VentureBeat

It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Oorja Protonics, a Sequoia Capital-backed Silicon Valley company developing an alcohol-based fuel cell technology for several years.

Today, Oorja is finally pulling off the wraps on its first application, a fuel cell for commercial and construction vehicles the company calls “ultra-powerful” in comparison to older technologies.

Oorja’s cell will power the electrical systems of vehicles like the pallet loaders used in large warehouses. The cells can be used in new vehicles, but also for retrofitting older vehicles.

It’s easy to see the benefit of using a fuel cell: Rather than having to stop operation to charge the cell, you just put in more of whatever fuels it — in Oorja’s case, methanol, which is a type of alcohol. Fuel cells burn their contents without moving parts like a combustion engine, giving them added reliability.

For the most part, though, the technology is unproven. Hydrogen fuel cells have been touted for their potential use in automobiles like Honda’s FCX, but you won’t see any hydrogen-powered cars on the roads anytime soon. Using an alcohol-based cell offers less power, but the fuel is much simpler to obtain.

Part of Oorja’s strategy is target the non-automotive vehicle market, because it’s hard to change buying habits and production standards the car market. If it can prove its technology in a low-level application, Oorja should be able to expand into other markets more easily later.

The company has taken just over $20 million to date from Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures and Artis Capital. It’s based in Fremont, Calif.

SchemaLogic, a company that wants to use “tagging” to transform the internal archives at media companies and large businesses, has just raised $12.7 million more to do so.

The company has signed a deal with Associated Press, Corbis and others to let freelance writers and photographers to use tagging for their articles and photos so that the content can be found and stored quickly and more easily targeted by advertising. It also wants to let businesses use the tagging to better manage their vast amounts of content — letting employees tag their files so that it can be stored and cross-referenced more efficiently online.

The Kirkland, Washington company raised its latest cash from investor Goldman Sachs, Artis Capital, Madrona Venture Group, Phoenix Partners and Trevor Traina, the company’s co-founder and Chairman.

By letting employees tag content with common language tags, those employees will be able to search and find everything about a subject by searching for those tags. A company can maintain its own tagging taxonomy and change it on the fly.

When the AP starts using it next quarter, a freelance writer wanting to submit their article about the London bombings to the AP, for example, would be able to get their story more easily syndicated by AP by tagging it with words such as say, Al-Qaeda and Iraq. SchemaLogic then gives AP and its newspaper and other clients ways to search and store such information. Other customers, such as Global 5000 companies, would be also be able to do things like find relationships between such tags.

Companies doing something similar are Wordmap and Synaptica, which is owned by by Factiva.

Oorja Protonics, a secretive Fremont, Calif. start-up developing fuel cell systems that run on alcohols like methanold and ethanol, has just raised $15 million in a second round of funding, according to a regulatory filing cited by PE Week.

Alcohol-based fuel cells are still in the early stage of development, but they’ve already been introduced for commercial use in laptops, camcorders, MP3 players, mobile phones, and other devices. There’s an overview in the Space Review, which among other things, mentions potential application of these fuel cells in space.

The company raised $5.52 million from Sequoia Capital last year, which we mentioned was a first sign that Sequoia is turning attention to the alternative energy sector. This time, it brings in two of its “coat-tail” investors, DAG Ventures and Artis Capital.

DAG has made a business of partnering with other high profile investors, and investing alongside them even if DAG has to invest a little later. Artis is a hedge funds with close (family) ties with Sequoia. McKenna Capital also invested.

Update: Sunil Paul is also an investor.

updated

Dash, the start-up offering the first car navigation device designed to be permanently linked to the Internet, has raised $25 million in a second round of funding.

The Mountain View Dash will launch its device in the Bay Area in late April, and nationally this fall, goes up against a host of other market incumbents, none aspiring to be as continuously connected to the Internet.

These other players are Garmin, TomTom and Magellan. Last week, Garmin released its own bluetooth gadget that turns your cellphone or PC into a naviation device.

Here’s our earlier coverage of Dash.

The round was led by Crescendo Ventures with new investors Artis Capital, ZenShin Capital Partners and Gold Hill Capital. Existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital and Skymoon Ventures also participated. Artis is the hedge fund with family connections with Sequoia Capital, and continues to benefit from that relationship. It is one of the few hedge funds that invests alongside venture firms in Silicon Valley start-ups. It won a coveted position as the only other investor beside Sequoia in hot video-sharing company, YouTube.

