Verizon to buy Alltel, your cell phone bill to go up? — Verizon has concluded a deal to buy smaller wireless operator Alltel for $27 billion. Combined, the two will pass AT&T to become the largest operator in the US. Alltel has many users in the Midwest, and it has gotten relatively good marks for things like customer service, that market leaders like Verizon and AT&T are not known for. Analyst Craig Moffett of Sanford C. Bernstein is optimistic about such consolidation driving up prices for consumers. The New York Times quotes him as follows:
The consolidation of Alltel takes another step towards rationalizing and consolidating the U.S. Wireless industry, something that must be viewed as a positive. Fewer players will inevitably mean greater pricing stability (although only marginally so, since the smaller operators increasingly have been in the position of taking their cues from the Big Four anyway), and should lead to marketing efficiencies for all players as competition for retail distribution consolidates.
“Pricing stability,” of course, is a euphemism for less competition, but the deal is expected to pass regulators, and anyway, some consumer-rights groups aren’t worried. For mobile startups, this all means there’s one less wireless operator out there to try to work with. [AP photo via The Boston Globe.]
Valley VC Vinod Khosla to get backing from CalPERS for cleantech investments — The California pension fund is expected to put up to $640 million into Kholsa Ventures, Khosla’s self-titled and self-funded investment vehicle that has focused on cleantech investments. PEHub has details; see also our previous coverage of the Wall Street Journal’s criticism of Khosla’s biofuel investments, and his response.
Microsoft may buy information management software company Zoomix for $20 to $30 million — more here.
HP also getting into cleantech — The storied tech conglomerate has announced an agreement with Xtreme Energetics to develop a solar energy system designed to generate electricity “at twice the efficiency and half the cost of traditional solar panels,” it claims. HP is licensing its transparent transistor technology, which it developed in conjunction with Oregon State University, to Xtreme Energetics in exchange for royalty payments.
Business software company EMC to buy data storage firm Iomega — The move will set EMC off on a new strategy to create a consumer business in data storage, an area that Google and other consumer-facing Internet companies have also been getting into.
The Los Angeles Times launches a tech blog — This means more competition for VentureBeat, which we, of course, welcome. The blog’s staff includes the excellent Jessica Guynn, who was recently hired away from The San Francisco Chronicle.
Posts Tagged ‘inv:Khosla-Ventures’
Here’s the danger in becoming a well-known venture capitalist: You may well become the locus for heated debates over cleantech and environmentalism, even when you’re not expecting it. That’s what happened to Vinod Khosla yesterday, when the Wall Street Journal lashed out with a short hit piece on his policies titled “Khosla’s Conspiracy”.
The motivator was a lengthy interview in last week’s San Francisco Chronicle, in which Khosla, asked whether biofuels are driving up food prices, agreed that they are but said the much greater problem is the price of oil used for transportation. He also suggested that a PR campaign has been organized to smear biofuels. That’s where the WSJ took offense:
Spiking food prices, global shortages and Third World riots have managed to elicit repentance from some ethanol evangelists. Not Vinod Khosla…
“Food prices have been going up,” Mr. Khosla conceded. “But there are massive PR campaigns trying to ascribe most of the blame to biofuels.” Apparently “lots of people” are behind the plot, though Mr. Khosla singled out one: “Clearly, the American Petroleum Institute has been very, very concerned about food prices, and you wonder why.”
Gosh. API is a trade group for the oil and gas industry that is radioactive on Capitol Hill. But we didn’t realize that API’s tentacles were wrapped around the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the USDA, all of which blame ethanol for inflationary pressures on food prices. …
Like other green venture “capitalists,” Mr. Khosla now claims that corn ethanol is merely a springboard for the cellulosic varieties, which don’t draw on food stocks. Of course, his investments in such fuels also come with their own handsome subsidies. As long as he’s on the federal dole, perhaps Mr. Khosla should take a vow of embarrassed silence.
In short, the WSJ is agreeing that there’s a PR campaign — but thinks that Khosla, rather than the API, is the master manipulator. True enough, Khosla has stood apart for his interest in biofuels, and helped make himself a strike-point for debate with several doozies, like saying last year that many hybrid-electric vehicles won’t make a difference and repeatedly insisting that corn-based ethanol is necessary to create distribution channels for future, next-generation biofuels.
