.