Updated 10 a.m. with new item
Some news on VC fundraising, startup investment, corporate layoffs, and student entrepreneurship in this midweek rundown of items to catch up on:

—Matrix Partners, based in Waltham, MA, has confirmed that it’s raised $450 million for its 10th venture fund. The news first surfaced in mid-April, courtesy of Fortune’s Dan Primack. Matrix did have one bone to pick with that earlier report: although its ninth fund was $600 million, as Primack noted, Matrix says that included a $150 million “special opportunity fund” that didn’t actually wind up drawing any capital from Matrix’s investors.

—E-commerce startup The Grommet (no longer Daily Grommet) has added more investment from Japanese e-commerce site Rakuten. As Kara Swisher at AllThingsD reports, neither company is saying how much money was put into Grommet again (Rakuten led an unspecified Series B investment in the startup last fall). But the larger company is now Lexington, MA-based Grommet’s “majority stakeholder,” Swisher says.

—More cleantech blues: Newton, MA-based Ambient Corp. is charging $350,000 in costs to a restructuring plan, most of that in employee severance. The Boston Business Journal cites unnamed sources pegging the number of laid-off Ambient workers at more than 25, roughly a quarter of the company’s overall workforce. Ambient (NASDAQ: AMBT), which makes smart grid connectivity and communications equipment, also announced its CFO was resigning earlier this month.

—Highland Capital has picked the newest class of student entrepreneurs to participate in its Summer@Highland program, which offers free office space and a no-strings-attached stipend of $18,000 to work on a startup idea over the summer. The full list of participants includes some good hometown representation, with teams from Harvard, MIT, Boston College, and Olin College. Cambridge, MA-based Highland recently filed paperwork outlining plans to raise a $400 million ninth fund.

Update:
—Acacia Communications, an equipment supplier for telecommunications companies, has raised a new $20 million round of financing. Summit Partners led the round, joined by existing investors Matrix Partners, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, and Egan Managed Capital. Acacia is based in Maynard, MA.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Call this bit of news a “blast from the past” that will make people in Colorado’s oil and gas industry smile—and could leave environmentalists and members of the clean energy industry shaking their heads.

Rigzone, an online industry news and analysis publication based in Houston, has named Denver the best oil and gas city in the U.S. and third-best oil and gas city in the world. The only cities to beat out Denver were second-ranked Calgary, Alberta, which is the center of Canada’s energy industry, and top-ranked Dubai, the booming United Arab Emirates city that is the hub for the oil and gas industry in the Persian Gulf.

While the rankings aren’t an authoritative measure—Rigzone said about 8,000 readers participated in its survey—it is another indicator that the “old school” energy industry is booming while new industries such as wind and solar are struggling.

Rigzone’s introduction to the rankings said it looked at two factors—the economic potential of the area and its attractiveness as a place to work.

The Denver area did well on both measures. Companies including Halliburton, Noble Energy, Anadarko Petroleum, and EnCana have significant operations in the area. Estimates created by industry groups estimate oil and gas accounted for 77,600 jobs in the state in 2012, along with value-added economic activity of more than $11 billion. They project that by 2035, those numbers could swell to 175,363 jobs and $26 billion in impact.

The report also cited the Denver area’s quality of life, opportunities for outdoor recreation, and good weather.

What’s good for employees in the oil and gas world is to the consternation of environmentalists and some local communities.

New improvements to technologies such as directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, are contributing to the boom. Together they have opened up new areas for exploration, but those fields often are near communities on the Front Range, where most Coloradans live. For the past few years, opponents have been organizing against the industry.

It is an interesting contrast to just a few years ago, when renewable energy was predicted to become the driving force behind Colorado’s “New Energy Economy.” Wind turbine manufacturers such as Vestas and solar panel makers including Abound Solar were predicted to make Colorado a leader in cleantech, but in the past few years Vestas has struggled with repeated layoffs and Abound has gone bankrupt.

Renewable energy analysts still believe in Colorado’s potential, with an Ernst & Young report ranking Colorado the third most attractive state for the renewables industries.

Meanwhile, the oil and gas sector looks to be reclaiming its historic place as one of Colorado’s economic drivers, for better and for worse.

The last big boom in the 1970s and 1980s helped build Denver’s skyline and national profile. The city was the setting for the prime-time soap opera Dynasty, which was about a family that earned considerable wealth in oil. But the boom didn’t last, with towns in the gas patch famously becoming ghost towns once drilling companies pulled out.

In the Rigzone rankings, Denver bested world-class cities like Singapore, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro. Denver was the only U.S. city to make the list, although Rigzone’s article suggests Houston might have been excluded from consideration.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Solar power advocates hope this will be the summer that drought-stricken Texas sees the potential of this abundant natural energy source, and changes electricity market structures to take advantage of it.

“Texas is one of the largest untapped solar markets in the U.S.,” says Maura Yates of SunEdison, an integrated supplier of solar equipment and developer of large-scale projects. “When you look at Texas’s overall load of 68 gigawatts, our 100 megawatts on the system is a rounding error at this point.”

Yates and others say they bring a solution to Texas’ electricity challenges that is water-wise, fast to deploy, and matches market needs.

“Where the opportunity lies now for solar is in this conversation,” says Carrie Cullen Hitt, senior vice president of state affairs at the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). “How can solar help with some of these major issues staring Texas in the face?”

Some 64 megawatts of solar were built in Texas last year, ranking the state 10th for new capacity. But oh, the potential. The SEIA says Texas could accommodate more than twice the solar generation capacity of any other state. Its rooftops alone could host 60,000 megawatts.

The solar development that has occurred in Texas so far is driven largely by municipal utilities, such as Austin Energy, responding to “specific civic interest,” says Hitt.

Though it has plenty of sunshine, Texas lacks a broad policy to spur the solar industry. It has not shied away from the other leading renewable energy source, however.

In 1999, under then-Gov. George W. Bush, Texas enacted a pioneering renewable energy mandate that propelled the state—blessed with the best wind resources in the country—toward wind-energy leadership. An expanded renewable energy mandate and a mechanism for driving construction of transmission lines connecting the state’s windy west with urban demand centers contributed to a decade-long wind bonanza.

Texas had more than 10.4 gigawatts of commercial wind turbines in operation that supplied 9.2 percent of the state’s electricity in 2012. On a windy evening in February of this year, wind generation supplied a record 28 percent of electricity used in the three-quarters of the state managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which operates the state’s grid and manages its deregulated electricity market.

