VentureBeat

Simbol Mining, a company that says it has a better way to collect the lithium used in today’s most advanced batteries, has taken a first round of funding.

The idea of mining usually conjures up images of sweating, grime-encrusted men and earth-moving machines. What Simbol is aiming for more closely resembles running a water through a Brita filter. The startup hopes to separate out valuable elements from water stored in mineral-rich deposits deep underground.

That would be an expensive task, if undertaken alone. Luckily, geothermal plants also have an interest in tapping into deep water supplies, which are often hot enough to use for electricity. By using the same water streams that geothermal plants do, Simbol can use its high-tech filters to separate out lithium and, eventually, other elements.

Lithium is a good target because demand for it in lithium-ion batteries, used by laptops, phones and hybrid and electric vehicles is on the rise. The market is about $500 million yearly right now, but could triple in size in less than a decade (or much more, if the electric vehicle market really takes off).

A somewhat comparable investment is Greatpoint Energy, which scooped up $100 million last year to convert and clean coal. In general, though, venture investments in mining-related technology are pretty rare.

The $6.7 million funding was led by Mohr Davidow Ventures and Firelake Capital.

Representing a potential medical quantum leap similar to, but even more important than the commercialization of X-ray imaging, Pacific BioSciences has taken a whopping $100 million to make it possible to affordably map out an individual’s entire genome in a matter of minutes, and for under $1,000 dollars.

While several startups, including 23andMe and deCODEme, are already offering cheap genetic testing for individuals, the technology Pacific Bio is looking at is about as different from those as looking at a satellite image of a town is to walking through it. The company is working on a system to “read” each DNA letter in a person’s genetic makeup, providing an in-depth view of every factor affecting a given person’s health.

The idea sounds fairly simple: Individial DNA molecules are captured in tiny holes on a chip, where they are pulled apart and rebuilt with enzymes identical to those present in the body, but with the addition of chemical markers. A type of digital camera takes a picture of the process, identifying the specific fragment being looked at. We covered the technology in more depth when it was first revealed, and have mentioned various competitors, most notably Complete Genomics and BioNanomatrix, who want to do sequencing for under $100.

In practice, of course, operating at such tiny scales is difficult, and accurately sequencing thousands of genes at once seems nearly impossible. But the company says it will be ready to commercialize by 2010, a Herculean feat if it can pull it off. The new funding indicates that it is at least gaining the confidence of venture capitalists.

If and when that happens, it will be time for early investors including Alloy Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Mohr Davidow Ventures — who collectively plowed more than $70 million into Pacific Bio over four previous rounds — to rake in the money.

However, it will just be the beginning for a whole new field of medical technology centered around finding uses for all the new information in individuals that becomes available. Preventative medicine is the obvious use, but others, like data mining for new cures and information on diseases, are also possible. Laws regulating the use (and misuse) of such information by insurers, employers and others will also have to be formulated.

A passel of new investors joined the funding, starting with co-leads Deerfield Management and Intel Capital. Also in were Morgan Stanley, Redmile Group, T. Rowe Price, and an unnamed “large financial institution.” Other previous investors Maverick Capital, AllianceBernstein, DAG Ventures and Teachers’ Private Capital also participated.

Enterprise storage is a market dominated by big companies. But Panasas has found a niche providing parallel storage systems for the biggest supercomputers. The company has raised $25 million in a fifth round of funding, VentureBeat has learned.

The Fremont, Calif.-based company declined to comment on the funding. The round was led by Focus Ventures of Palo Alto, Calif. Other investors included Mohr Davidow Ventures, Carlyle Venture Partners, Centennial Ventures, and Northgate Capital Partners.

The company’s web site says it focuses on the parallel storage market in competition with NetApp, EMC, Sun Microsystems and IBM. It can do so because it has a unique architecture to deliver the best storage performance in high-bandwidth applications such as simulations, modeling, oil and gas exploration, and product design.

Most clusters of Linux servers use an architecture dubbed a “network file system,” or NFS. But such systems with a “serial” architecture bog down when a lot of users are trying to access the same file at the same time. Panasas has a parallel file system that can accommodate all of those users in parallel. It builds a kind of “unified memory” storage system that resembles the kind of unified memory of SGI supercomputers. In fact, SGI is a major reseller of Panasas’ storage systems, as is Dell.

