VentureBeat

Well-known but still young biofuel company Sapphire Energy has more than doubled its funding to more than $100 million for its “green crude,” a fuel it says will mimic the best characteristics of the oil we drill for today.

Sapphire’s plan, which I covered in depth back in May, is to grow tailored strains of algae on waste water. Algae is criticized because it often uses open pools of water, which evaporate quickly in hot climes, wasting a precious resource. So Sapphire will genetically modify algae to subsist on water that is useless to humans.

But few new details have come out since Sapphire emerged in May. Developing a process like Sapphire’s takes a long time, and the company estimates that it will need three to five years to reach 10,000 barrels a day of production — a nice revenue line for a startup, but a relatively tiny amount of fuel. And problems with the algae can occur at any point in that time window, delaying or halting progress.

If Sapphire is successful, it make a substance it calls “green crude,” which can be run through existing oil refineries to produce gasoline, jet fuel and other petroleum derivatives. Most algal biofuel startups, like Greenfuel and SequesCO, plan to make biodiesel, which is roughly the same as today’s diesel fuel.

One confusing point about Sapphire’s growing funding is that the company is unwilling to break down the numbers. It says it has raised “substantially more than” $100 million, and in May said it had taken $50 million. So its funding has at least doubled since then. However, reports that it has taken a $50 million second round may be inaccurate.

The new investor in this round, officially the second, is Cascade Investment, which is owned by Bill Gates. The other investors are ARCH Venture Partners, Wellcome Trust and Venrock. Sapphire is based in San Diego, Calif.

Oanda, one of the first companies offering online currency trading for consumers, has received a $100 million second round of investment from firms including Legg Mason, Cascade Investment and NEA.

The currency trading market has been considered somewhat closed to small investors, having long been the haven of banks and large funds. Trading currency, despite its innate risk, can offer several advantages, including better tax rates and superior margins, when compared to trading stocks.

New York City’s Oanda is particularly good for consumers because it claims very narrow spreads (the difference between the price the currency seller asks, and the bid price). Spreads are typically much wider for small retail investors than for institutional investors, who can trade much larger volumes of currency. Oanda’s link to a comparison of spreads between trading platforms is down, however, which is disappointing. (We’ll check back.) Update: It’s back up, and shows that the company’s spreads are almost always lower than the competition.

Competitors include FXCM and Alpari. These are the online currency equivalent to the discount brokerages attacking big traders like Merrill Lynch.

The investment round is intended to strengthen the company’s balance sheet, giving it enough heft to compete in larger markets and scale its operations. Oanda’s current peak trading volume is around $10 billion a day, out of a total market that trades in excess of $2 trillion each day.

The company was started in 1996 to offer reliable information on exchange rates. In 2001 it opened a trading platform based on proprietary technology.

Kittu Kolluri, a member of NEA, say his company invested because “Oanda has become the technology leader, as well as the price leader, and they achieved a lot of that virtually without any investment.” Kolluri, who headed up Neoteris until its sale for $265 million in 2003, will join Oanda’s board and take on an advisory role.

The amount that each investor contributed to the funding round was not disclosed. Oanda previously received $17 million from Index Ventures.