But is the WSJ right in its own implied assertion that food-based biofuels are a villain? Not really. Essentially, Khosla is right: Food often moves hundreds or thousands of miles from where it’s grown to its target market, so quadrupling the price of transportation fuels over a few years’ time would have driven up prices without the help of biofuels. For its own reasons, the WSJ doesn’t deign to address that argument. Khosla, for his own part, has been bright enough to avoid investing in first-gen biofuels like corn ethanol.
To address these points, and some others of his own, Khosla issued a rebuttal, sending it to us and some other news outlets. We’re reprinting it, with editing to take out some less substantive portions, after the jump.
Where is technology headed?
The Churchill Club of Silicon Valley just wrapped up one of its most anticipated events: the Annual Top Ten Tech Trends Debate. Five well-known and opinionated venture capitalists weighed in on what trends will take flight and what trends will fizzle out in the months ahead.
(The VCs are pictured, from left to right: Steve Jurvetson, Vinod Khosla, Josh Kopelman, Roger McNamee, Joe Schoendorf.)
The audience of around 300 people was asked whether it agreed or disagreed with the VCs’ predictions. I’ve ranked them below, according to how well they were accepted by the audience.
Last year’s predicted trends included a shakeout of Web 2.0 companies and the rising economic power of Brazil, Russia, India and China.
Trend 1: Customer data stored by different service providers will be combined to create more intelligent services. Josh Kopelman, managing partner at First Round Capital, a seed-stage venture fund, who founded online retailer Half.com (sold to eBay after a year for $300 million) said such customer data includes your financial records, dinner reservations, preferences in the iTunes store, random searches on Google and much more. In this way the Internet goes from satisfying explicit user needs (like searching for a friend to add on Facebook) to satisfying implicit needs (like telling who you should add and why adding them would be helpful to you).
Audience: 95 percent voted “Yes”.
Trend 2: Oil will have increasing difficulty competing with biofuels made from cheap non-food crops for transportation. Vinod Khosla (pictured left below, beside Kopelman), founder of Khosla Ventures, which focuses on alternative fuels and green technologies, said coal will become less competitive compared to reliable solar thermal and other alternative energy sources.
Audience: 90 percent voted “Yes”.
Trend 3: Water technology will replace abating global warming as a global priority. Joe Schoendorf, partner at Accel Partners, previously vice president of marketing for Apple, said the world is running out of usable water and this will kill millions more people in our lifetime than global warming.
Audience: 80 percent voted “Yes”.
Trend 4: The mobile device industry’s migration to smart phones will produce great disruption for big industry players. Roger McNamee, co-founder of Elevation Partners together with U2 lead singer Bono, and early private equity investor in technology, said the disruption will exceed what the PC industry experienced as it moved from character mode to graphical interfaces. Shifts in the competitive balance will hurt Motorola, Microsoft and probably LG Electronics, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. Apple, Nokia, Palm and RIM will do better. [McNamee's firm is an investor in Palm]
Audience: 75 percent voted “Yes”.
Trend 5: Booming market for healthy aging technologies Steve Jurvetson, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson and well-known for his founding investment in Hotmail, said a booming market in such technologies will allow people in their 60s and beyond to continue working and living a good life. Every 11 seconds, a baby boomer from the 1940s turns 60. These people have time and money and are Internet-savvy, so they represent an enormous market for services like mental exercise programs and online education in various topics. It fits into a larger vision that could also include an eBay for information services that exceeds the market for physical goods.
Audience: 70 percent voted “Yes”.
Trend 6: Four-fifths of the world population will carry mobile Internet devices within five to 10 years. Schoendorf said mobile Internet devices are rapidly becoming the leading device category.
Audience: 50 percent voted “Yes”.
Trend 7: Algorithms will be constructed to develop new industrial chemicals, new biofuels and eventually artificial intelligence. This was Jurveston’s prediction.
Audience: 50 percent voted “Yes”.