The architecture is the brainchild of Garth Gibson, who was one of the inventors of the popular RAID storage systems that are popular today because they can store data reliably across a bunch of disk drives. Currently chief technology officer, Gibson started Panasas in 1999. The first products shipped in 2003 and the company is now on its third generation of ActiveStor products that can store up to 200 terabytes of data per rack or up to 100 petabytes in a single file system. (Our description: That’s a lot of data).

Among start-ups, the competition included Cluster File Systems, but Sun Microsystems acquired that company in October. Panasas’ storage system was part of Roadrunner, the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s supercomputer with a petaflop of computing performance. The supercomputer, announced a few weeks ago, will have 12,900 microprocessors, including the Cell chips that serve as the brains of Sony PlayStation 3 video game consoles.

SodaHead, a company that provides a polling widget for web publishers that it also uses to prompt discussions on its own site, is seeing some decent traction. It has gained more than 600,000 members total since launching last September, and has logged a total of more than four million comments on its site.

To use SodaHead, you create a poll widget on its site, then embed the widget code into your site, similar to competitors like Polldaddy and others. But SodaHead has its own community, unlike its poll-widget competitors, where members can see polls from across the site and comment on them. There’s also an “answers” section where users can ask questions and provide answers to each other.

When I used a SodaHead poll to ask VentureBeat readers if they thought Facebook should let them aggregate and export their Facebook friends’ email addresses, a discussion on the topic emerged on the SodaHead site. See below. This discussion would have driven additional traffic back to my article containing the poll — except that SodaHead doesn’t link back to the sites that use its polls, so it didn’t.

The company has recently raised an $8.4 million round from Mission Ventures, on top of a previous round of $4.3 million from Mohr Davidow Ventures and angel investors. Mission Ventures managing partner Robert Kibble says that ”SodaHead’s community and upcoming initiatives are very exciting and I believe SodaHead will be one of the biggest sites on the Internet.”

That may be a bit optimistic, but I can at least say that SodaHead is useful.

One day soon, with the help of Moblyng, you’ll likely be able to stream music playlists from social networks to your phone.

In the meantime, though, you can use Moblyng to watch any number of things on your mobile device — a YouTube video or to put Slide slideshow widgets from MySpace or another social network.

First, you go to Moblyng’s site (going live later today), enter the social network profile URL, username and password.

Then, the Menlo Park, Calif. company’s technology scrapes profile on social networking sites and other applications of your choice and recreates Flash content as video or as JPEG-format images. Once you’ve used Moblyng to scrape content, you can send the scrapings to your friends via mobile text messages. See sample screenshot of a Snoop Dogg slideshow, above.

Incidentally, the company originally developed this technology when it was a direct competitor to social network slide show makers such as Slide. The company, until now known as Fliptrack, originally let you create advanced slideshows that matched music in time with slideshows — Animoto has more recently come out with a similar product. Facebook users can still use Moblyng’s slide show application here.

Moblyng realized the technology it had created for Slideshows could also be used to convert Flash to mobile. Personally, I’ll find the most use for Moblyng when I can use it to stream music playlists from MySpace, such as those offered by Imeem. Moblyng says legal issues need to be worked out before it can start streaming music — but it does have the technical ability to do so. Note: Moblyng already does license some music, so some slideshows with music will also play that music within its mobile renditions of applications.

The company has raised $5.7 million from Mohr Davidow Ventures and Deep Fork Capital.

The chemicals business has gone through massive shifts in the past, and it’s high time for another one, according to Christopher Gann, the CEO of Genomatica, who recently left a cushy position at industry giant Dow Chemical for the startup. Chemical manufacturing is perched atop the much larger fossil fuel market, thus suffering from the same high prices the rest of the world does — but, says Gann, it can be weaned off hydrocarbons.

Shifting away from oil and gas is one of the most common stories in cleantech, with numerous companies claiming that they can make transportation fuels from renewable sources like corn, sugar and grasses. By contrast, chemical manufacturing has received relatively little attention, despite the fact that most chemical manufacturing is also based on crude oil and natural gas, going through stepped processes to reach the desired end product.

Part of the reason is that there are tens of thousands of products to deal with, though some, like polyethylene, account for billions in sales yearly. However, Genomatica claims to have the scientific chops to simplify the problem, and produce the needed compounds on demand, and has raised $20.4 million in a second round, according to VentureWire.

