Word: techs
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Once the province of those with long hair and short credit lines, today clean tech is a prime target for the smartest - and richest - investors in the world. Green investment by American venture-capital firms reached $2.6 billion in the first three quarters of 2007, the highest level ever recorded and nearly 50% more than the total for the whole of 2006. The European clean-energy sector is already producing winning companies in countries like Germany and Spain, and in rapidly growing China nearly 20% of all venture capital was channeled into clean companies in 2006 - double the percentage...
...thing For CEOs who founded clean-tech companies before this explosion of interest, the sudden materialization of capital can seem too good to be true. When Tom Todaro launched Seattle-based Targeted Growth, which uses genetic engineering to greatly enhance the yields of crops, he thought the company's ability to multiply the amount of feedstock available for biodiesel or ethanol would make it a star of the emerging biofuels sector. But it was the late 1990s, when clean tech made up less than 1% of total venture-capital spending, and investors weren't interested. "I went begging to friends...
Though they couldn't be more different from former dotcom darlings like? Pets.com, clean-tech start-ups were hit hard by the vaporization of venture capital in the wake of the tech and Internet bust of 2000. Funding for green venture capital plunged over the next three years. But it wasn't just flashbacks to that meltdown that initially kept venture capitalists cool on clean tech. Starting up an Internet company required relatively low levels of capital - at least before you started buying your employees massage chairs - and dangled the possibility of a quick and lucrative payoff. Cracking the energy...
...tide began to turn in 2004, thanks partly to rapidly climbing oil prices that instantly made alternative energy more competitive, and partly to government action in the U.S. and elsewhere that provided support for clean tech. The Gore-approved narrative of climate change - as both a threat and an economic opportunity - penetrated the venture-capital community. Adam Grosser, a venture capitalist at the Silicon Valley firm Foundation Capital, struggled to convince his partners that they should expand beyond their traditional IT focus into clean tech. "When I first proposed it, my partners scoffed," he says. But Grosser persisted, and today...
...clean-tech sector was absorbing 11% of all venture capital in North America and Europe. Investors started knocking on Todaro's door, and they haven't stopped since. "We went from hat in hand to not being able to return investor calls," Todaro says. The company won millions in financing, and has just announced a deal with a firm called Green Earth Fuels to develop 100 million gallons (380 million L) of biodiesel by 2010. Says Richard Kaufman, CEO of the international sustainable investment company Good Energies: "There is just a wall of money out there...