VentureBeat

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.

SiBEAM, a company developing technology to stream high definition video more quickly than any existing technology, has raised $40 million in third round of funding.

The financing was led by New Enterprise Associates. The other firms backing up SiBEAM are Foundation Capital and U.S. Venture Partners.

SiBEAM, of Sunnyvale, Calif., is developing a technology called WirelessHD. The technology helps you move rich, high-definition data like video wirelessly from one gadget to another, such as from your portable digital video camera to you TV. We’ve covered the company earlier.

WirelessHD competes with WirelessUSB and WiFi. Wireless USB transfers data at a speed of 480 megabits a second over three meters, while wirelessHD uses the 60-gigahertz spectrum and works in higher speeds, starting at four gigabits at 10 meters and with the theoretical maximum speeds of up to 25 gigabits a second, as the technology matures. That is more than ten times faster than WiFi solutions.

SiBEAM is the first company to build 60GHz chipsets using a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology that lowers the costs of the WiHD solution so that it’s affordable for the mass market.

With the money raised, the company hopes to get is the first WiHD-gadgets to shops by the end of this year.

If SiBEAM succeeds, it will be remarkable. The video market is huge, and who wouldn’t want to download videos faster?

The first devices available to consumers will be “little adapter devices” that are used with the existing gadgets like TV, HD movie players, camcorders and gaming consoles, says John LeMoncheck, the President and CEO of SiBEAM.

The price of the adapter is expected to be on par with WiFi adapters. With the adapter, WirelessHD can be used with old gadgets. WirelessHD chips embedded to new TVs and other new gadgets will appear in shops in the beginning of year 2009, LeMoncheck says.

If you’ve just bought a flat-screen TV, and want to transfer hi-definition video from your laptop or camcorder to your TV, you can buy the adapter — instead of having to buy a new TV.

He says that the main target for the solution is new flat screen TVs. WiHD will work with a range of ten meters, so it’s meant to be used between the devices in one room, not in the whole house.

John LeMoncheck said he is convinced that WiHD will win “the battle of wireless technology” and become the standard in wireless. WirelessHD is promoted by SiBEAM, Intel, LG Electronics, Panasonic, NEC Corporation, Samsung Electronics, Toshiba and Sony. The companies formed a group to promote WirelessHD standard in the year 2006.

SiBEAM was founded 2004 by experts in wireless communications from the University of California, Berkeley and the private industry. The company has 80 employees.

updated
New Enterprise Associates, until recently one of the largest Silicon Valley venture capital firms, is looking less and less like a venture capital firm. It has transformed into a late-stage private equity firm, doing more buyouts and debt. And thus it becomes another protagonist in the tale of the shrinking — or at least, hurting — VC industry.

Look, for example, at NEA’s $50M investment in Simplex, a distributor of diabetes-testing supplies, based in Tennessee, a story wrritten up by David Hamilton at VentureBeat LifeSciences. What in the world is this Sand Hill Road firm doing?, David rightly asks.

True, NEA has the token partner or two looking at traditional early technology investments (Kittu Kolluri, for example, though even he is investing $4 million a pop), but its focus is largely elsewhere. Its drift started a few years ago, and comes at a time when traditional venture capital is in a crisis mode. [Update: While the bulk of NEAs dollars are being invested in more mature companies, Kittu tells us the company is still doing seed investments at $1 million.]. Despite the talk of the bubble (see the WSJ piece today, for example), VCs firms are showing signs of depression and crisis (see BusinessWeek piece). This is the big difference from 1999/2000, when the bubble and VC fortunes were joined at the hip.

We’ve written about NEA’s recent gutsy moves before.

[Update II: We've worked with the company to get more specific data. It says it has made five seed investments of $1 million or less this years, so it certainly has not abandoned early-stage investing outright. Every single one of these companies is stealth, and so the firm is not giving out their names. Kittu says the firm is still committed in this area. However, the firm has 44 investment professionals with $2.5 million in cash to invest from their latest fund; most of it is clearly going later stage.]

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.

Sometimes, if you keep plugging away, you can pull something off — even if its daunting during the low points along the way.

Two years ago, we wrote about San Francisco’s Yipes, which provides “managed ethernet services” for corporate customers. At the time, it was raising yet another $24 million more in venture capital. The funding cycles seemed endless. Launched in 1998, it had gone through bankruptcy had raised a whopping $385 million — a seeming impossible amount to generate a profit from. One more symbol of the excess of the Bubble.

We called the company “Yikes.”

Today we learn the company has just been acquired for $300 million by Reliance Communications. Groups like NEA, Focus and Sprout kept investing in the company through the years and probably didn’t make much, if anything. But newcomer Crosslink Capital, which led the turnaround beginning 2005, has apparently done very well — because it’s stake wasn’t watered down by the restructuring, and it held a major chunk of the company. At least someone is a winner in the saga.

(Updated to correct reference to Artimi’s total funding)

SiBeam, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, Calif. company, has emerged from secrecy with a chip it says transfers uncompressed high-definition video to an HDTV from a set-top box or other source.

Transferring high-definition video wirelessly is something several companies are offering — all of them in various stages of development and each using different technology. This could permanently remove wires from your home. Few of the companies offer the transfer uncompressed like SiBeam though.