The company was started by a team of biotech researchers from the University of California at San Diego, who started out working with E. Coli genes. Several years ago, they realized that their expertise could be more profitably applied to organisms for other industrial uses. Similar to startups like Amyris, LS9 and Synthetic Genomics, they decided to begin custom-making organisms to produce specific substances.

However, their combination of lab experience and modeling ability provided other opportunities, and the group decided to move in on the chemical industry. To create specific chemicals, the team identifies pathways in organisms with computational modeling techniques, then tests their theories out in the lab. The combination of modeling ability and lab technology in a single company is rare, says Gann, and provides a significant advantage.

Genomatica is currently testing out organisms for several chemicals, with plans to move on to pilot plants to prove the processes. However, after the pilot tests, the company again diverges from biofuels startups. It has no plans to make its own full-scale plants, instead adding what Gann calls “bolt-on” facilities to existing, multi-billion dollar plants owned by larger companies.

The feedstocks Genomatica can use vary widely. Syngas byproducts from biofuel manufacture can be used, as well as carbon dioxide, the culprit behind global warming. And the company can make use of “a very broad array of plant matter,” says Gann, exceeding the reach of biofuel makers, who need plants that are highly cost-effective. Cleanup after the processes should also be simpler, only requiring cleanup of the fermentation matter and dead cells.

Genomatica isn’t entirely alone in its plans. Novomer wants to revolutionize plastics manufacturing, although it will rely on chemistry, rather than biological processes. Another startup, Segetis, appears to plan on using biological feedstocks, but again, will use chemical processes; the company was backed last year by Khosla Ventures.

Of those companies, Genomatica has raised the most funding to date, about $24 million including its first funding. The backers in this round were led by Mohr Davidow Ventures, with participation from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Alloy Ventures. The company is based in San Diego, Calif.

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• InSound Medical raises $11M for “invisible” hearing aids (VBLS exclusive)
• Corventis takes in $20M for heart-failure therapy (VBLS exclusive)
• Molecular diagnostics user AssureRx raises $1M (Cincinnati Enquirer)
• Arresto Biosciences, cancer-drug developer, raises funds (VentureWire)
• San Diego’s Obalon raises $4.7M for drug discovery (peHUB)

InSound Medical raises $11M for “invisible” hearing aids – This item is a standalone post here.

Corventis takes in $20M for heart-failure therapy – San Jose, Calif.-based Corventis, a startup working on ways to monitor the vital signs of heart-failure patients, raised $19.9 million in a second funding round, according to Dana Mead, a Corventis board member and VC at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Investors in the round included Kleiner Perkins, Mohr Davidow Ventures and DAG Ventures, Mead said.

Mead declined to further describe Corventis, which remains in stealth mode. The startup, however, is sponsoring a clinical trial (see its registration in the federal clinical-trials database) in which it intends to monitor heart-failure patients with some kind of “multi-sensor” device it calls the MUSE Clinical System.

While MUSE isn’t described in detail, it appears to be a non-invasive monitor of some kind designed to measure various aspects of the heart’s function, presumably including ejection fraction (a measure of how well the heart is pumping blood) and blood pressure within the heart, two measures that generally require doctors to thread sensors through a patient’s veins into the heart itself. The Corventis trial isn’t yet enrolling patients. (UPDATE: In a subsequent email, Mead said the trial has begun enrolling patients.)

Molecular diagnostics user AssureRx raises $1M – AssureRx, a Mason, Ohio, startup working on new molecular diagnostics for personalized medicine, raised more than $1 million in new funding, the Cincinnati Enquirer reports. The Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Blue Chip Venture Co., CincyTech USA and several individual investors provided the funding.

AssureRx is developing a new test licensed from Children’s Hospital and the Mayo Clinic intended to help doctors determine the best doses of antidepressants and other drugs for individual patients. The Enquirer story didn’t go into much detail, but it sounds as though the company may be measuring variation in genes that influence how quickly the body breaks down, or metabolizes, drugs, such as cytochrome P450.

UPDATE: Belatedly — as in a full week later — AssureRx put out this release on the funding. The only additional news seems to be that the startup’s tests look at several genes, not just one.

