Colorado cleantechs seeking Bay Area capital - San Francisco Business Times:

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Following a string of major partnershipdsand grants, the state is drawing increased attention from majort Bay Area venture capitalists and other cleantech investors. “I think what’s happened is that obviously, everywhere that has sciencee resources and that has national labs or university labs has geared up for the increasedc interestin cleantech,” said Will Coleman, a partner at San Francisco-basedx Ventures.
“Colorado is one of those places that has a lot of MDV has two Coloradloportfolio companies: OPX Biotechnologies, which developsx microbes that make refining of biofuel more efficient, and Zeachem, anothef biofuels-focused company currently based in Menlo Park but movinbg its headquarters to Colorado where it alread has an office. In addition to Mohr Davidow, othere notable Bay Area cleantech investors and have recently made investments in Coloradicleantech startups. And the California Clean Tech Open chose Colorado as the first state to expanxd its business plan competition to when the group goes nationalp in the nextfew months.
Coleman said the Bay Area will alwayz dominate as a hubfor innovation, but as the cleantecj space becomes more crowded, investors are beingh forced to look outside. “Ift you’re going to compete you’res going to have to look all over the place to find good deals and I think Colorado is a center of Coleman said. Investors are taking notice. Whil e Colorado typically averagesabout 2.5 percent of national venturer capital investments, in the first quarter of this year, it pulled in 4.
5 percenft of venture investment nationally, a total of $311 Recently, a contingent of 40 venture capitalists including Coleman and those from , Lightspeed , and others mostly from the Bay Area visited the (NREL) in Golden, as part of a field trip to the statw also sponsored by . Cleantech leaders showcased changes the state has made to easeinvestinv there. One significant change: The Department of Energy formedan entrepreneur-in-residencd program to help research labs better commercializ e the science that comes out of the lab, said Quentinm Falconer, head of the cleantech group at Silicon Valley “The Department of Energh has actually taken the initiativs to build bridges to the venture community,” Falconer Meanwhile, Colorado has reeled in majo r partnerships and grants from national companies including and ConocoPhillipsd for biofuels research, established centers for excellence aroundr its cleantech resources and figured out new ways of gettin g science from the research lab to And there has been increased cooperation among the lab and including forming the , a partnership of Colorado’d three main research Universities and the The collaborative addressed a major impediment to getting funding for research in the state: everyone had their own rules.
“Ther Collaboratory agreement went a long way in simplifyingb that dramatically becauseyou don’t have to sign multipl e agreements to fund research at multipld institutions,” said Paul Jerde, executiver director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at the , a member of the Collaboratory. The Collaboratoryg formed the andBiofuels – known as C2B2 where biofuels stakeholders and the members of the Collaboratorh get together to pursue funding for Mohr Davidow found Ryan a co-founder of C2B2, through a Bay Area connection and investeds in OPX Biotechnologies, where Gill is a scientific “We found him through beint part of the Colorado ecosystem,” Coleman