Despite that, Texas—one of the few states in the country with growing electricity demand—faces generation capacity shortages.

On Wednesday, ERCOT confirmed its earlier prediction of an abnormally hot summer, with electricity demand likely to break a record set in August 2011, and edging uncomfortably close to total available generation. The ERCOT asks people to conserve power when the grid is nearing its limit, and again faces “the possibility of rotating outages if needed to protect the grid” in extreme conditions, ERCOT executive advisor Kent Saathoff said in a statement.

Solar could help with that, advocates say. … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Fallbrook Technologies was founded in San Diego, and it spent 15 years working to commercialize its design for a new type of continuously variable transmission, with the potential to increase fuel efficiency, reduce emissions, and improve vehicle performance. The company bills its innovative “NuVinci” transmission as a greener and more fuel-efficient technology for cars, trucks, and other types of vehicles.

After generating negligible revenue through 2009, Fallbrook began to gain some real traction last fall, after the company forged strategic partnerships with three major automotive companies that specialize in transmission design and production. The big three deals helped Fallbrook generate more than $43 million in revenue last year.

Over the past four months, however, Fallbrook has released the parking brake on San Diego. The company has moved its headquarters to Cedar Park, TX, a suburb north of Austin that now lists Fallbrook (with 133 employees) among its biggest employers. Fallbrook plans to close its San Diego offices for good in May, leaving behind just a few San Diego employees who will continue to work at home—with occasional trips to Texas.

“The business has grown so fast and so big that we had to do something to centralize our operations in one place,” said Fallbrook CEO Bill Klehm. “It’s just critical to stay close to the action on a day-to-day basis.”

Fallbrook reached strategic partnerships in September with Dana Holding and Allison Transmission that account for much of the company’s increased business. Dana, based in Maumee, OH, has more than 23,000 employees and is a worldwide supplier of axles, driveshafts, and other components for every major vehicle maker in the global automotive industry. Allison, based in Indianapolis, IN, has 2,800 employees, and makes commercial-duty transmissions and hybrid propulsion systems.

Fallbrook granted Allison exclusive rights to develop and … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

For the past couple of years, a variety of high-level federal officials have sounded increasingly urgent alarms about the vulnerabilities of the U.S. power grid to cyber attack.

In October, for example, former U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned that increasingly aggressive hacker groups had developed the technical expertise and software tools needed to shut down the power grid across large parts of the United States. In February, an American computer security firm said it had found that an overwhelming percentage of cyber attacks on U.S. corporations, organizations, and government agencies were originating from a specialized Chinese Army unit in the outskirts of Shanghai. The hacker group is focused increasingly on companies involved in such critical U.S. infrastructure as gas lines, waterworks, and the electrical power grid.

“The probability of an attack is high, and the potential consequences are dire,” according to Duncan Earl, who says he spent 18 years at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory developing IT security technology to address the rising cyber threats from China, Russia, and Iran. The technology, known “quantum encryption,” uses physics to ensure the security of IT communications used by electric utilities today.

Cyber security has become much more of an imperative since utilities began adding computer systems and wireless smart grid technologies in recent years to improve their operational control of the power grid.

Such IT systems use the standardized Internet data protocols known as TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). But Earl says Internet protocols come with a big disadvantage for utilities. Data communications for controlling the power grid over such networks cannot use conventional encryption because computerized commands sent by grid operators must be executed in less than 4 milliseconds—and standard encryption techniques would take too long to read the data.

“We’ve got a vulnerable grid, and there’s no going back,” Earl says. “We need a solution, and we need it quickly.”

Under growing pressure to get … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Houston’s energy sector is an economic powerhouse, but not one usually associated with startup culture.

“Energy is extremely global but it’s also extremely myopic,” says Kirk Coburn, founder and managing director of Surge Accelerator in Houston. “It doesn’t look outside the industry for solutions.”

Industry giants have venture arms, but Houston lacked a fully formed ecosystem that includes innovation at its most basic level—startups and the entrepreneurs who lead them. Surge was founded in 2011 to help fill in those gaps, Coburn (an Xconomist, pictured above) says: “We connect the energy world to entrepreneurs.”

One example of this is DrillMap, which has created a subscription-based Internet database that displays publicly available and private data on wells and pipelines on maps that can be viewed on smartphones, computers, and other devices, similar to the way you could plug queries into a GPS database for restaurants in your area. The Austin company was part of Surge’s inaugural class last year and has so far raised $6.25 million in venture funding from two venture capital firms and one major energy company.

“We were generating revenue before Surge, but since Surge, we’ve signed major clients, and, of course, all the fundraising has been spurred on by our experience there,” says Ross Peery, DrillMap’s CEO.

Coburn himself had founded three companies in Austin when he decided to return to his hometown of Houston two years ago. Though Austin has a reputation of being a startup haven, Houston’s entrepreneurial scene was lost in the shadows of the city’s multinational corporations and international scientific institutions, he says.

So, Coburn decided to found Surge and in 2011 recruited an initial class of 10 startups that were brought together in a rented red-brick mansion along a leafy boulevard west of downtown Houston. Each company at the for-profit accelerator receives $30,000 in funding and the usual assortment of business support and mentoring sessions. Surge can also invest up to $50,000 in optional convertible notes in each startup, something it did in half of the first year’s class. In return, the accelerator takes 6 percent of the company’s equity.

To pay for the space (see photo) and get Surge going, Coburn says he put $75,000 of his own money into the accelerator. He also invested $100,000 of the total $1 million he raised for the small venture fund that provides the seed funding for the startups at Surge. Members of the Houston Angel Network put in $800,000, while Houston-based Mercury Fund invested the remaining $100,000.

Surge companies have raised about $14 million to date. Five hundred hopeful startups applied for the dozen available places in its current class, and these entrepreneurs will make presentations before prominent venture capitalists, angel investors, and business leaders at the second annual Surge Day on May 22.

Surge is one of a handful of Texas-based accelerators, which include Capital Factory in Austin and Tech Wildcatters in Dallas, but is the only one to focus exclusively on software companies designed to innovate and promote efficiencies in the energy industry, a sector not typically known for its entrepreneurial standouts.

