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Kajeet, a mobile operator for kids, delves into 4G with Clearwire deal

Kevin Fitchard — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 16:52:48 +0000

Kajeet, a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) that serves children, has struck a deal with WiMAX carrier Clearwire to resell its 4G connections. The details of what it plans to do with that access are still fuzzy, but it looks like it plans to start selling 4G modems and hotspots to families with kids.

“Adding a 4G mobile broadband product with Clearwire gives our customers new connectivity options and allows Kajeet to expand our mobile service offerings so that we continue to lead in the creation and delivery of mobile solutions that are great for kids, families and educators,” CEO and founder Daniel Neal said in Kajeet’s announcement.

Kajeet is already selling mobile broadband dongles and hotspots through its education arm, which provides schools with devices and connectivity for learning purposes. It may now be planning to bring those devices over to its consumer-facing carrier business, which for now is focused on selling feature phones, smartphones and tablets.

Backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Kajeet differentiates itself from the competition by offering parental control and management software with every device. Parents can define the phone numbers allowed to call the device, restrict usage by time and track their kinds using GPS. Modems are typically open connections to the internet, but Kajeet has developed similar management software for schools called Sentinel.

While putting a 4G hotspot into a child’s hands might seem extreme, it makes more sense if you think of the device as an internet nanny rather than a modem. Children are increasingly connecting to the internet with devices through Wi-Fi: tablets, e-readers, PCc, etc. By placing its protection software on a hotspot, Kajeet can expand its parental control services to devices it doesn’t sell or directly connect.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Hasloo Group Production Studio

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BrightSource actually raising $130M for solar thermal

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 17:27:18 +0000

Last month solar thermal startup BrightSource announced it had raised a massive $80 million in equity. But in addition to that $80 million, the company is also looking to close on another $50 million according to a filing, which would bring this latest round to $130 million. That’s huge and would bring BrightSource’s total funding raised to date to $665 million.

As I previously pointed out, it’s pretty rare these days that a cleantech startup can close on such a large round — investors are far less willing to put big rounds into cleantech startups in 2012 (see GigaOM Pro’s Q3 wrap up). But some cleantech startup outliers — able to raise sizable rounds — are still out there.

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BrightSource develops solar thermal plants and its design uses fields of large mirrors to concentrate sun light onto the top of large towers. The tower has a boiler at the top that heats liquid, which in turn runs steam turbines and produces electricity. BrightSource is building a solar farm called Ivanpah near Las Vegas on 3,600 acres, and currently has 2,100 workers installing about one mirror a minute onto poles in the desert ground.

BrightSource’s investors include power company Alstom and venture firm VantagePoint Capital Partners, and additional investors included DFJ, CalSTRS, DBL Investors, Goldman Sachs, Chevron Technology Ventures and BP Ventures.

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Tesla investor Steve Jurvetson drives off in the first Model S

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 23:47:47 +0000

Tesla investor Steve Jurvetson — a partner with Draper Fisher Jurvetson — drove off in the very first Model S electric car recently and just published this video and photo to prove it on his Flickr feed.

Jurvetson has had his eye on the first Model S since the concept of the Model S was out there. Back in 2010, Jurvetson told the story to a Chicago Tribune reporter and explained that at a board meeting in early 2009 this happened:

“The policy was that only after the car was officially on sale and the price had been set could anybody reserve a Model S. . . They were about to open the meeting, so without saying a word I whip out my wallet, where I always keep one check, fill it out for the full price of the car, and then toss it across the table. Everyone was stunned.”

Of course, the Model S is now priced at a range from $50,000 to $100,000 (expect Jurvetson’s model to be on the high end of that). Here’s the video of the delivery taken recently and posted yesterday:

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And the greentech VC exodus continues

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 09:13:34 +0000

It’s no secret that it’s been a rocky road for many venture capitalists that have invested in greentech — their greentech investments haven’t made very many of them money. Now according to Dow Jones Venture Wire, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which has one of the largest greentech portfolios, is shifting away from investing in greentech startups.

The move seems to have been happening for awhile. Both DFJ partners Raj Atluru and Josh Raffaelli left DFJ months ago to join Silver Lake Kraftwerk and it doesn’t seem like they were ever replaced. DFJ’s managing director Don Wood told VentureWire that the deal flow “perhaps has shifted somewhat toward mobile, cloud and consumer web of late.”

Yet despite the reported (and yes, clear) shift, DFJ still seems to have made a few clean power bets this year. According to the Cleantech Group, DFJ was the most active investor in greentech in the first quarter of this year, with investments in companies including Solar Junction, Intematix, SCIenergy, Shanghai Dajun Technologies, Pentalum Technologies, Oasys Water, ēssess, Aveillant and Jing-Jin Electric (JJE).