Arresto Biosciences, cancer-drug developer, raises funds – Arresto BioSciences, a Palo Alto, Calif., biotech developing a new class of cancer drugs, has raised an undisclosed sum in two funding rounds since last May, VentureWire reports. Investors included Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and HealthCare Ventures.

Arresto is developing drugs that attack the “extracellular matrix,” a tissue layer that provides structural support to cells. Under certain conditions, changes in the extracellular matrix appear to play a role in the development of cancer, as well as “fibrotic” disease such as cirrhosis and pulmonary fibrosis.

San Diego’s Obalon raises $4.7M for drug discovery – Obalon, a stealthy San Diego drug developer, raised $4.7 million of an anticipated $7.7 million first funding round, peHUB reports. Investors included Domain Associates, Okapi Ventures and Phagia Technology.

Genius, which lets businesses track the behavior of customers visiting their Web site, has raised $19 million more in financing.

Genius lets a salesperson track who is visiting a page (see image at left), and jump in to have an IM chat with a customer who seems close to making a purchase on the site — to either help close the purchase or answer any questions the customer might have.

The financing round for the San Mateo, Calif. company was led by Accel Parters. Previous investors, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Emergence Capital and Walden International, also invested. The four-year-old company previously raised $15.1 million.

The company now says it has more than 400 corporate customers, up from 100 customers when we wrote about the company a year ago. It says it just closed a major account with British Telecom.

Chief executive David Thompson told us the company has focused on new features like email campaigns. In such a campaign, a salesperson can send out emails with links. When a potential customer clicks on a link and comes to the site, Genius lets the salesperson watch their clicking behavior.

Management teams at some companies (BT, for example) are now using the product to monitor how well email campaigns perform, how a web site is performing and how the salesforce is doing overall.

However, Genius will face more competition with its move into email. Competitors include Eloqua (coverage here), and for email, ExactTarget and Constant Contact.

The product is sold for $49 per user per month.

Visible Measures is the latest company trying to give publishers better knowledge of how users react to their videos — so that they can insert advertising in the right places.

The core of Visible Measures’ technology is a tracker that content owners attach to their videos. Once installed, they can see what viewers do with the video — how long they watch for, whether they use controls like the pause, whether they rewind or jump forward or even change the volume.

All of this is aimed at a few very simple objectives. Publishers want to put ads in their videos, and to do so, they need to know what their viewers will put up with. And, for the content itself, they want to see what viewers like in the first place.

For the moment, Visible Measures is aiming mainly at large media publishers — the network television companies of the world, who have the most to lose or gain from moving their content online. However, the company also recently acquired VidMeter, which helps smaller publishers put their content out onto video networks.

Mohr Davidow Ventures led the $13.5 million funding round, announced in conjunction with the product launch. General Catalyst, which provided Visible Measures’ first round of $5 million, also participated. The company is based in Boston, with offices in Palo Alto.

The company provides a video “demo,” but it’s vague and not very useful:

In less than a year, cellulosic ethanol startup ZeaChem has raced through preliminary pilot testing in a tiny Silicon Valley pilot plant, and now plans to build a larger facility in Oregon.

Experts consider cellulosic ethanol one of the most promising technologies for helping to reduce global warming, but the technology is still unproven, and there’s a race on to be first to commercial production. The challenge is to make it cost-competitive with oil.

We first mentioned ZeaChem just a few months ago, when the company received an initial $6 million venture investment.

ZeaChem’s patented process is distinct. Whereas most methods seek to reduce cellulosic biomass like wood or grass into either a gas or liquid, ZeaChem does both. It does that by first separating biomass into its constituent parts — cellulose and lignin. The company also uses an organism taken from a termite’s stomach to more efficiently break down the biomass.The upshot is a 50 percent higher yield over competing methods, says Dan Verser, ZeaChem’s vice president of research and development. Getting more fuel out of less material will help the company eventually make ethanol for less than $1 per gallon, if it’s able to scale production up.

First, though, the company’s planned one-and-a-half million gallon per year pilot plant in Oregon will have to prove the concept. So far, ZeaChem has made its ethanol in large batches at its Menlo Park, Calif., laboratory, but at nothing approaching commercial scale.

The plan is to build the pilot plant in stages, in order to work out kinks in the process progressively. In the first stage, the plant will only use sugar as its feedstock, and produce ethyl acetate, an intermediate chemical on the way to making ethanol.