Coburn says Surge wasn’t an easy sell to either startups or the corporate establishment at first. Houston’s business community is more risk averse than what you typically find in entrepreneurial hotbeds, he added. “I was given a thorough background check,” Coburn says, as he laughed. “There is a big focus on reputational risk here.”

But he added that Surge’s purpose—to boost innovation in energy IT—ultimately secured buy-in from some of the sector’s major players, including Shell, Schlumberger, and Conoco Phillips. “They recognize that now is the time to look outside their walls for new technologies,” Coburn says.

One of Surge’s ongoing challenges, however, has less to do with the technical aspects of the energy industry: the perception of Texas as “flyover country,” or a place not usually associated with innovation. Entrepreneurs might be interested in coming here, Coburn says, but they are worried what others in Boston or Silicon Valley might say about them.

The bottom line, he says, is that Houston is the hub of the world’s energy industry. “If you want to solve energy problems, we are a good place to connect with the energy world,” he says.

Coburn’s thinking is already large enough to expand potential Surge franchises into the world’s other energy capitals, including Tel Aviv, Calgary, and possibly, Dubai.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Texas has always had a larger-than-life reputation.

Big business, big politics—even big hair—the state’s outsized persona often takes center stage in our national story. No matter where I’ve traveled, be it in a village in Nepal or the glitzy hotels of Hong Kong, when I say “Texas,” I receive a smile and a flash of recognition. Texas is everywhere.

But our story goes beyond the stereotypes. Texas is home to three of the biggest cities in America, and it continues to attract migrants from around the world and around the nation. (This started back with Davy Crockett: “You all may go to hell. And I will go to Texas.”)

Why? Texas is a good place to work, live, and dream. A robust entrepreneurial community works alongside some of the world’s top corporations, medical facilities, and research firms. What happens here today gives us as Americans a glimpse into our nation’s future. That’s not to say there aren’t real challenges in healthcare, education, and using technology to improve standards of living. But those challenges are opportunities that create the perfect crucible for innovation. With the launch of Xconomy Texas, we will present to you a portrait of the Lone Star State not often reflected in the press.

Texas is home to innovators like H. Ross Perot and Jack Kilby, Michael Dell and Mark Cuban. You’ll find the next generation of these men (and there are women, too) in places like the Texas Medical Center and energy startups in Houston, at IT companies scattered across the Dallas suburbs, and at software and media organizations in loft offices in downtown Austin.

On a personal note, Xconomy Texas brings me back to my hometown of Houston. When I left more than 20 years ago, Houston was mired in a deep downturn, plagued by an oil bust and a real estate crash. In the years since, I’ve studied and worked in both Austin—as Silicon Valley transplants transformed a hippie college town during the ’90s tech boom—and Dallas, as it evolved beyond being J.R. Ewing’s hometown and a place where that football team plays.

From late 2008 until last month, I lived and worked in the United Arab Emirates, where regular visits by Texas executives and entrepreneurs reminded me constantly of the state’s position as a major node of the global economy.

So, welcome to Xconomy Texas. And please join the conversation. Whether you’re an old Texas hand or someone new, let us know what we should be writing about. As Lyle Lovett says, “You’re not from Texas. But Texas wants you anyway.”

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

I’ve been coming to Texas regularly for more than 20 years—first to meet my future in-laws, and ever since to visit a growing extended family network around the state. I didn’t envision opening a Texas business arm on that initial visit (I didn’t have a business), but ever since launching Xconomy in mid-2007, I’ve been looking for the right opportunity to expand to the Lone Star State.

Today, I am extremely pleased to say, that opportunity has come. Welcome to Xconomy Texas, the eighth region in our growing national network, and the second cluster site opened in barely the past month (Boulder/Denver launched in late March).

I am also excited to introduce the editor of Xconomy Texas, Angela Shah. Angela is well known around the state, having worked at both the Austin American-Statesman and, more recently, the Dallas Morning News, where she spent eight years as a senior reporter and columnist covering economics, startups, and more. For the past three years, Angela has been based in the United Arab Emirates, writing about business, finance, and other topics for the likes of The New York Times, Newsweek/Daily Beast, TIME, and Forbes Asia. Angela not only brings a great knowledge of Texas, but a world view of innovation, and I believe readers around our network will be treated to a special blend of Texas stories with global context.

Angela will be living in Houston but responsible for our coverage around the state. Her own welcome post will be coming tomorrow. In the meantime, check out her first news feature, about Houston startup Datafiniti moving to Austin because it can’t find enough software developers in its current home town—a problem it turns out other Houston companies are having (Angela gets at why). Chief correspondent Wade Roush (based in San Francisco) has also contributed a story for our Texas debut. He checks in with Siri co-inventor Adam Cheyer, who left Apple last year but who disputes the findings of a recent Texas A&M Transportation Institute study that says using Siri or Vlingo while driving is just as risky as manual texting while driving.

We have also posted our first guest contribution, from Xconomist Bob Metcalfe (Xconomists are our informal editorial advisors–the full list is here). Bob, a noted technology pundit and inventor of Ethernet, is an old friend from Boston who moved to Austin a few years ago to become professor of innovation at UT. His (typically quippy) post gets at some of the differences between Texas and Massachusetts, but also really celebrates what is happening in his beloved adopted state with the declaration that it is “where energy will be solved.”

Our launch in Texas is especially significant to me because the vision behind Xconomy is to be on the ground in key clusters, telling in-depth stories of innovation in diverse fields from information technology to life sciences to energy and more.

And here’s the thing about innovation—it has no boundaries. All too often, the business media misses what is happening around the country because it follows the easy trails in the main clusters like Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston. We at Xconomy know there’s a lot more important work going on in other cities, and we have always believed the best way to serve our readers is to get those stories firsthand.

With the launch of Xconomy Texas, we are now in every time zone in the continental U.S., a big step forward in building a truly national network. (I’d like to make it a clean time-zone sweep, so if anyone over there in Hawaii can help us build our business there, oh, say around next January or February, let me know! Let’s hold off on Alaska until next summer.)

Our launch in Texas was made possible through the support of a fantastic group of partners around the state: BioMed San Antonio, BioHouston, Capital Royalty, Cooley LLP, Rice University, Texas Medical Center, University of Houston, and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. All these great organizations, innovative leaders themselves, dared to take a chance on supporting an independent media company—because they know the importance of in-depth daily information about what is happening in Texas. Thank you one and all!

