Torrents of Green Flowing to Green Tech

Before I get to my observations on the money flowing into Green technology, forgive me a moment of shameless self promotion...

Mpayy is less than two weeks away from launching to create the new payments standard. The product enters User Acceptance Testing on January 9th, and will deliver the best value to consumers and merchants alike with 1% Cash Back on all purchases over $50 and a single low rate for secure payment processing and 0% fraud liability for merchants.

On January 2nd, I posted here about a recent National Venture Capital Association survey for 2008 venture capital investing along with some spiffy charts, but I realized I did not link to the survey data, which is here. One interesting trend from that survey is the...

Torrential Money Flows into Green Tech

I posted this image from the survey, but failed to note the top of the chart. Fully 79.5% of those in the know predict that Clean Technology investments will grow.



To their credit, those folks know their industry well enough to predict that green technology will be the most overvalued sector in 2008.



This is not terribly surprising. Unlike Internet and software companies, which can be started with a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars (Peter Thiel just return 50X his investment on facebook in just a few years), green technology is a massively capital intensive industry in which tens of millions of dollars can be spent PROVING a new methodology, let alone commercializing it. Even companies with proven sources of alternative fuels will require massive capital expenditures on the part of gas stations, electricity companies, etc. to deliver those sources to consumers.

What Next With Coal???

Last weekend, I had brunch with Andrew Perlman, President and CEO of GreatPoint Energy, who is an exciting and successful repeat entrepreneur. His company is in the process of commercializing its patent-pending BlueGas product that will turn coal into natural gas. With oil at $100/barrel, and gasoline over $3 across the country, Perlman et al are working to make clean use of coal, a commodity that is in abundance in the United States.



GreatPoint secured $100 million in funding from a syndicated group led by Kleiner Perkins in the 4th quarter. Their only competitor is a public-private partnership called FutureGen.



At the very least, it will be an interesting case study in the efficiency and success of private enterprise vs. federal innovation.

However, this market raises the question of what happens for companies like Freight Pipeline, which secured $1 million in funding today to create "Green Bricks" from coal's by products or BlueGas competitor EnerTech, which secured $46 million today to use human byproduct, or "slurry" to produce energy.

Watching the VC headlines for clean tech will be interesting to watch not just over the next year, but the next ten as the global economy determines what solutions to adopt to reduce the human environmental footprint. For Mpayy, we'll continue to stand on the sidelines as we hopefully close our $2 million round in the next few weeks to deliver the new payments standard.