The second stage will switch the feedstock over to wood chips provided by the state’s forestry industry. ZeaChem will then begin making ethanol from the wood. After that, the company will build a commercial plant to produce around 50 million gallons per year.

For the moment, the company is raising funds from a combination of venture capital and debt, in order to begin construction on the pilot plant later this year. It hopes to complete all stages next year, at which point it would be another two years from completion of a full-scale plant.

Among ZeaChem’s many potential competitors, the only one already constructing a commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plant in the United States is Range Fuels, which broke ground in November for a plant in Soperton, Georgia. Verser is somewhat skeptical of that company’s chances, noting its gasification technique is a “brute force approach that takes massive capital expenditure.”

Other cellulosic ethanol companies, like Coskata, Losonoco and SunEthanol and (coverage here, here and here) have timelines closer to ZeaChem’s. Perhaps the furthest along besides Range is Mascoma, which reportedly planned to break ground late last year for a plant using switchgrass as its feedstock — but it appears to have not yet begun construction.

So far, ZeaChem has taken funding from Mohr Davidow Ventures and Firelake Capital, who provided the $6 million round last year.

Update note: The Mercury has a video of the ZeaChem process, part of their own article on the company.

Suppose a simple blood test were to tell you that you’ve got a better than 50 percent chance of developing “type 2″ diabetes — a form of the disease long associated with age and obesity — within the next five years. Would you make the recommended lifestyle changes, by eating right and exercising more? Would you even consider starting lifelong medication that might postone or prevent the disease entirely?

These are the sorts of choices that Tethys Bioscience, an Emeryville, Calif., biotech, would like to force on you before much longer. Tethys is preparing to launch a new diagnostic test — dubbed Diabetes PreDx (”dx” is a common medical abbreviation for “diagnostic” or “diagnosis,” although here it’s pronounced in a way that sounds like “predicts”) — that it says can accurately identify people who are most at risk of developing diabetes. The company plans to launch the test in a preliminary version later this month, with a full rollout planned for June.

The Tethys approach is conceptually simple, if still somewhat breathtaking on a practical level. Diabetes PreDx measures a patient’s blood sample for roughly 100 proteins that the company has linked to the progression of diabetes, then produces a numerical score that quantifies an individual’s diabetic risk. People with scores at the low end of the spectrum will actually have a substantially lower risk of diabetes — as much as five times lower — than conventional measures might suggest, while those at the other end may face an equally elevated risk.

This is obviously a pretty big deal if the test works the way Tethys says it does. The company says it refined and validated its test over the past five years — it was founded in 2002 — using tens of thousands of historical blood samples and matching them against whether the donors actually developed diabetes. Tethys says it’s already presented supporting data at various scientific meetings over the past year, although it doesn’t appear to have actually published any of it yet.

Tethys isn’t saying exactly which proteins it’s identified for the test, although the company’s CEO, Mickey Urdea, acknowledged that some are indicators of glucose metabolism, while others are related to liver function, inflammation and blood coagulation.

“This is why using a single marker, or a combination of two markers, has always been insufficient” to make accurate diabetes-risk predictions, Tethys chief scientific officer Mike Richey says. “There are multiple pathways by which people reach [a diabetic state of] glucose dysregulation.”

What, exactly, could a high-scoring individual do to alter his or her fate? Obviously, the first step would be to start paying closer attention to diet — specifically to the consumption of sugary or refined-carbohydrate foods that tend to trigger repeated surges of insulin production in the body — and to exercise more. In addition, Tethys officials suggest that some of the safer diabetes medications now in use, particularly the generic drug metformin and newer drugs such known as DPP-IV inhibitors such as Merck’s Januvia, might be able to prevent irreversible damage well before it occurs.

Diabetes PreDx is the result of years of stealthy work by a group of former employees at Chiron’s diagnostic unit, who came together at Tethys to find a way to make useful blood tests that could help patients and their doctors postpone or prevent the onset of serious chronic diseases. The company is also at work on a predictive test for osteoporosis, and has another diagnostic candidate in the pipeline. Tethys hasn’t said what it will charge for Diabetes PreDx, but says its models show that identifying and, presumably, postponing the onset of diabetes in a single individual can save the healthcare system $1,100. So don’t expect the test to be particularly cheap.