Which brings me to another point: you will likely have noticed the new site is called Xconomy Texas, whereas all our other sites are named after cities. Truthfully, in all our regions, we cover stories far beyond the city proper: Boston editors, for instance, cover stories around New England. But as we talked to folks in the Texas innovation community in preparation for our launch, we got a lot of feedback that to single out one city in our name would be doing a disservice to the others. We therefore chose to make an exception with our name to symbolize from the start that inclusive view.

Finally, I want to add a special thank you to two incredible friends who were critical to our launch. The first is David Schubert, executive director of the Houston Area Translational Research Consortium (HATRC, fondly pronounced “hat trick”), which seeks to accelerate advances from the Texas Medical Center (or those drawn to the TMC) into commercial markets. David has known us since our June 2008 launch in Seattle, where he lived at the time. When he recently took a job in Texas, he reached out to Xconomy Seattle editor and National biotech editor Luke Timmerman and urged us to expand there. Not only was innovation abounding, he argued, there was a glaring lack of high-quality coverage about it—the kind Xconomy brings. David introduced us to a series of fantastic people who felt the same, many of whom became partners or Xconomists or helped in other ways.

One of those was Jacqueline Northcut, president and CEO of BioHouston and CEO of Texas BioAlliance. Jacqueline quickly grasped what we were about and gave us a Texas-sized welcome, not only opening up many doors but walking through them with us. I could go on about Jacqueline and David, but let’s just say that when we open the Xconomy Hall of Fame, they will be two charter members.

With that, I will turn things over to Angela. Texas is a huge state, but she won’t be on her own. Every editor across our network is contributing stories to help get Xconomy Texas started, and we have also tapped some great freelance writers in the state. All this was coordinated masterfully by deputy editor Greg Huang, while executive editor Rebecca Zacks and designer Rob Hunter led the integration of the new site into our network, marketing coordinator Thea Bissell worked tirelessly on production and worked with all our partners to coordinate announcement of our launch, and associate publisher Jim Edwards continues to travel far and wide building partnerships and business relations.

But we need your help, too, to keep things going. We hope you’ll let us know about story leads, and consider posting your own opinion pieces in our Xconomist Forum, the Op-Ed section of our site. For either of these purposes, write us at editors@xconomy.com, or reach out to Angela directly at ashah@xconomy.com.

Again, great thanks to all our friends and partners in Texas and around our network who made Xconomy Texas possible. I look forward to getting to know the Texas innovation community, and hopefully connecting folks in this great state to others around our network.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

It’s great that Xconomy is finally getting to Texas. Which is not to say that I’m rooting for Austin over “Baustin.” Innovation is not a zero-sum game. Or, as they say around these parts, we know you’re not from Texas, but we’re glad you’re here.

On the other hand, I spent 10 years trying to solve energy by investing in enertech around Boston. But, turns out that Boston is not really an energy innovation cluster. I see now that energy is much more likely to be solved in Texas, The Energy State, probably Houston. Our cowboys understand thermodynamics and chemical engineering at scale.

Texas developed the technologies for horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking, which are yielding (1) vast supplies of (2) cheap, (3) domestic, and (4) lower-carbon energy. Domestic natural gas is being used to replace coal and oil, significantly decarbonizing our energy supplies. U.S. CO2 emissions are down.

The trick is to use this gas boom, not to kill development of alternative energy supplies, but as a bridge, sustaining our economy while we research and innovate to make cheap and clean energy squanderably abundant. Hey, already 8 percent of Texas electricity comes from wind.

What I’ve learned about Texas geography: Austin is the center. We have big suburbs to the north, east, south, and west: Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and El Paso. Dallas gets the tornadoes, Houston gets the hurricanes, and Austin gets the music. Come visit.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Finally, the economy seems to be heading in the right direction, but frustratingly slowly—and peril lurks around every sequester corner. Is that the new normal in this age of rising healthcare costs, venture capital belt-tightening, and a nearly broken Congressional system that can’t see fit to invest properly in vital areas such as research and education?

Well, it doesn’t have to be. And fortunately, incredibly innovative people and organizations are working tirelessly to invent new technologies, business models, and strategies to overcome the conditions that have brought us almost five years of outright recession and lackluster growth.

Now, it is our pleasure to announce the second incarnation of an exclusive Xconomy event dedicated to gathering some of the country’s leading innovators and investors together for a front and center view of these efforts—from healthcare to cyber security to education, food technology, energy, personalized medicine, e-commerce and retail, and much, much more.

The Xconomy Napa Summit: New Rules for Growth will be held this year on June 3 and 4. We are once again convening an amazing body of entrepreneurs, investors, corporate innovators, and Xconomists—our editorial advisors—to explore this vital topic in a spectacular setting. We’ll have plenary chats and small, interactive panels, along with three special deep dive breakout sessions in healthcare, food and the environment, and energy. And plenty of wine.

Among our participants: Ray Rothrock of Venrock, chairman of the National Venture Capital Association; lean startup guru Steve Blank; Zynga co-founder Steve Schoettler; Juan Enriquez of Excel Medical Ventures; Tibco CEO Vivek Ranadivé; Poshmark founder Manish Chandra; Internet and quantified self pioneer Larry Smarr; John Poisson of Wantful; and Get Satisfaction CEO Wendy Lea. You can see the full lineup to date and request an invitation here (read on for more details)—and we will be posting the initial version of the agenda soon.

June 3, 2013: Silver Oak Vineyards (Oakville, CA)

Registration and cocktail reception begins 5:30 PM

Vineyard tour and dinner commences at 6:30 PM

June 4, 2013: Villagio Inn & Spa (Yountville, CA)

Program from 8:15 AM to 3:30 PM

Did I mention wine? We’ll be experiencing some incredible vintages both at our dinner at Silver Oak on June 3 and after our sessions on June 4, when venture capitalist Kevin Kinsella of Avalon Ventures (one of our speakers) will lead a special tasting of Kinsella Estates 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon that garnered a 94 from Wine Spectator.

We only have room for a small number of attendees at this invitation-only event. General registration is $1,250 (you can apply for a discount if you’re from a government organization, non-profit, or startup, or you are a student), and includes wine reception, vineyard tour, and all meals (lodging is separate).

To request an invitation–and for more event information, including the full list of speakers–please visit our Napa Summit event listing here.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Even with the big BIO International Convention in Chicago this week, San Diego still managed to make life science headlines, as Avalon Ventures unveiled a pharma partnership that could bring nearly a half-billion dollars in startup capital to San Diego. We have that and the rest of the local life sciences news over the past week.

