Holy smokes: Cilion grabs $200M, largest ever alternative energy VC deal?
We are still pinning this story down, but we’re hearing that Cilion, the California ethanol comany formed by well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla (pictured here), has just raised $200 million.
This may be the largest ever alternative energy deal by venture capitalists. It is also significant because the company is so young; it was formed barely three months ago.
But with everyone from Bill Gates to Virgin Airways chief Richard Branson and California’s two big public pension funds, CalPERS and CalSTRS, poking around for alternative energies to invest in, you are going to get these sorts of big deals, even if they are fabricated from scratch.
We wrote about Cilion here, when it first emerged that Khosla teamed up Western Milling to form the company. Western Milling is a grain-milling firm near Visalia, south of Fresno, in central California. Cilion aims to build eight plants by 2008 capable of producing a total of 440 million gallons of ethanol a year.
We’re going to write more about Khosla’s big bets shortly — and how he’s brushed up against big critics in the oil industry.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
