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About this time a year ago, biofuel and biochemical startups were aggressively seeking to go public. Amyris, Gevo, Solazyme and KiOR were all able to have public debuts within the past two years. But these companies’ stocks, and their long timelines for delivering their biochemicals and biofuel products, have mostly disappointed. KiOR is trading at $7.19, down from its IPO debut of $15 per share; Amyris is trading at $3.31, down from a debut price $16 per share.

While Genomatica announced its new funding on Thursday, it also filed a withdrawal form, removing its planned IPO. Genomatica filed for a potentially $100 million IPO a year ago. In the filing Genomatica sited “current market conditions” as the reason for withdrawing the IPO.

Genomatica’s new funding comes from Alloy Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mohr Davidow Ventures, TPG Biotech, VantagePoint Capital Partners and Waste Management (disclosure: Alloy Ventures is also an investor in GigaOM). Genomatica has now raised at least $125.7 million.

Solix BioSystem’s new funding was led by I2BF Global Ventures, and previous investors include Shanghai Alliance Investment Ltd., or SAIL, Valero Energy, Southern Ute Alternative Energy, which manages clean power investments for the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, Bohemian Investments and Infield Capital.

According to the Cleantech Group biofuels and biochemicals received 14 percent of venture funding for cleantech in the second quarter of this year. New biofuel companies are barely getting any funds, but more established firms continue to be able to draw down capital. Algae company Sapphire Energy closed $144 million in the second quarter of this year, while waste and biogas company Harvest Power closed $112 million.

Genomatica creates organisms that can turn sugar or synthesis gas into a variety of products, from chemicals for plastic to transportation fuels. The sugar or syngas comes from plants, wood chips or trash rather than the more traditional method of using crude oil or natural gas. Genomatica’s first product is 1,4-butanediol, or BDO, which is made from using sugar-eating E. coli, and is used for making things like spandex, running shoes and plastic auto parts.

Solix BioSystems has developed bioreactors that grow algae to turn it into fuels and chemical feedstocks, and more recently it decided to also commercially grow the algae. Solix says it will use the funds to start producing and selling its product commercially.

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This is Mavenir’s fifth round of funding. The round — led by August Capital and including existing investors Alloy Ventures, Austin Ventures, North Bridge Venture Partners and Greenspring Associates — brings Mavenir’s total funding to $105 million since 2005, a phenomenal amount when compared with the much smaller rounds raised by other companies offering IP-based communications.

However, unlike services such as Skype, Fring, Twilio and others that seek to deliver IP communications over the top of existing broadband networks, Mavenir wants to throw operators a lifeline to help prevent them from becoming a dumb pipe. Mavenir’s gear sits inside an operator’s network and lets it offer IP communications services like video calling, more accurate presence and other ways to make a seamless transition from the type of collaboration tools offered on wireline networks to mobile ones. The company is already working with three U.S. operators, including an announced deal with Metro PCS. The new funds will help Mavenir expand its footprint especially, now that operators are deploying faster 4G networks that can truly deliver on the promise of mobile collaboration.

During a lunch two weeks ago with Shubh Agarwal, Mavenir’s VP of marketing, he showed off some nice demonstrations of the services Mavenir Networks can provide. The video calling was especially compelling because it could run over the operator’s network or the Wi-Fi network. And by using the operator’s network, the quality was assured. If the operator’s network was unable to make the call, it didn’t offer video as an option, but would connect voice: a graceful degradation of service that’s far better than just being cut off mid-call or being unable to make a call at all.

The services also offered some nifty blocking features and a deeper granularity around availability. For example, I could be available for video calls only to my family, while on weekends, my coworkers could see me online only for voice and texts and PR people wouldn’t see me online at all. Unfortunately, Mavenir’s more granular features could end up dead on arrival if carriers don’t price them appropriately for consumer adoption — a problem in an industry where Verizon Wireless charges $10 a month for a navigation service I can get from Google for free.

Mavenir gets paid either way, since carriers have already bought the gear, but Agarwal is confident that carriers have learned from their past battling free or cheaper over the top services. He suggests that with LTE networks, the carrier has a level of control that will boost the quality and dependability of such a service and carriers will price the offerings competitively. Of course, I’ve heard this before from other gear companies and even operators, but the tidal wave of adoption is still driven by cheaper or free services.