—San Diego’s Avalon Ventures and the London-based drug giant GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK) said they signed a strategic partnership to start as many as 10 new biotech companies in San Diego. Avalon Ventures and GSK also committed to invest as much as $495 million in seed funding, R&D support, and milestone payments for the startups.

—Tranzyme Pharma (NASDAQ: TZYM), said it is merging its struggling business into San Diego-based Ocera Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical startup developing new treatments for liver disease. The combined public company will be based in San Diego and operate as Ocera. Tranzyme CEO Vipin Garg is leaving the company, which will be headed by Ocera CEO Linda Grais. The merged company also plans to raise $20 million through a private investment in a public company.

—San Diego-based Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN) said it has entered into a strategic collaboration with China’s Kindstar Global, enabling Kindstar to use Illumina gene sequencing equipment and supplies to expand its specialty testing services in more than 3,300 hospitals throughout China. Financial terms were not disclosed.

—Sense4Baby, a startup developing wireless fetal monitor technology licensed from San Diego’s West Health Institute, said it has received $4 million in funding from the West Health Investment Fund. San Diego-based Sense4Baby also named Jessica Grossman as CEO. Grossman was previously the medical director of Ethicon Endo-Surgery, a Johnson & Johnson company.

—BioAtla, a San Diego-based antibody therapeutics developer, and Providence, RI-based EpiVax said they have agreed to incorporate EpiVax’s proprietary immunogenicity screening technology into BioAtla’s technology for boosting the binding capabilities of humanized antibodies. In a statement, the companies said combining the two technologies is expected to increase the success rate of biotherapeutic drugs.

—It was front-page news back in 2009 when ExxonMobil said it would spend up to $600 million to develop algae-based biofuels in collaboration with San Diego’s Synthetic Genomics. But the partnership ran aground in 2011 after an algal strain that produced oil in a greenhouse failed to perform at an ExxonMobil facility in Texas, according to a Bloomberg news report. Contract changes by ExxonMobil led Synthetic Genomics to lay off more than half of the employees working on biofuels for the company. Synthetic Genomics spokeswoman Heather Kowalski told Bloomberg the effort now focuses on long-term R&D instead of commercial production.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

According to MoneyTree data released today, first-quarter venture funding in southeast Michigan was down compared to the first quarter of 2012, though the deal count rose by one. Compared to last year, funding in Q1 2013 was down by almost two-thirds, with venture capitalists investing $17.6 million in 13 deals.

However, 2012 was a record-high year for Detroit in terms of venture activity. By contrast, during the first quarter of 2011, VCs invested only $3.9 million in seven deals.

Detroit’s venture activity mirrors national trends. According to MoneyTree data, there was a 6 percent decrease in capital deployed nationally during the first quarter of 2013 compared to the same quarter last year, when nearly $6.3 billion was invested in 868 deals.

The first-quarter deals in Detroit were:

—$5.2 million invested by 5am Venture Management, Frazier Healthcare, and Osage Partners in Atterocor, an Ann Arbor-based startup developing a therapy to treat adrenal cancer.

—$2.5 million invested by Northcoast Technology Investors in Gema Diagnostics, an Ann Arbor firm that makes tools for testing embryos during in vitro fertilization.

—$2.3 million invested by Detroit Venture Partners (DVP), DFJ International, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC), Northcoast, and other undisclosed investors in Detroit-based social referral site Stik.com.

—$1.4 million invested by Early Stage Partners, the MEDC, and RSVP International in uRefer, the Ann Arbor startup behind the digital marketing platform Amplifinity.

—$1.2 million invested by Grand Angels and Start Garden in Blue Medora, a Grand Rapids-based company making software products that enhance the capabilities of Oracle, IBM, and VMware platforms.

—$1 million invested by DVP and another undisclosed investor in iRule, the Detroit-based maker of remote control apps.

—$1 million invested by Andreessen Horowitz Fund I, First Step Fund, Huron River Ventures, Hyde Park Venture Partners, and other undisclosed investors in Farm Logs, the Ann Arbor-based ag-tech startup.

—$850,000 invested by Ann Arbor SPARK in Algal Scientific, a Plymouth-based biomass production company.

—$750,000 invested by DVP, Ludlow Ventures, Griffon Venture Partners, Bizdom, and Start Garden in Chalkfly, the Detroit-based online school supplies startup.

—$640,000 invested by an undisclosed investor in 3D Biomatrix, a University of Michigan spinoff developing ways for drug researchers to test their therapies on cell cultures with three dimensions.

—$480,000 invested by DVP and Ludlow in UpTo, the Detroit-based social calendar app.

—$280,000 invested by Start Garden, Bizdom, and other undisclosed investors in GreenLancer, the Detroit startup offering cloud-based cleantech engineering services.

—$100,000 invested by Ann Arbor SPARK, the First Step Fund, the University of Michigan, and other undisclosed investors in Fusion Coolant Systems, a cleantech startup based in Ann Arbor and Detroit.

The MoneyTree Report is compiled by Pricewaterhouse Coopers and the NVCA, using data from Thomson Reuters.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

[Updated 4/23/13 2:30 pm. See below.] The year is off to a slow start in terms of venture capital investing, both for companies in the Boulder/Denver area and around the country, according to the MoneyTree Report released today.

Sixteen companies in the Boulder/Denver region raised $77 million in the first quarter, which is the lowest quarterly amount since the first quarter of 2010, according to the report. In the fourth quarter of 2012, 21 area companies raised $86.3 million.

Colorado’s sluggish start is in keeping with the national trend, according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), based on data from Thomson Reuters.

One reason for the drop is that venture capital firms are consolidating, according to John Taylor, who heads research for the NVCA. Fewer firms are able to raise funds, and those that can are raising smaller funds. Venture capitalists also are investing less in industries that require a lot of capital, such as cleantech, Taylor said.

WellTok’s $18.7 million deal was the largest in the area. The Denver-based company is producing an online platform that uses social media, competitions, and gamification to help insurance plans work with clients to improve their health and cut costs. Emergence Capital Partners, InterWest Partners, and New Enterprise Associates were the firms that invested in WellTok’s financing round.

Two other deals topped the $10 million mark. Convercent, a startup based in Denver, raised $10.2 million in a round that included Azure Capital Partners and Mantucket Capital. Convercent develops cloud-based compliance software.