Trend 8: The mobile phone is your most important device. This prediction by Khosla is similar to Trend 6, but he predicted an even more intimate connection with the phone: Mobile phone applications will extend beyond e-mailing to include a virtual credit card, your ID, access to location systems and personal information filing systems. If you lose your phone, your data on it will all be backed up on a network so that you can load it all on to a new phone. Ten years ago people thought it would be ridiculous to have a camera in your cell phone, in two years you will have two cameras per phone – one for taking photos of yourself, and one for taking photos of others.
Audience: 40 percent voted “Yes”.
Trend 9: There is going to be a venture capital shakeout. Lower costs and barriers to entry for startups will have a dramatic impact on the venture capital industry and lower returns. This was Kopelman’s prediction.
Audience: 40 percent voted “Yes”.
Trend 10: Within five years everything that matters to you will be available on a device that fits on your belt or in your purse. This was McNamee’s prediction, and it’s similar to Trend 8. This will cause a massive shift in Internet traffic from PCs to smaller devices.
Audience: 30 percent voted “Yes”.
[Photos by Cecilia Aronsson]
updated
Aliph, a Silicon Valley maker of a remarkably effective noise-reducing headset, has been able to do what a lot of companies haven’t in the wireless headset market: Sell something expensive while the competition is selling cheap stuff.
The company has so far sold millions of its Jawbone wireless cell phone ear piece units since launching in 2006, at a hefty price of $120, in a commodity market where cheap ear pieces sell for $40.
It has done so with a unique audio technology that it had been working on since 1999. The Jawbone Bluetooth headset has features enabling its user to hear their calls more clearly, even in noisy environments.
Today, the company is launching its second-generation product. (We were invited to a launch party last night, and picked up the new ear piece to try it out). The price has been increased to $129, but it’s worth it.
The new Jawbone is smaller and has a sleeker design. It’s as thin as your little finger, and it’s simpler to use than the first version — and based on a testing this morning, it’s just as good, if not a tad better, at noise reduction.
Aliph chief executive Hosain Rahman did say the new headset has better noise elimination. It’s also meant to fit better on most ears, and Matt can confirm that it does have an easier, snug fit. Both of us bought and used the first generation Jawbone, and found it remarkably good at reducing noise. Matt tried out this second version. He turned on the microwave and called a friend while standing right next to it; his friend’s voice crackled for the first few seconds, but became much clearer and clearly audible thereafter. The friend could hear him fine, with almost no noise in the background. On the other end, she ground some coffee beans next to her phone. Even though she had no jawbone, Matt’s Jawbone kicked in and the noise was sharply reduced after about three seconds.
It now has a leather-covered hook for the ear instead of a plastic one (a good thing because the plastic broke off on one that Dean used) and it is 50 percent smaller. Matt’s first Jawbone broke when he tried pulling off the power socket, in part because the first version’s design was too delicate; the second Jawbone feels more robust, and the power socket fits on easier.
The Jawbone features a patented design where a small plastic nub rests on the cheek of the user. It records the vibrations and movements from the user’s jawbone and uses that data to determine what the person is saying. It then uses an audio processor to filter out background noise. Aliph calls this the Jawbone Noise Assassin, a technology originally developed by the Department of Defense’s DARPA agency for battlefield use. The Jawbone also raises the volume of the headset whenever the user is in a noisy place. The company claims it eliminates 10 times as much noise as rival headsets.
The new Jawbone goes on sale at AT&T stores around the country. Bluetooth headets are expected to top 120 million units sold in 2009, partly because some states such as California will require that drivers use such headsets when using cell phones in a car.
Aliph is based on San Francisco and has been funded by Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital. It competes with other audio technology companies such as Audience, which recently raised a $15 million round for its audio processing chips.
The new Jawbone weighs 10 grams, has four hours of talk time on a battery charge, has eight days of standby time, and charges in one hour.
With oil past $120 a barrel and possibly headed to $200, cellulosic ethanol companies are looking like a smarter investment choice every day. Following the increase of Range Fuels’ second funding to $166 million, its competitor Mascoma has pulled the wraps off an $81 million funding of its own, with $10 million coming a major oil and gas producer, Marathon Oil Corporation.
