Greentech VC Roundup: HelioVolt, BrightSource, Inventure, Organica and Desalitech

VC investment in solar power, water technology, and biofuels. HelioVolt?

Eric Wesoff August 07, 2013

Eric Wesoff

Editor-at-Large
Greentech Media

Eric Wesoff is Editor-at-Large at Greentech Media. Prior to joining GTM, Eric Wesoff founded Sage Marketing Partners in 2000 to provide sales and marketing-consulting services to venture-capital firms and their portfolio companies in the alternative energy and telecommunications sectors. Mr. Wesoff has become a well-known, respected authority and speaker in these fields.

His expertise covers solar power, fuel cells, biofuels and advanced batteries. His strengths are in market research and analysis, business development and due diligence for investors. He frequently consults for energy startups and Silicon Valley's premier venture capitalists.

HelioVolt, which to date has produced mostly press releases for the press and agita for its investors, has raised an additional $19 million from SK Group, Korea’s third-largest conglomerate. SK invested $50 million in the firm in September 2011.

HelioVolt builds monolithically integrated CIGS solar modules and has raised more than $200 million since its founding at the dawn of the last decade. Investors prior to SK included Masdar Clean Tech Fund, Morgan Stanley, New Enterprise Associates, Paladin Capital Partners Fund, Solucar Energia, Sunton United Energy, Texas Emerging Technology Fund, and Yellowstone Capital.

HelioVolt claims in a release, "After several years of limited commercial product shipments from its current facility in Austin, TX, HelioVolt is preparing for global capacity expansion. The company is not yet disclosing information about future factories, though it does acknowledge its intent to expand its product areas to include innovative solutions for residential and commercial applications in addition to utility-scale projects."

Here's some recent CIGS PV module industry news.

BrightSource Energy, a pioneering concentrating solar power (CSP) developer, collected $15 million of a modest $35 million tranche of venture funding. (It's modest relative to the hundreds of millions the company has raised over the last decade.) The Oakland Tribune caught the Form D from the SEC and noted that 44 investors were involved in this equity round and promissory note.

Inventure closed a $7.2 million round of financing to build a plant for converting biomass into industrial sugars. Investors included Asian agribusiness giant Wilmar International and strategic partner Trebet. The firm aims to develop its chemical catalytic technology for the conversion of cellulosic residues at commercial scale.

Organica Water, a Budapest-based wastewater treatment and recycling firm, raised an undisclosed round B led by International Finance with WLR Private Equity Investment Management and return backers RNK Capital and Gamma Capital Partners.

Desalitech, a maker of efficient water production and treatment technology, secured an additional $5 million in equity funding from Liberation Capital et al., bringing the total VC raised by the company to over $13 million. Desalitech claims to desalinate seawater using 1.5 kWh/m3 energy, compared to 2 to 3 kWh/m3 with state-of-the-art conventional reverse osmosis.