Ciris Energy raised $10 million. The Centennial, CO-based company is trying to develop a system to convert coal to natural gas using microbes.

The figures for Boulder/Denver are for companies located in the Denver and Boulder metropolitan statistical areas, which span 11 counties around the two cities. There was an additional $1.9 million deal in the part of Colorado outside that area. In the fourth quarter of 2012, two companies outside Boulder/Denver raised a combined $10.4 million. [Updated to provide numbers for the entire state.]

The rest of the Boulder/Denver area’s 10 biggest deals of Q1:

—BiOptix raised $6.23 million

—Photobucket raised $5.65 million

—Novinda raised $5 million

—Luca Technologies raised $4 million

—Infinite Power Solutions raised $3.87 million

—Coalfire Systems raised $3.55 million

—TeamSnap raised $2.75 million

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Overall venture capital activity slowed in the U.S. during the first three months of 2013, with venture capitalists investing $5.9 billion in 863 deals nationwide, according to the MoneyTree Report released today.

Compared with the previous quarter, VC funding was off nearly 12 percent and the deal count was down almost 15 percent. Venture firms invested $6.7 billion in 1,013 deals in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), based on data from Thomson Reuters.

The amount of capital deployed during the first quarter also was down over 6 percent from the same quarter last year, when nearly $6.3 billion was invested in 868 deals, according to MoneyTree data.

John Taylor, who heads research for the NVCA, told me by phone there is nothing unexpected about the lower investment levels because the venture industry has been consolidating, with a smaller number of firms raising less capital. VC fund-raising over the past decade peaked in 2006, when NVCA data shows that 236 VC firms raised almost $31.2 billion from college endowments, pension funds, and other institutional funds. In 2012, 189 firms raised more than $19.4 billion.

Taylor said a couple of other factors also are contributing to the slowdown: VC firms are providing less funding in capital-intensive sectors like cleantech and life sciences, especially in first-time deals; and VCs are investing smaller amounts in more Internet and software deals.

“One place where we did see an increase was in companies that are in later-stage rounds,” Taylor said. To him, it’s an indication that more venture-backed companies are planning IPOs. “Our hope is that as companies come off their 2012 audits that they are starting to put their S-1 [IPO] filings together to go public,” Taylor said. “We expect to see a large number of companies go public this year.”

Under securities reforms adopted just over a year ago, companies also can now submit their IPO filings confidentially for regulatory review. About 175 IPO filings have been submitted to … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Last week, Allen Park, MI-based EcoMotors announced a $200 million deal with China’s Zhongding Power to build a manufacturing plant in Anhui Province. The plant will produce EcoMotors’ opposed piston opposed cylinder (“opoc”) engines, which the company says are cheaper to manufacture and will deliver up to 60 percent greater fuel efficiency than conventional engines at half the size and weight. It’s the world’s first opoc plant.

Don Runkle, EcoMotors’ CEO, calls the deal a good next step, and one that has been in motion essentially since the company signed a letter of intent with Zhongding in 2010. Zhongding, one of the biggest producers of automotive components in China, will finance and build the plant, which will have the capacity to manufacture about 150,000 engines per year—generating a potential $1 billion in revenue, Runkle notes.

“China is a big target for us,” Runkle says. “It’s the most rapidly growing engine market in the world, and they’re aggressively looking at new technology rather than copying existing technology in the United States or Europe.”

Runkle says EcoMotors will receive a portion of the engines manufactured in China to sell to its other customers with no “cap back,” meaning EcoMotors won’t have to pay Zhongding for those engines. Zhongding benefits because the total number of engines being manufactured adds volume at the new plant. Zhongding plans to supply opoc engines to its own set of customers across China.

Runkle says even though the manufacturing plant will be located in China, EcoMotors still plans to use Michigan suppliers. Part of the reason the plant is located in Anhui Province is because of “excellent” support from the Chinese government, he says.

Last week’s announcement is the latest piece of good news for EcoMotors, which closed a $32.5 million Series C round last summer. The round was led by New York-based Braemar Energy Ventures and joined by Bill Gates and Menlo Park, CA-based Khosla Ventures. Gates and Khosla had previously invested $23 million in EcoMotors during an earlier round of financing.

When asked why EcoMotors is flourishing while other cleantech ventures seem to struggle to stay alive, Runkle had this to say: “The key is lower cost. If you look at solar, wind, or batteries in general, those types of technology improve efficiency at a very dear price.”

Runkle adds that EcoMotors recently signed three additional letters of intent with companies he declined to name, though he did say two of them were “top 10″ Chinese companies. As for Navistar, the truck and engine company EcoMotors also has a contract with, Runkle says, “We continue to work with Navistar. Though they’ve fallen on hard times, we look to continue with them as they dig their way out.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Who are all these new guys around town?

Over the past year or so, Massachusetts has seen lots of outside companies set up offices in the Boston area. Not a new trend, but something to keep an eye on. Tonight a bunch of them will be in one place—Genzyme’s headquarters in Kendall Square, Cambridge—for a networking reception organized by nonprofit business group MassEcon.

The companies include BTI Systems of Littleton; CitySprout of Northampton; Copa Airlines of Boston; Cureport of Worcester; Desalitech of Newton; EnergySavvy of Cambridge; Janji of Brookline; Johnson & Johnson of Cambridge; MarketMeSuite of Cambridge; Nipendo of Burlington; PayPal of Boston; Sequence and PCI of Boston; Rhode Island Novelty Company of Fall River; Sony DADC of Cambridge; Xenetic Biosciences of Boston; and Zappix of Burlington. (That’s a pretty diverse mix of sectors and stages.)

Just a few notes on these companies: Desalitech, an Israeli water-treatment tech firm, has set up its U.S. headquarters in Newton and is now part of the local water innovation cluster. (A Massachusetts water delegation visited Israel in December to build relationships and encourage companies to set up shop here.) Nipendo is another Israel-founded company, this one working on software to connect enterprises with suppliers; it opened an office in Burlington at the beginning of March.

Meanwhile, MarketMeSuite has been in the Cambridge Innovation Center since last year; it specializes in social-media marketing for small businesses. EnergySavvy is a Seattle-based energy efficiency software startup that I got to know when I was living in the Northwest; the firm set up shop in Boston last year to be closer to East Coast customers. And PayPal is in Boston by virtue of its acquisition of Where in 2011; the company recently opened an office in Boston’s Financial District.