Tethys also just raised an undisclosed sum in a third round of funding, bringing its total financing so far to $54 million. Investors in the round included Intel Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Mohr Davidow Ventures.

SodaHead is one of many companies that offers a polling widget that you can embed on a blog or social network. Others include Polldaddy, Pollection, JS-Kit, Vizu, and others. But SodaHead differentiates itself by being focused on social interactions.

Poll Answers

SodaHead pairs polls with features such as discussion forums and Myspace-style user profiles, so users can both vote and discuss the issue presented in the poll, and do things like comment on each others’ profiles.

To demonstrate, here’s a poll with a hot question of the day in the tech blogosphere. Should you, as blogger Robert Scoble thinks, be able to use third-party service Plaxo to remove information from Facebook friends’ email addresses from their profiles (our coverage)? I agree that you should — after all, if somebody both Facebook-friends you and displays their email address on their profile, they are literally sharing it with you already. Not everyone agrees — so, if you want to talk about the issue more, use SodaHead’s forum that comes with this poll. You can either access the forum through the widget or go to it directly, here.

Back to SodaHead, the company. It launched four months ago, and has gained the most traction, it tells us, with musicians and their fans on Myspace. Many artists and managers are looking for new ways to interact with their large Myspace fan bases. Popular acts that use SodaHead include Plain White T’s, My Chemical Romance, Avenged Sevenfold. Others include include Pajamas Media, Hilary Clinton campaigners, OK Magazine, college newspapers and others.

The Los Angeles-based company reports 300,000 monthly unique visitors and 2.4 million monthly page views. It says it has done basically no public relations work, received no press coverage, forged no partnerships and done only limited advertising.

It was founded by Jason Feffer, a former vice president of operations and founding member at Myspace, and Michael Glazer, a former senior vice president of technology at investment bank Jefferies. It has raised $4.3 million from Mohr Davidow Ventures, angel group Tech Coast Angels and prolific angel investor Ron Conway.

updated
OPX Biotechnologies, a new startup that hopes to modify microorganisms to produce fuels similar to those we use for power generation today, has received $3.6 million in a first round of venture funding.

Although fuels like biodiesel and ethanol are also called biofuels, the term has a different meaning for companies like OPX. It, and a small handful of other companies, are modifying the DNA of bacteria, fungi and other lifeforms to cause them to produce fuels as a natural waste by-product.

Scientists have already proven that using microorganisms can result in higher efficiency over conventional methods of making biofuels. Unfortunately, there are various problems. The organisms often die, for instance, or don’t produce a high enough volume of fuel.

The trick is to modify their DNA to make changes. However, getting precise results is difficult or impossible, and each must be tested out in turn. That means the process of changing multiple genes in a bacteria to create a fuel-production unit is akin to walking through a casino spinning each roulette wheel, hoping that each will land on a winning combination.

Robert Chess, the company’s new CEO, said in an interview that OPX’s advantage is in how quickly it can spin the wheel. The company’s founders, two scientists from the University of Colorado in Boulder, have developed a method to make multiple changes at once while aiming at a specific result, like raising the tolerance of a yeast for living in its own waste, the fuel by-product. They say their process will be up to thousands of times faster.

That’s good news for the company, because it’s already behind. OPX was only founded earlier this year, by which time companies like Amyris (our coverage) and LS9 (our coverage) had already hit on some winning combinations. They’re beginning work on building pilot plants. That said, pilot plants don’t necessarily suggest success. Just look at the solar cell industry, for a comparison: Multiple start-ups have produced pilot plants for new cells, but most of them are still struggling to get to market and have suffered multiple delays. The same is likely to happen in new biofuels.

To catch up, OPX must first identify the main microorganism strains it wants to work with, and what kind of fuels it wants to produce. It hopes to have a pilot plant in the works by 2009, which is early enough to keep it in the running.

Each competitor in the race to produce a cost-effective biofuel must take some time to build up capacity, which will give later entrants — include Gevo (our coverage) and Green Biologics (our coverage) — some time to scale up. The potential upside to all for producing a cheaper alternative to gasoline and other fuels is, of course, enormous.

OPX is still based in Colorado, although Chess is located in Woodside, Calif. The $3.6 million funding was provided by Mohr Davidow Ventures, along with X/Seed Capital, which did the company’s seed funding round.