Range, Mascoma, Coskata and others are all racing to raise huge amounts in an attempt to bring the world’s first full-scale cellulosic plant online. The stakes are high: If the process proves to be cheap enough, investors will be eager to pour money into new plants. On the other hand, waiting to see if competitors fail won’t be particularly helpful — each company has its own proprietary process.
Mascoma will begin production this year at a demonstration plant in Rome, New York, but is also planning facilities in Michigan and Tennessee. By comparison, its two largest competitors will build a single, big plant each, a bet that could presumably result in a more spectacular success, or failure.
Backing each company is a network of high-profile investors, some of whom overlap. General Motors has investments in both Coskata and Mascoma. Morgan Stanley is with Range Fuels, which also counts Khosla Ventures as an investor — and Khosla has invested in Mascoma, as well. Taking venture fundings and government grants together, Range Fuels is the most heavily funded, Mascoma coming second with just over $200 million now, and Coskata third.
It’s possibility none of the three emerge with a competitively priced product — something that also hinges on whether oil prices continue to climb, or fall back to somewhat saner levels. If all three find their methods too expensive, there is still a constellation of smaller cellulosic startups waiting for their own turn in the spotlight, like Zeachem.
Other investors in the round included Khosla, Flagship Ventures, Atlas Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Pinnacle Ventures and Vantage Point Venture Partners. Out of the total amount, $20 million was venture debt provided by Pinnacle.
Cellulosic ethanol producer Range Fuels has heaped more than $50 million extra onto a $100 million round we reported two months ago, picking up the support of Passport Capital, Morgan Stanley Capital Group and others.
While the company originally planned to keep the round to $100 million, it appears to have received intense interest in its project. While the round was at first over-subscribed to $130 million, according to Ethanol Producer Magazine, Range has now taken a total of $158 million, according to a regulatory filing obtained by VentureBeat. The cap on the round is currently $166 million.
The additional funding should give Range the edge it needs to speed ahead in the race to open the world’s first full-scale cellulosic ethanol refinery in Soperton, Georgia, which broke ground last November. At 100 million gallons per year of capacity, the plant will be larger than many existing facilities that make ethanol from corn. Importantly, it has trees from the surrounding forests on-hand for use, rather than counting on next-generation feedstocks like switchgrass that have yet to be planted at scale.
Size is important for Range, because the thermo-chemical process the company uses works better at large scale. Yet even with its size advantage, a number of onlookers have speculated that the company may suffer from the pitfalls of being first to try out a complex process. Just breaking down woody fibers into a product isn’t good enough — Range’s ethanol must also be cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels, albeit with the help of subsidies.
Its investors either don’t have the same expectation, or have been caught up in the drama of (maybe) leading a (possible) revolution.
Range’s competition for the distinction of being first is from two companies. One, Coskata, has a partnership with a plant construction company and plans for a 40 million gallon per year plant. The other, Mascoma, took on $50 million more in February and just today announced a partnership with General Motors, which also backs Coskata.
The round was led by Passport, with participation from a passel of others: PCG Clean Energy & Technology Fund, Khosla Ventures, Blue Mountain Venture Capital, Leaf Clean Energy, Pacific Capital Group, Morgan Stanley, and possibly some unlisted investors.
The green building sector has been awash with VC cash in recent months: Despite there only being a few dozen startups in the nascent field, investors have started paying close attention — helping several raise new rounds of funding.
Newark, California-based CalStar Cement has received $3.4 million from several investors, including Foundation Capital, while Serious Materials landed a hefty $50 million second funding round, led by New Enterprise Associates, Rustic Canyon Partners and Foundation Capital. The Sunnyvale-based startup had earlier capped a $5 million first round. Los Gatos-based Calera, which is developing a cement capable of sequestering carbon dioxide, is backed by Khosla Ventures.
New Jersey-based Hycrete, which produces an admixture (or liquid solution) that is used to waterproof concrete, completed its second round in 2006. Just one more, CEO David Rosenberg says, could take it to profitability; in late February, he said he was seeking $10 - 20 million. Its investors include RockPort Capital Partners and NGEN Partners. Hycrete’s admixture was one of the first to receive a cradle-to-cradle certification through McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, a green product and design firm. The designation “cradle-to-cradle,” coined by architect William McDonough and Michael Braungart, refers to a product that can be completely recycled or re-used. It was also selected as a Technology Pioneer at this year’s World Economic Forum.
A mixture of sand, aggregate, cement and water, the admixture acts as a replacement for the external membranes that are typically used to keep water from seeping into concrete. When it is mixed into concrete, it links up to metallic ions and behaves like a hydrophobic solution (like oil) — repelling water. Because it doesn’t require volatile organic compounds (VOCs) or other harmful chemicals, the corrosion-resistant concrete can safely be recycled and reused in other projects. Conventional forms of concrete, which use permanently bonded waterproofing membranes, are sent to landfills.
Hycrete’s technology has already been used in more than 75 projects worldwide — including several Marriott and Hilton hotels and condos and apartments in Seattle. Other applications include mixing it into roofing material to make green roofs — roofs covered by lawns — or into drywall to stop moisture seepage.
The admixture reduces energy waste, cuts costs and lets builders receive Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) points. Developed by the U.S. Green Building Council, the LEED accreditation indicates a building has successfully adopted a suite of rigorous green building standards. The rating is seen as a boon by companies seeking to bolster their environmental credentials and is increasingly being implemented in new construction projects. Hycrete’s product helps builders reach that goal faster.
Range Fuels, a company that is searching to become the first to bring a much cleaner kind of alternative fuel, cellulosic ethanol, to market commercially, has raised nearly $100 million in new financing.
Cellulosic ethanol is significant because it’s a much more environmentally friendly way to to produce ethanol. Instead of using corn or sugar, it uses portions of plants and grasses to make ethanol, and has been found by the US DOE to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 85 percent, when compared to reformulated gasoline. Regular starch ethanol (from corn, for example), which uses natural gas in its creation, has not been found to lower emissions.
Cellulosic ethanol has also become attractive because traditional methods of making ethanol have become more controversial of late. Critics say the demand for corn ethanol is outmatching the supply of corn, and taking away from the world’s food source — creating higher food prices.
There are several pilot projects attempting to prove that cellulosic ethanol production is economically viable.
The Broomfield, Colo.-based Range Fuels started building a production facility near Soperton, Ga., which is expected to produce up to 100 million gallons of ethanol when in full production mode.
The funding, first reported by VentureWire this morning, came from previous investor Khosla Ventures (which committed $25 million) and another undisclosed energy investor (which committed a similar amount). Range Fuels previously got $76 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Range Fuels’ process produces synthetic gas that can be converted to ethanol, but that’s just one of several methods. Another method, used by competitor Mascoma, of Cambridge, Mass., uses an enzyme process to create ethanol.
There are several other players racing to produce ethanol from cellulosic material, including start-up Coskata, of Warrenville, Ill., which has backing from General Motors Corp. and others, and Iogen, which has backing from Royal Dutch/Shell. BP is working with Hayward, Calif.’s startup Mendel Biosciences. Chevron also has its own project, called Catchlight Energy.
Do chip start-ups really exist anymore?
Not seeing many, we were going to propose changing the name of Silicon Valley to Social Networking Valley. But now eASIC, a maker of rapid-turnaround custom chips, comes along to remind us that it’s still possible for start-ups to raise more money in the semiconductor field.
eASIC says today they have raised $48 million in a new round of venture funding from Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The company says its combination of speed-to-market and customization gives it the benefits of two different kinds of chips: field programmable gate arrays (FPGA), which have a fast turnaround, and application specific integrated circuits (ASIC), or low-cost custom chips.
It takes a big bet like this to get funding for a chip company these days. Asked if he had any trouble raising money, Ronnie Vasishta, CEO of eASIC, said, “We didn’t go out to pitch widely among VCs this time. Maybe we might have got that reaction about not being a social networking company if we had. The shine has gone off the silicon a little bit. But we have a very big opportunity.”
The ASIC industry is about $20 billion, but the number of ASICs being designed has fallen. Only the highest-volume chips can be made as ASICs, given the high upfront costs. The FPGA industry, meanwhile, is about $3.7 billion. ASICs go into just about every major consumer electronics product, from TV sets to set-top boxes and game consoles. eASIC has a chance to steal some of this share from the ASIC business and enable new devices where entrepreneurs aren’t counting on selling millions of units at the outset.