Some others not on the list, but which also moved to Boston recently (or opened office space), would include Lagoa, Sarepta Therapeutics, and Sqrrl.

We’ll see if Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter participate in the event next year. Maybe Oracle too, given its billion-dollar acquisitions in the area (see Endeca and Acme Packet).

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

You can’t help but be inspired after spending a couple of hours with the 20 Northwest student teams at the UW Environmental Innovation Challenge.

Despite the shortcomings of our education system at multiple levels, rising tuition, and laments about diminishing American technological competitiveness, here is a group of talented, motivated young people thinking hard about solutions to real global problems.

At least a quarter of the teams are working on problems associated with water. How to conserve it, more efficiently desalinate it, disinfect it for reuse in irrigation, generate energy from it, and keep pollutants out of it.

Other teams are developing products to improve life in poor countries: a cheap mill to save women in Gambia from the daily pounding of grain, which keeps them out of school and in poverty; an innovative solar-powered light and USB charger to replace dirty, costly, and dangerous kerosene lanterns; a bio-briquette maker for home use in India where the consumption of wood for cooking fuel is leading to deforestation.

The event is mainly an exercise, with winners splitting $22,500 in prizes. “This is a safe environment. They’re not mortgaging their houses yet,” UW Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship director Connie Bourassa-Shaw says. Still, two or three of the 20 teams have ideas that could actually get funded, in the opinion of one venture capitalist there.

Kirk Washington, a partner in Yaletown Venture Partners‘ Seattle office, doesn’t want to say which ones exactly—”competitive advantage,” he says with a chuckle—but notes that the problems the students are attacking are “quite timely.”

“Not only are those applications potentially far-reaching…it’s the capital efficiency to be able to take advantage of existing infrastructure, so you’re not building some big plant for hundreds of millions of dollars,” he says.

The winner of the event—as determined by the 115 judges who viewed two-minute presentations and then interacted with the 20 teams—is PolyDrop, and its business model fits Washington’s description.

The team is targeting electrostatic charge dissipation for advanced carbon fiber materials using a conductive polymer developed in the lab of UW chemical engineering professor Danilo Pozzo. The polymer, explains PolyDrop team member and chemical engineering student Heather Milligan, can be added in small quantities to existing paints, transforming them into a light-weight alternative to metal-based conductive coatings.

This could be particularly useful for aircraft and vehicles built from carbon fiber reinforced composites, which build up static charges that can scramble their electronics, and for which current conductive coatings are not viable, the team asserts.

PolyDrop was on the technologically advanced end of the spectrum. Other teams, such as Earth’s Elegance, were developing businesses around happy accidents.

Sophie Michele had a stack of old magazines on a work table in a design class at Bellevue College. Another student bumped the table, spilling a solution on the magazines, giving them a marbled, stone-like appearance. Sandwiched between two pieces of glass, the erstwhile magazines could be a lighter, cheaper, and less environmentally destructive replacement for tiles made of mined natural stone.

The students face long odds in turning their ideas into viable businesses—as would any entrepreneur. But the good thing about exercises like this is that students get a glimpse of what it takes, and will hopefully enter Seattle’s entrepreneurial ecosystem with eyes open.

“I think they’ll always be entrepreneurial, and they’ll be looking at opportunities,” says Bourassa-Shaw. “My hope is they’ll know what to do with one once they see it. That’s the part that’s hard, and a lot of people don’t get that. How do you marshal resources? How do you gain support? How do you find a champion?”

2013 UW Environmental Innovation Challenge results:

Winner of the $10,000 grand prize: PolyDrop (UW)

Runner up ($5,000): Pure Blue Technologies (UW)

Honorable mention ($2,500 each): EcoMembrane (UW); Sunscroll (Western Washington University); Upcycle (UW)

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Four years ago this week, I put the deposit down on my first apartment in Detroit. I had been spending an increasing amount of time in the city on weekends, and every time I visited, I felt—at the risk of sounding corny here—a connection forming. The city had just plain gotten under my skin. Something was pulling me toward Detroit, and as I signed my name on the lease, my heart pounded with an exhilaration I hadn’t felt since leaving my parents’ home at age 18.

I moved to Detroit in the first half of 2009, when its prospects never looked shakier. Certain family members, friends, and co-workers struggled to understand my decision. Laying eyes on my “fortress of solitude” gated, high-rise apartment building along the banks of the Detroit River often blunted their misgivings, but still—why would I choose to relocate to a place so “bombed out,” so broke, so dangerous?

I was moving to Detroit from Lansing. If a city could be a piece of cardboard—flat, humdrum, boring—Lansing, to me, is it. I find Detroit to be its opposite: colorful; flavorful; never a dull moment. It’s a fascinating place unlike any other in both good ways and bad, but it’s never boring.

During my four years here, I’ve watched a steady stream of other young professionals fall sway to Detroit’s charms and put down their own roots. What I imagine we all have in common is a feeling of optimism about the future of Detroit. In my line of work, I meet some of the city’s best, brightest, and wealthiest, and I often have the pleasure of reporting the most positive stories about startups and innovation Detroit has to offer. I tell everyone who will listen that moving here was the best decision I made in a decade.

Terina Davis, my friend and a lifelong Detroiter who is in the middle of her 69th year living in the city, sees the past four years here a little differently. She’s watched the east side apartment complex near the corner of Harper and Whittier that she’s called home for 17 years disintegrate before her eyes. She’s moved from one apartment inside the complex to another as she’s watched a block that was once lined with beautiful, well-kept buildings fall apart under the perfect storm of an absentee landlord, squatters, drug dealers, a police raid, and fires. Two young men were gunned down in the middle of the night on the steps of one building about a year ago, but by then Terina’s surroundings had become so chaotic that the noise didn’t even wake her.

I began visiting Terina at her apartment complex in the fall of 2010, and I, too, can attest to the horror of its current condition, and how quickly it became that way. Once it became clear that nobody with any power was interested in the fate of this little block on Whittier, things went to hell fast. But the fact is, this type of spiraling neglect is replicated all over the city. In fact, in many parts of the city, this is simply everyday life.

Despite the positive things happening along the Woodward corridor in the city’s center and the emergence of a nascent tech scene, Detroit is also under the watch of an emergency financial manager, a supposedly last-ditch step to right the ship before Detroit becomes the first city of its size to declare bankruptcy. The murder rate in 2012 was the highest since the ultra-violent era a generation ago, when crack swept through and decimated the city.

