Tioga Energy gets $10M to offer more solar power
Updated
Tioga Energy, a Sunnyvale, Calif. company that wants to makes solar power financing easier for mid-sized businesses, has raised $10 million in a first round of venture financing.
It is just the latest of several players entering the hot solar market to make it easier for companies to buy solar power. Chief executive Paul Detering says the market is so robust that new players focusing on a niche should have no problem attracting customers. Tioga’s niche is solar installations of 50 to 500 kilowatts — which are mid-sized projects. Tioga seeks to partner with solar installation companies.
Leading the investments were venture capital groups NGEN Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Rockport Capital, DFJ Frontier and Kirlan Ventures.
A typical customer of Tioga’s, Detering said, might be a food processing company located in California central valley where there is a lot of sun. These companies may have to spend about $5 million to ensure a proper solar power system, research complex tax laws for incentives, and hope that they are getting state-of-the-art technology that lasts. However, Tioga hopes to handle most of these worries itself, even retaining ownership of the solar systems — so that a customer can always shift way from solar if it wants. Tioga offers so-called “Energy Power Purchase Agreements,” where it essentially charges the company a monthly bill just like a normal utility.
Here is the company’s statement.
Competitors include SunEdison, which focuses on larger installations, MMA Renewable Ventures and Recurrent Energy
Update: Turns out, Tioga is a restart of a failed company CerOx, something the company — understandably — didn’t disclose to us. Lazy VentureBeat! Anyway, CerOx had raised $17 million from the same investors for a “waste remediation” technology business, but that didn’t go anywhere, so investors changed models, and decided to go after solar. Hat-tip to VentureWire for unearthing this (sub required).
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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.