It has been eating away at the ASIC share, on and off, because FPGAs can be made in rapid product design cycles. Vasishta says that by making chip design easier and less expensive, eASIC could make life easier for chip startups and thereby enable more of them, even if they aren’t doing Facebook applications.
Normally, it takes $1 million of design resources and a 16-week production process to make an ASIC. Santa Clara, Calif.-based eAsic can create custom chips without the up-front engineering costs and deliver its chips within four weeks. The upfront design costs are typically only $20,000 to $100,000, said Vasishta.
eASIC can do this because it spent about five years, from 1999 to 2004, figuring out how to customize a generic chip with a minimum amount of headaches. It can now do so, Vasishta says, by laying down a single layer of metal on top of a nearly-finished chip at the very end of a manufacturing process. In the past, other companies have tried to do this, including Vasishta’s alma mater, LSI Logic. But too often those attempts required more elaborate customization procedures on multiple layers in the manufacturing. Hence, they weren’t as fast or low-cost, he said.
The chip architecture is fairly modular itself and that makes it more predictable to manufacture, Vasishta said. Thus, the chip has the flexibility of a FPGA — which are typically easily programmed but available at high costs — without the additional costs of one. Vasishta also says that his chips consume 10 percent to 20 percent of the power of an FPGA.
A chip design takes perhaps a couple of months. Then, once the design is finished, a customer can get a chip out of the factory in four weeks. By comparison, ASIC chips normally take about 18 months to deliver.
Also participating in the round were Crescendo Ventures and Evergreen Venture Partners. eASIC’s chief financial officer, Craig Klosterman, also invested in this round.
The company says that it has customers with a wide variety of applications such as portable video devices, cell phones, wireless base stations, routers, gateways, video surveillance, digital displays plus others.
Khosla Ventures, headed by founder Vinod Khosla, participated in earlier rounds. Earlier investors also included Advanced Equities Inc. To date, the company has raised $80 million.
Part of the reason is that the company spent a lot of time in development with ST Microelectronics, the European chip maker. eASIC has been shipping the 90-nanometer version of its chips since 2006 and it has customers among the top-20 semiconductor companies as well as a number of consumer systems companies.
Mascoma, an East Coast biofuel startup with a multi-pronged approach to commercializing cellulosic ethanol, has just become one of the most heavily funded companies of its kind with a $50 million funding reported by peHUB.
Based in Cambridge, Mass., Mascoma is in the process of building several demonstration-scale ethanol plants in three other states: Michigan, New York and Tennessee. It’s partnered with a variety of different corporations and universities at each location.
What that boils down to is hedging its bets — by experimenting with several different feedstocks and processes, Mascoma is making itself more likely to hit the jackpot, a cost-effective cellulosic ethanol facility. The feedstocks it’s using include wood, switchgrass, and in New York, mixed materials like paper sludge and corn stover.
The $50 million funding was broken into a $30 million venture round and $20 million in debt. Participating were one new investor, General Catalyst Partners, and previous investors Khosla Ventures, Atlas Venture, Flagship Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Pinnacle Ventures and VantagePoint Venture Partners. Including various government grants, the company has taken just over $100 million to date.
Although it’s over two decades old, Infinia is a relative newcomer to the solar market, having only been working on its solar thermal generator for a few years.
That may not prevent it from quickly becoming one of the largest players, though, with a new $50 million investment to kick off production and a slate of manufacturing partners ready to help fulfill its first orders.
The most notable detail about Infinia’s technology is that it’s based on the Stirling engine, which uses thermodynamic cycling of air to produce energy. Basically, air within the engine is heated by the concentrated rays of the sun, and then converted directly to energy.
Stirling engines are noted for their high efficiency, but have so far confounded other startups that have attempted to use accident-prone “kinematic” versions with solar concentrators. “You don’t know when you fire those up whether they’ll run for 25 or 500 hours, but you do know they won’t work for 5000 hours, or 60,000, as ours will,” Infinia CEO J.D. Sitton told us in an interview.
Infinia uses a hermetically sealed, single-piston design that Sitton says drastically reduces maintenance costs, although it lowers efficiency somewhat. The outcome is a solar thermal generator with 24 percent efficiency, which is still much higher than most competing alternatives currently on the market.