In 2012, fire stations were revealed on the evening news to be seeped in raw sewage leaking from the pipes in bathrooms where firefighters were forced by shrinking municipal budgets to buy their own toilet paper. Streetlights are out in large swaths of the city, the buses are never on time (and are the settings for sometimes fatal fights), and the schools are among the lowest-performing in the state.

So, whose Detroit is the “real” Detroit, mine or Terina’s? How will we decide what course the city should take when it seems like Detroit is actually two separate cities? Is there any other city in the nation where a toxic stew of race, power, and provincialism does so much to impede growth, even as it’s so clearly in the interests of everyone involved to work together? Is Detroit doomed, or is Detroit shaping up to be the blueprint for what a truly progressive post-industrial American city can look like?

Checking in on the side of optimism are a pair of sprawling initiatives launched this year: Detroit Future City and Opportunity Detroit.

Detroit Future City’s Strategic Framework Plan is the culmination of two years of outreach, information gathering, and analysis by the city planners at Detroit Works. It’s a 50-year roadmap to Detroit’s turnaround, and its suggestions are as comprehensive as they are far-reaching.

Less all-encompassing but just as forward-looking is the Opportunity Detroit initiative announced last week. Led by Dan Gilbert’s Rock Ventures, the Downtown Detroit Partnership, and the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, Opportunity Detroit is a “visionary placemaking and retail plan for Detroit’s urban core.”

Whether you count yourself as an optimist or a pessimist about Detroit’s future, what most experts agree is that a healthy Michigan—some would even argue a healthy America—depends on a healthy Detroit. Detroit is an iconic city, once one of the wealthiest, most full-of-promise places in the free world, now struggling to survive. People have strong feelings about Detroit, whether for or against, but everyone seems to be waiting to see how we chart our course for the next generation and beyond.

Orchards, Ponds, and Housing Swaps: Detroit Future City

Detroit Future City’s Strategic Framework document is 345 pages of maps, graphs, charts, statistics, and well-informed suggestions for what a healthy Detroit could look like and how we might go about getting there. Some of the highlights include focusing investment on seven corridors where job creation is already happening by emphasizing entrepreneurship and digital, creative, and “eds and meds” job growth. There’s also an emphasis on improving public transportation, including the creation of a high-speed bus line; turning vacant land into forests, orchards, and ponds meant to keep air and water clean; creating dense, walkable neighborhoods; removing roadblocks to getting business licenses from the city; repurposing vacant land as a tool for neighborhood stabilization; a house-for-house swap program meant to shift the population out of vacant neighborhoods to those more densely populated; and mixing art and industry in “Live+Make” neighborhoods in functionally obsolete areas of Detroit.

The framework document is divided into chapters that take a deep dive into the topics of economic growth, neighborhoods, city systems, land use, public land, and civic engagement. The framework is the product of “30,000 conversations, over 70,000 survey responses and comments from participants, and countless hours spent dissecting and examining critical data about Detroit.”

One can read the entire Detroit Future City document online in English, Arabic, Spanish, or more than a dozen other languages, or walk in to the Detroit Works office in Eastern Market and … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

San Diego’s emerging agricultural biotech cluster has added three new companies, with DSM, ZeaKal, and Algenetix setting down roots here. I’ve got details about them below, along with the rest of the life sciences news over the past week.

—A White House initiative to spend $1 billion over the next decade to map the brain and determine how it functions could provide added funding to neuroscience researchers in San Diego at a time when federal spending on biomedical research is under pressure. Connect CEO Duane Roth told U-T San Diego he expects the project will induce significant local investment in science and entrepreneurial companies. By coincidence, a new RAND Corp. study says the financial burden of caring for people with dementia is outpacing cancer and heart disease in the U.S.

—Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), the San Diego wireless giant, also has been working at the frontiers of neuroscience. A startup venture backed by Qualcomm called Brain Corp. was founded in 2009 to develop radically different computer systems and software that are based on mathematical models of the way neurons work in the human brain.

—The shutdown rumors began flying soon after Bristol-Myers Squibb closed its $5.3 billion acquisition of San Diego’s Amylin Pharmaceuticals last year. Now it’s official. A spokesman for the New Jersey pharmaceutical giant told U-T San Diego’s Brad Fikes BMS plans to shut down its Amylin-related operations in San Diego by the end of 2014. About 420 employees will be affected, with a small number remaining to close the facility by March 2015.

—Last week a new San Diego agricultural biotech called ZeaKal announced itself with a $3.8 million funding deal. This week, an industrial biotech company called Algenetix said it has closed on a $2 million tranche of Series A funding to commercialize technology it has developed to improve oil productivity in microbes. The common thread in both deals is San Diego-based Kapyon Ventures, a new firm commercializing breakthroughs in industrial from global research institutes.

—The Dutch multinational industrial conglomerate, Royal DSM, officially opened a new office in San Diego with plans to expand into the … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

GreenLancer, the Detroit-based solar engineering company Xconomy profiled last July, announced last week that it has oversubscribed its Series A fundraising round, snagging $275,000 from four Michigan-based investors.

The company, which is based online and employs a national network of contract employees, or greenlancers, to work on jobs, is leaving the round open as it waits for expected funds to come in from an individual investor in Grand Blanc, MI.

“All of these investors started coming out of the woodwork,” says Michael Sharber, GreenLancer’s CEO. “It’s been great.”

BlueWater Angels, the Midland-based VC firm, is the lead investor; joining them is the Traverse City-based Northern Michigan Angels, Rick DeVos’ Grand Rapids-based Start Garden; and the Detroit-based Bizdom accelerator.

There are seven full-time team members working out of the Detroit office, which will soon be moving back downtown to 1500 Woodward Ave., and Sharber says the company has refined its software platform to help companies reduce their “soft costs.”

GreenLancer develops its projects cost-effectively in the cloud, calling on its team of engineering freelancers to design and build clean energy systems with an early focus on solar and photovoltaic applications. Sharber says that the company has been doing a lot of work in in the Midwest, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia. GreenLancer has also done work for the U.S. military.

In the future, Sharber says, GreenLancer will continue to expand and work on developing an application programming interface. “We’re looking to take our same business model and dive into other verticals, like wind, hydropower, and geothermal,” he says.

Comments | Reprints | Share: