Greentech Funding Frenzy: Digital Lumens and More

Greentech investments in the New Year have come in with a bang - here’s a quick rundown…

Eric Wesoff January 05, 2010

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.

We covered 2009 VC investment in Greentech in some detail here. But investments in the New Year have come in with a bang - so here's a quick rundown of new money and some stealth deals and miscellaneous deals we might have missed from late 2009.

Lighting

Digital Lumens raised $5 million from Stata Venture Partners, Flybridge Capital, and Black Coral Capital as per an SEC filing According to their website - they're working on lighting innovations that reduce customers’ energy consumption and carbon footprint.   They've given me a polite "no comment" in response to my inquiries and their investors remain silent as well. Using my meager powers of persuasion I was able to get this comment from an insider, "They've got some of the first cost-effective LED-based lighting."

Smart Grid

EcoFactor's $2.4 million raise was covered by Michael Kanellos here.   The company, which has created a system that controls home energy consumption through broadband gateways, came out of stealth mode in early November. A few weeks later it won the prize at the Cleantech Open. Their funding comes from Claremont Creek Ventures et al.

Verdiem raised $4.7 million for PC energy management from Kleiner Perkins, Microsoft and others according to an SEC document.

And More

Simbol Mining raised $1.375 million from MDV and Firelake Capital. Simbol is an early stage company commercializing zero waste, zero carbon footprint production processes for lithium, EMD, and zinc battery chemicals produced from geothermal brines.

Nordic Windpower raised $12.2M for their two-blade wind turbines according to an SEC doc. Previous investment came from Goldman Sachs, Impax Asset Management, I2BF Venture Capital, Pulsar Energy Capital et al.

It's too early to tell but this should be a very strong year for Greentech investments.