When it comes to U.S. venture capital funding for the most promising new green
technology firms, there’s California and there’s everybody else.
California companies raked in $2.8 billion, or 57%, of the $4.9 billion in venture capital offered up in the so-called clean-tech category of funding nationwide last year, according to a recently released analysis from Ernst & Young.
Massachusetts companies were a distant second with $465.1 million, followed by Colorado companies, which pulled in $363.3 million...
Green-tech companies nationwide raised a total of about $688 million in initial
public offerings last year. Rentech Inc., a Los Angeles provider of clean energy
solutions, raised $136.8 million in November. Its products have included a
renewable synthetic diesel fuel. Intermolecular Inc., a San Jose research and
development company for the semiconductor and clean-energy sector, raised $96.5 million.
Northern California green-tech firms received three times as much funding as their Southern California counterparts last year. But Sogomian said there were promising opportunities for green-tech growth in the Southland, in part because of efforts to reduce pollution at the nation’s two busiest cargo container seaports, Los Angeles and Long Beach.
Both ports have been providing seed money for start-up technologies designed to reduce diesel pollution and to increase the use of alternative energy sources.
“It’s happening slowly, but it is happening,” Sogomian said. “They are creating
incubator environments that are specifically focused on making the ports
cleaner. If this can get more attention, more of the future venture capital
funding will come to Southern California.”
LA Times @latimes