However, rather than fight for utility-scale developments with other solar thermal startups like Ausra or Solel, Sitton says his company will compete with solar photovoltaics. The first Infinia product will be a dish which can be sited within towns or cities, singly or in small groups.
That strategy will give the company the ability to set its own margins because it 20-30 percent cheaper than solar PV, Sitton said, although he would not disclose exactly how much the 3 kilowatt dishes would cost.
The company plans to begin producing dishes in November, and build up to 200MW per year of manufacturing capacity by the end of 2009 by working with manufacturing partners from the automotive industry, who Infinia is helping retool their production lines with part of its funding.
GLG Partners led the $50 million round, with Wexford Capital and previous investors Vulcan Capital, Khosla Ventures, EQUUS Total Returns, Idealab and Power Play Energy also participating. It was Infinia’s second funding; it also took $9.5 million last year and $3.5 million in early 2005, for a total to date of $63 million.
Ford Tamer, a former executive at chip company Broadcom, is the latest to join Khosla Ventures, the venture capital firm that has made an aggressive, sweeping bet on clean-technology.
This formalizes a relationship that has existed for sometime: Tamer has already led Khosla Ventures’ investments in EcoMotors, Kaai, Soraa, and Topanga. In addition, he sits on the boards of eASIC and PAX Streamline.
Tamer, who led Broadcom’s enterprise networking group, will expand the Khosla Ventures’ “support of leading scientific work in clean technology, with a focus on breakthroughs related to mechanical and electrical efficiency, solar and IT,” the firm said in a statement.
Prior to Broadcom, he was CEO and co-founder of Agere, a provider of network processors acquired by Lucent.
Khosla Ventures’ current portfolio includes investments in biofuels, solar photovoltaic and solar thermal, geothermal, battery, new materials, clean water and other environmentally friendly technologies.
Updated
Widget-maker Slide has raised nearly $50 million at a $550 million valuation from two private equity funds, Fidelity and T-Rowe Price, according to the New York Times, with the two firms buying a total of around a nine percent stake in the company.
San Francisco-based Slide has more than 144 million users of its widgets on Myspace and other social networks, and another more than 50 million total (not necessarily active) users of its Facebook applications, according to Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, who first reported that a large round was in the works earlier today.
However, Slide hasn’t, as far as I know, publicly stated significant revenue streams — as is the case with many other Myspace widget and Facebook application companies. A large funding round could mean that the company has proven to investors that it can monetize.
On the other hand, investors may just be impressed with the number of eyeballs Slide has attracted. The company’s Top Friends Facebook application, which lets you designate and display your favorite Facebook friends on your profile page, has 2,483,760 daily active users. Its FunWall application, which replaces Facebook’s “Wall” of messages from your friends on your profile with its own features, such as video-sharing, has 2,762,039 daily active users.
Note: Facebook applications give third-party developers direct access to user data, such as your list of Facebook friends, which companies like Slide can use to make more compelling applications, like Top Friends.
Slide sees itself as a “distributed media company,” relying on its widgets and applications to create new forms of entertainment for social network users. For more, see my interview with chief executive Max Levchin from last June. Its latest efforts include involvement in Open Social (our coverage), a Google-led effort that’s in development, that intends to create a standard means of implementing social networking applications on Facebook rival sites, including Myspace.
Main competitors to Slide include RockYou, which also has popular Facebook applications as well as widgets on other social networks. RockYou claims to have passed Slide as the most popular Facebook app company, as I wrote last month, although it’s not clear if that’s still the case. In late August, Slide claimed the number one spot.
Slide would use the money to expand as well as buy other companies, Swisher says, and has hired investment bank Allen & Co. to help raise the round (the bank, among other things, is also helping Digg shop itself around).
Slide’s previous valuation is based on the approximately $20 million that it raised in 2006 from Khosla Ventures, Mayfield Fund, BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund (our coverage).
Well-known Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla has never been shy expressing his opinion. Khosla once dissed plug-in hybrid vehicles — supported by environmentalists because of their partial reliance on batteries versus oil — as “nice toys …not material to climate change.”
Coming from Khosla, who has been among the most prolific investors in green technologies, the comments raised some eyebrows. However, the tune has since changed, because Kholsa has backed a select kind of hybrid vehicle after all (see our post).
Still, Khosla (pictured here) is clearly betting that combustion engines will stick around. The latest evidence is Khosla Ventures’ increased investment in Transonic Combustion, a company that says it will have a 100 mile per gallon sports car on the road by the end of this year.
Transonic focuses on a single part of an engine, the fuel injection system, to give a big boost to efficiency. Although secretive about details, the company says it can achieve extremely high compression ratios within engines and reduce the amount of energy lost to waste heat.
The proof of the unlikely-sounding boost to 100mpg is slated to be a lightweight demonstration stock car that Transonic plans to put out for a spin sometime in the third quarter. That probably means normal cars would get a somewhat lower fuel efficiency, using the same engine. However, anything over 50mpg would be an incredible gain.
For perspective, consider that in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000, the average passenger car went from 15mpg to only 22mpg. The Toyota Prius, a hybrid combustion / electric, only gets about 50mpg.
Although the size of Khosla’s latest investment was not disclosed, it does make the firm Transonic’s largest shareholder. For more on another recent Khosla Ventures investment in transportation, see this post on EcoMotors, a maker of hybrid diesel engines.
American automakers have finally learned that fuel efficiency and environmental friendliness count, turning the yearly Detroit Auto Show, which started Sunday, into a lineup of cleantech exhibitions.
Among big-company prototypes like the Chevy Volt and Cadillac Provoq are a handful of smaller firms making significant headway. Following is a brief lineup of the ones we thought were most interesting:
Coskata
A mere two years old, ethanol producer Coskata has managed to attract an investment from General Motors, which it announced at the event.
This isn’t your run-of-the-mill ethanol company. Like cellulosic ethanol companies, Coskata can convert wood and random organic debris into fuel. However, it uses its own proprietary gasification technology to turn this raw material into a synthesis gas, which is then cooled for “fermentation,” during which microorganisms convert the gas to ethanol.
The company says it can run this process very cheaply — for less than a dollar per gallon. The materials it can use include both regular biomass (such as wood chips) and municipal waste streams. To prove the concept, Coskata will initially build a 40,000 gallon per year pilot plant.
The specific amount of GM’s investment was not disclosed. Coskata’s previous investors include Khosla Ventures, GreatPoint Ventures, and Advanced Technology Ventures, who put $17 million into the company. It’s based in Warrenville, Illinois.
EcoMotors
A team with engineering experience at European automakers Volkswagen and Audi is working on a diesel engine that could be efficient enough to be competitive, on a miles-per-gallon basis, with plug-in hybrid technologies.
EcoMotors says its engines, due on the market in 2011, will get about 100 miles per gallon on fuel alone. It’s also planning its own hybrid adaptations that will be even more fuel-efficient.
Diesel engines are often overlooked in the clean-fuel furor. However, they deserve more attention: Not only are they used in virtually all trucks, they’ve also been growing in popularity in consumer vehicles over the last few years.
As with Coskata, Khosla Ventures is an investor in this company, which is based in Menlo Park, Calif. As it happens, Khosla is also an investor in another diesel-cleantech company we recently reported on, called Nanostellar.
Fisker Automotive
When we recently mentioned Fisker Automotive, we had no idea that star VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers had plowed more than $10 million into the company, an investment just disclosed at the auto show. The exact amount wasn’t revealed. Palo Alto Ventures has also invested in the company.
Fisker plans to significantly undercut potential rival Tesla Motors’ $98,000 all-electric Roadster by charging only $80,000 for its luxury plug-in hybrid. (For the overly rich: That’s sarcasm. $80,000 is a lot of money.)
The remaining details: A 0-60 mph acceleration time of 5.8 seconds (slow for an electric vehicle, but comparable to most combustion-engine sports cars), a sustainable speed of 125 miles per hour, and a 50-mile range if using only battery power. Perhaps most importantly, the car is gorgeous, as seen below.
Unfortunately, the car won’t be available until late in 2009. Fisker, which is based in Irvine, Calif., plans on manufacturing about 15,000 a year.
