The Week in Cleantech – June 3 – 9
Last week saw substantial activity in cleantech, with venture capital investments in areas like energy efficiency, oil & gas, and smart grid, as well as exciting news in public offerings and M&A. In venture capital, a regulatory filing disclosed on June 6 leads us to believe that the partnership between Inertech and Skanska in efficient data center cooling has produced a spinout, stand-alone company, called Aligned Energy. The new company has just raised $60 million in growth capital, with Inertech, Skanska, and One Equity Partners as investors. Other companies receiving venture investments during the week included Panzura and Optimum Energy (Energy Efficiency), CoolPlanet Energy Systems (Biofuels), and wirelessSeismic (Oil & Gas).
In IPO news, Tecogen, a Waltham, Massachusetts-based manufacturer of natural-gas-fueled, engine-driven, combined heat and power (CHP) systems, filed to raise $25 million on the NASDAQ. The company is a former business unit of Thermo Electron Corporation and then of Thermo Power Corporation, and counts Southern California Gas as an investor.
Two acquisitions caught our eye during the week in the Energy Efficiency space. First, San’an Optoelectronics, a Chinese supplier of semiconductor chips and products for LED lighting applications, announced its acquisition of Luminus Devices, a leading venture-backed company in the LED lighting space, for $22 million. Luminus, based in Billerica, Massachusetts, had raised around $130 million privately, so the price tag on the acquisition leads one to believe that this was not a positive exit for its investors, which include Braemar Energy Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Argonaut Private Equity, and Stata Venture Partners.
In a more positive exit, Silicon Labs, a maker of mixed-signal integrated circuits for power electronics, announced that it would pay $115 million in cash, plus approximately $55 million in deferred and earn-out considerations to acquire Oslo, Norway-based Energy Micro, a maker of power-efficient microcontrollers. Energy Micro had raised $13 million in venture capital from Investinor AS and Northzone Ventures.
To dynamically track company and investor activity in cleantech, consider subscribing to our i3 Platform, which drives all the data in this blog post. And finally, we hope you’ll register for this year’s Global Cleantech 100 Gala & Summit | October 9-10, 2013 | Washington, DC.