Back to Dash. The company won awards at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES)
last month. It is uses Yahoo for local search, so drivers can find things like bars, restaurants and movie times, along with maps. It uses Tele Atlas for maps, and Inrix for traffic pattern data, which can used to help drivers steer clear of traffic jams.

The GPS navigation market has been on fire this year, with the market tripling in 2006 compared to 2005, said chief executive Paul Lego. He expects the device to price within the $500 to $800 range, along with the existing leading devices.

YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are each worth about $326 million as a result of Google’s purchase of the video-sharing company, documents registered by Google Wednesday reveal.

Their takes are five times that of third co-founder Jawed Karim, who returned to Stanford before YouTube was bought last year. Karim got 137,443 shares, worth about $65 million based on the $470 closing price of Google’s stock yesterday. Hurley and Chen both have 694,087 shares.

For the full, long list of beneficiaries, check out the Securities and Exchange Commission document directly (see pages 5-16). Only a partial list is below in screenshot.

Venture firm Sequoia Capital, the main early backer of YouTube, got more than a million shares, or more than $502 million based on Google’s current stock price. Most of that, however, was transferred to Sequoia’s investors. The SEC link above provides a good look at who they are. Artis Capital, a hedge fund with ties to Sequoia, got about 176,500 shares, now valued at about $83 million. The other big indirect YouTube beneficiary we hadn’t known about before was the Ford Foundation (an investor in Sequoia). It carries 218,989 shares, valued at $103 million.

Finally, YouTube senior software engineer Yu Pan did well, with 75,593 shares, or about $36 million.

Sequoia Capital is Silicon Valley’s most respected venture capital firm, having made money from backing Yahoo, Google, YouTube and many others.

It’s been known for some time that Sequoia Capital’s partner Mark Kvamme is married to the daughter of Sequoia partner Pierre Lamond. No big deal, right?

Now it emerges that, through reporting of PE Week’s Alex Haislip (sorry the full version is subscription only), that David Lamond, son of Pierre (Pierre pictured here), is an investor at hedge fund Artis Capital. Another family connection, and again, who cares?

Sequoia made a killing off its investment into video site, YouTube when it was sold to Google for $1.6 billion, and eyebrows were raised when it emerged that the obscure Artis Capital had also been in on the investment. Who were these guys? One of its partners has since bought the $20 million Tiburon estate of Andre Agassi. Is it a coincidence that David Lamond, who has been with Artis since at least 2005 appears to have been among the few to benefit from the YouTube investment? And is it a coincidence that since that time, Artis has landed as an investor alongside Sequoia in a surprising number of deals, from Aruba in Sept. 05, to Open Silicon in Oct. 05 and AdBrite in February, to name just a few?

Again, no big deal, unless of course investors in Sequoia’s fund begin to argue that their stakes in companies like YouTube are being artificially reduced because Sequoia is letting in Artis simply for family reasons. We should caution that we know very few facts about the relationships. We contacted both Sequoia and Artis for comment. However, another common thread is that both firms are obsessively secretive. Sequoia did not respond. COO John Milani of Artis, when contacted, told VentureBeat: “We don’t comment on employees or our investments.”

Sequoia took public money from the University of California for decades. While working for the Mercury News, we engaged in talks with Sequoia and other firms in an effort to obtain their financial performance, which we thought the public investors a right to access, especially given the downturn in the economy and in venture capital. UC, CalPERS and many other public-backed institutions had invested in VC firms, and almost nothing was known about the money-losing investments the VCs had made. Notably, Sequoia initially agreed to release its basic data, the so-called Internal Rate of Return, in exchange for an agreement that we not request other, more detailed information about the fund. Two days later, Sequoia reneged on that agreement, and decided to boot the University of California as an investor for its initial decision to reveal Sequoia’s financial performance to the public.

Of course, the public coffers can only profit if a firm like Sequoia does well, and Sequoia did do well (in contrast to most venture firms, which aren’t doing so well). But it’s important that the public be aware if its investments in venture firms are riddled with favoritism, especially if firms aren’t doing well. Pierre Lamond reportedly lost $250,000 from his personal investment in the CKS Group, an ad agency, which was run by Mark Kvamme (pictured here) in the late 1990s. It was also a time when Lamond’s firm was taking money from UC. Even then, Lamond’s son, David, was partaking of Lamond’s investments.

PE Week’s Haislip points out that there is no evidence (yet) that Sequoia’s partners invested in Artis — which would be of concern for Sequoia’s remaining investors. To repeat, we don’t know the full facts on this, but it is a significant reminder that family and relationship ties do matter at a time when many tend to think — quite naively — that meritocracy alone rules in a place like Silicon Valley.