There’s an explanation of its technology here.

However, it’s not clear at all who is going to buy this technology, and whether consumers really care about uncompressed versus compressed (SiBeam says uncompressed is more secure and may appeal to content producers worried about pirating).

It uses 60GHz technology using standard CMOS.

Artimi, a company with U.S. headquarters in Santa Clara, has raised $26.5more than $50 million in funding to develop its chip using ultrawideband technology, focused on portable devices. UltrawideBand can transmit up to a whopping 500 megabits of data a second — roughly 10 times today’s Wi-Fi speeds. Another player, Tzero has raised more than $38 million. Then there are WiFi-focused companies like Palo Alto’s Airgo Networks which say their technology can do just as well. Airgo was snapped up by Qualcomm after raising $130 million. There’s also Ruckus Wireless, which has raised $30 million (see coverage).

SiBeam itself has raised $38 million from Foundation, NEA and US Venture Partners.

“The big question is do consumers want any of this stuff, (and) how much extra is this going to cost them,” says Brian O’Rourke, analyst at In-Stat, to the Mercury News

Here’s the latest wrap-up of Silicon Valley tech news:

Cisco sues Apple over iPhone name — Who cares? If Apple loses, it will come up with a different name. Like, ApplePhone, or iPodPhone. Details of suit.

Yahoo signs deal with Akimbo to deliver video to televisions — Just the latest move in a huge number of deals pushing video to your TV. More details here.

Avvenu shares music via link in email — Avvenu, a Palo Alto start-up has been around for a while, but has introduced a new service for sharing music. By downloading a free music player, users can select tracks they wish to share (250 for free) and send links to friends via email. Recipients click on the link to listen for up to five days. Users sharing their music must have iTunes software downloaded, though recipients don’t. Works on Windows mobile software, too.

The latest on Jeff Bezos’ space project – Here’s the scoop from Amazon.com’s Bezos on Blue Origin, which reveals a cone-shaped vehicle to be used “to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system.” Tests have already been made, though the program has some ways to go.

MyBlogLog sold for reported $10M, after no venture capital, and then spammed — The service, which lets bloggers and others see who is reading their blogs, and where those readers tend to go afterward, has sold to Yahoo for a reported $10 million. MyBlogLog became popular last year, after its little widget started showing up on blogs with the pictures of their readers. Some 45,000 bloggers had signed up for it. Om talked with chief exec Scott Rafer. Lately, though, some have showed it is relatively easy to spam.

Update on Techdirt’s analyst service — As reported (see here), Techdirt raised $600,000 to build out its Insight Community product, which hooks up expert bloggers with companies that seek their advice. Mike Masnick (left), of Techdirt, who has built the company without outside investments over the past decade, tells VentureBeat he finally bit the bullet, realizing it made sense to raise money to help build out the project — given all of the interest he’d received in it. It is still in testing mode, but he’s now building more interactive features, letting people in the network communicate with each other, rather than limit it to one-to-one relationship originally envisioned. Entrepreneur Mark Fletcher, one of the investors, joins the board. Also, investors were all outsiders. Insiders didn’t participate, as suggested earlier by the PEhub report, Masnick said.

Slideshow company Slide raised $20 million — We’d reported Slide’s venture round last year. Reports suggest Slide raised $20 million, giving it a valuation afterward of $60 to $80 million. This gives it some runway, even as competitor Filmloop lays off most of its workers. Here is our earlier story.

Weatherbill, an online site to sell weather insurance policies to individuals and businesses — Sounds boring, but it has all the Map mashups and other Web 2.0 candy to make it worth a look (via Techcrunch)
It has raised a first round of round of financing from NEA, Index Ventures and a number of angel investors.

Second Life has opened its application to developers — Many people find the virtual world Second Life difficult to get the hang of, which has no doubt limited its growth. Now it has opened its software for developers to provide alternatives. It isn’t clear whether this will spark a vibrant developer community or not.

Podzinger searches words in YouTube videos — Podzinger gives you a way search for words that are mentioned in YouTube videos. Podzinger has a tab letting you do this on its front page, and it tells you how many minutes and seconds into the video the reference is (although we couldn’t figure out how to zip automatically to the reference, like Pluggd does). More details here, at Splashcast blog. Blinkx is another company that searches audio and video files.

PayPerPost drops its purchase of Perfomancing assets — Details here.

Aaron Swartz, of Reddit, not done dreaming — Good piece in the Chronicle mentioning the impressive rise of Swartz, who built his first web site at 13, got bored, and then, circuitously, ended up building Reddit, which was bought by Wired Digital. Now 20, he says he’s headed back to academia soon. Re hanging out: “I’m so shy I don’t even hang out with the people I know now.”

Hype at Asiatech? — Days ago, we reported on the purchase of software developer Mediabolic by Macrovision. Sources told us the return was marginal, giving later investors slightly more than the money they invested. But it was no where near a two-fold return claimed by AsiaTech investor Katherine Jen in an interview with VentureWire recently, they said. Jen did not respond to a request by VentureBeat for comment about her “2x return” claim.

See Jobs’ demo of iPhone — It is striking, and worth it. See here, and click on “touch navigation” for starters.