Still, Mavenir continues to raise money, boost its offerings through acquisitions or organic efforts and sell gear to operators. Perhaps with the advent of 4G networks, operators will have a chance to change the narrative from one of good-enough, free services to high-quality, paid ones.

Disclosure: Mavenir Systems is backed by Alloy Ventures, which also backs GigaOmni Media, the parent company of GigaOM. Alloy’s Ammar Hanafi is on the board of both companies.

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Aspera has built a proprietary high-speed file-transport technology, fasp, that helps data move across networks with issues like over-burdened WANs. Aspera is primarily the province of large companies dealing with big data, including digital media companies sending content among supply-chain partners, life sciences researchers sending genome-sequencing data among institutes and government intelligence customers sending video files between agencies.

Munson said current Internet infrastructure lacks three qualities:

1. availability
2. geographic independence
3. security

While all these issues need to be addressed in the fundamental architecture itself, the constraint has created an opportunity for Aspera’s transfer product. The reliability of Internet services is going up, which creates an expectation that this data will be available quickly, said Ammar Hanafi, general partner with Alloy Ventures.

While consumer web services can easily meet customer expectations, Aspera’s customers are a different story. “Our customers are moving many gigabytes and larger [quantities] of data that has to be chunked up and then distributed,” said Munson. But even if Aspera’s file transfer tech can make sure the delivery is as fast as the consumer web, the company has learned it can provide something else: predictability. “After solving the bottleneck, then you can offer customers predictability,” that manage their expectations, Munson said.

At the end of the day, its a physics problem, both Munson and Hanafi said. TCP, the transmission protocol used by IP networks, just doesn’t perform all that well for moving big data long distances. That’s both a big opportunity for startups like Aspera and big data infrastructure companies.

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Well, this is what happens when you break news about your competitors getting acquired by AOL. They get back at you by revealing news that you raised additional venture dollars while you are fast asleep. I was planning to write about the fact that we received a fresh $2.5 million injection from True Ventures (see disclosure below) and Alloy Ventures on Monday. Oh, well! By now you must be wondering what the new money is for. No, it is not for acquiring smaller blogs. Instead, it’s about the future.

Let me explain: Our traditional businesses — ad-supported blogs and our events (which include Structure and upcoming NewTeeVee Live) are humming along nicely. We have five events and over 4 million monthly unique visitors across GigaOM. Even through the 2008 recession, we grew our business, and in 2010 — just as in 2009 — we are going to double our revenues.

Paid Content, Yeah We Got That

We are much more than just a collection of blogs. Over a year ago, we launched our research service, GigaOM Pro. We started this paid subscription service at a time when most of the big media companies were merely toying with the idea. When we started Pro, it was clear to me that we didn’t want to compete with existing research firms. They do an admirable job, and frankly, as a disruptor, we needed to do something different.

But unlike some of the larger media companies, we didn’t want to charge for our existing offerings, aka our blogs. That just doesn’t make sense. From that, GigaOM Pro was born. We didn’t know how successful it was going to be. Fast-forward to today, and the growth and success of GigaOM Pro has surprised us. We have over 10,000 subscribers on the platform and are growing fast. The biggest success of GigaOM Pro has been with the large corporate customers. From Silicon Valley giants to the fast-growing upstarts, many are turning to GigaOM Pro.

Welcome Skip Hilton, Leader of GigaOM Pro

A year after we launched the service, an authority none other than Gideon Gartner (yup, you read that right) gave GigaOM Pro his blessing. So now comes the hard part: sustaining and keeping the momentum of the GigaOM Pro side of the business.

In order to do that, we are fortunate to bring on Skip Hilton, who joins us from Focus Research. His job will be to press the gas on GigaOM Pro. A graduate of Stanford Business School, Skip has oodles of experience. He has worked for JRG Software, Octel, Nuance, and Price Waterhouse in his long and storied career. I am super-excited to bring him on board.

The Technology Within

But there’s more! We’ve been building out our technology team and adding developers to helps us build the next-generation technology platforms to allow us to take content to any and every device that consumers might be using.

Most folks think of us as a blog network, but we have quietly built-up a large, custom laundry list of technology assets that could exist as standalone tools. For instance, we’ve built a dashboard that gives us near-real time view of what’s happening on our network. It allows us to constantly monitor our revenues, page views and site performance

We’ve developed a virtual content router that allows us to not only take content from our sites and make it ready for any screen: iPhone, Android phones and iPads. If Steve Jobs wants to throw another device at us, we’re ready for that too.

Believe it or not, we have one of the most complex WordPress.com deployments, and have made modifications to their service, which we could package up and sell as a standalone offering.

But We Are Content Guys

No, we aren’t a technology company. We are simply a company that uses technology to help us with what we do best: content. In this age of whiz-boom-bang news blurbs and re-blogging, we strive to bring our readers context-driven and timely analysis day in and day out. It is not an easy job, and when we falter, many of you personally remind me within seconds (I’m looking at you, Mark Hernandez and Ronald), and we are better for it. For that, we work incredibly hard; each one of our writers understands the need for context.

New York New York

In order to keeping our content top notch, we keep bringing top-notch people. The latest to join us is Ryan Kim, who, until recently, was a reporter for San Francisco Chronicle. He’s joined us to be our New York correspondent, and has moved to the Big Apple to cover what’s turning out to be an incredible technology renaissance in my spiritual hometown. Needless to say, we have plans for New York.

To sum it up, we’re a big company that’s over four years old, and we’re trying new ideas and new things. As we in the technology industry know, inventing the future takes time, and, yes, money.

Disclosure: Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a partner at True Ventures.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Tambako the Jaguar

We have just raised $4.5 million, led by new investor Alloy Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm with over $1 billion under management. True Ventures, our primary investors thus far, also participated in the round. The round was blessed by our angel investors, Rakesh Mathur, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman as well. As part of the funding, Alloy Ventures general partner Ammar Hanafi will join the Giga Omni Media board.

We are going to use this new investment prudently, to enhance our technology platform and content offerings, add to our current portfolio of publications and expand our Events and Briefings businesses. We are in investing for the long-term — in ourselves.

I got to know Ammar when he was heading up corporate business development at Cisco Systems (read: V-P of the merger & acquisitions business.) As part of my job as a telecom reporter for Red Herring, I would hound him for information, often when there was none to be had. We stayed in touch periodically as our careers progressed before eventually losing touch.

Then earlier this summer, we reconnected through CEO Paul Walborsky. Our conversation quickly turned once again to my quest for clear and accurate information, but this time in relation to how I had made it the core quality around which our online media company was built. Soon we were discussing the possibility of Alloy becoming an investor.

The shift of audiences and ad dollars to online media from more traditional mediums has been significant on many levels, not least of which has been how it’s created opportunities for new models such as ours. What hasn’t changed is a desire on the part of business and technology audiences for in-depth, insightful coverage, which is what we are committed to providing.

Macro trends of our industry aside, the reason Alloy Ventures and True Ventures invested in our company is because there are lots of little things that need to happen before crazy ideas become a living, growing business. Sure we didn’t have an auspicious start to 2008, but we together overcame that little hiccup and my team has achieved a huge amount this year, among them:

• We are now providing content to a number of prominent media sites, including CNNMoney.com, Businessweek.com and NYTimes.com.
• We hosted two sold-out conferences, Structure and Mobilize. (And we are getting ready for NewTeeVee Live for 2008.)
• We acquired jkOntheRun.
• We acquired TheAppleBlog.
• We appointed Paul Walborsky CEO of the company.
• We named Carolyn Pritchard as the managing editor of our network. Our network now has seven sites: GigaOM, WebWorkerDaily, NewTeeVee, OStatic, Earth2Tech, jkOnTheRun and TheAppleBlog.
• We have doubled the number of visitors to our sites. We launched two experiments –- NewTeeVee Station and GigaOM Daily.

As the company grows, I try to reflect on the job done so far and the road ahead. We have come so far on so little, mostly by being frugal and having a realist’s view of the world. The whiplash-inducing bad winds that are plaguing the overall economy will cast a pall on Silicon Valley in general and online media as well. So it’s nice to have the ability to grow even in the face of adversity, whether organically or through acquisitions. Before I go back to work, please join me in welcoming Ammar to our family.

More importantly, dear readers, please accept my extreme gratitude for your support — through good times and bad times, for without you it would not have been possible. Thank you.

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