Other VCs that have led investments in greentech companies over the years have also seemed to have waned on greentech. Both Kleiner’s Ray Lane and Bill Joy, who were greentech champions, weren’t named as general partners on Kleiner Perkins’ next fund. So basically they will continue to take care of their current investments, but they won’t go out looking for new ones for the next fund. While Kleiner says it’s not changing its strategy away from greentech, its actions seem to suggest that it is.

As Bill Gates has said, it’s still unclear how we’re going to reward the energy entrepreneur — which is worrisome.

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Green:Net: Steve Jurvetson on the Future of Greentech From an IT Pioneer

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:22:51 +0000

Thanks to Moore’s Law, information technology revolutionizes more and more industries over time, and is currently creating trillion-dollar opportunities in the greentech industry said Steve Jurvetson, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson today at the Green:Net conference in San Francisco, as he explained why his firm was focused on the sector. In order for startups to survive there has to be a disruption of some sort in the status quo. For green IT, that disruption is partly a cause of the advances in computational sciences and communications as well as changes in regulations. “Without disruptions startups can’t survive,” he said.

Those startups can be a new entrant into an existing market like Apple entering into the music market or a startup, he explained. “We believe strongly that all meaningful change comes from entrepreneurs,” Jurvetson said, adding that he currently he sees much of this change hitting industries that have largely been shielded from such disruptions.

That is reflected in the arc of DFJ’s investments in the last few years. It has shifted from initial forays into IT-related fields such as solar panels which are similar in structure to semiconductor manufacturing and energy management software to new fuels and materials as well as efficiency and lighting. As an example of bringing efficiency to IT, he compared the current centralized server model to a P2P model. With 30,000 servers, a P2P network would mean 700,000 fewer pounds of carbon dioxide, which is like removing 35,000 cars from the road.

Jurvetson spent a considerable amount of time on data center efficiency, highlighting portfolio companies such as PowerAssure which has save one customer 57 percent on their energy costs simply by turning off servers hen they are not needed. Other investments include SeaMicro, a company redesigning servers using Atom chips, which can cut energy costs by 50 percent. Currently data centers use about 3 percent of the world’s total energy consumption.

He concluded the talk with a look ahead at how the advances in computation have helped push the life sciences to a point when companies can test and build synthetic chemicals and fuels that could be the disruption that takes on the trillion-dollar chemicals and petroleum industries. Scientists can now sequence genes very quickly and can use the genetic code to build new organisms via simulation rather than in the lab. “Biotech 1.0 is slow, like a lab science, and Version 2.0 is more like computational sciences,” Jurvetson said.

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BioFuelBox Opens Its First Fat-to-Fuel Plant

Jennifer Kho — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:28:46 +0000

We’ve heard hardly a peep from BioFuelBox, a 3-year-old biofuel startup backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Element Partners, since it raised its first round of $9.46 million back in 2007. But now the San Jose, Calif.-based quiet company says it’s ready to hit the market in a big way. On Monday BiofuelBox announced it has opened – and begun operating – its first biodiesel refinery, a 1-million-gallon-per-year plant that turns waste grease, oil and fat into low-sulfur biodiesel.

It’s an interesting move at a time when other biodiesel plants are being idled, shuttered and put up for sale. But BioFuelBox says its biodiesel is cost-competitive with diesel from petroleum, that it’s already bringing in revenue, and that it expects to have 10 factories up and running by the middle of 2011, with its first profits early in the same year.

In addition the second plant is already underway, says Richard Reddy, vice president of marketing. BioFuelBox eventually plans to build hundreds of these refineries, he said, but claims it only needs “a couple dozen” to become “wildly profitable.”

The key is technology that allows BioFuelBox to cost-effectively use impure oil that previously has been too costly to turn into biodiesel. The process enables the plants to make financial sense at small 1-million-gallon sizes so they can be located – and the fuel they produced can be used – near the supply of grease, reducing the costs of transporting either the feedstock or the fuel.

While the company wouldn’t disclose details about its proprietary system, called Novostream, Reddy said it involves three steps to extract oil from watery contaminated waste streams, convert the oil into fuel and then purify the fuel so it meets ASTM standards. The whole process takes about 15 minutes, and BioFuelBox uses buffer tanks to store waste and even out the supply so its factory can run 24 hours a day, he said.

The factory in American Falls, Idaho, gets its supply of grease from a wastewater treatment plant, said Richard Reddy, vice president of marketing for the company, adding that the company then sells the fuel to an unnamed diesel retailer, which sells the fuel regionally. Future plants might also sell fuel to the grease supplier, if that supplier also runs diesel trucks, school buses, or farm equipment, he said.

Here’s how the supply system works in Idaho: Restaurants and other high grease generators set up grease traps to keep the gunk from clogging up the pipes. When those traps are pumped out, the grease – mixed with water – goes to wastewater treatment plants so that the water can be reclaimed and cleaned up, and the rest of the grease usually gets thrown away. BioFuelBox takes that gunk and turns it into fuel. BioFuelBox finances, owns and operates the plant, signing 10 year (or longer) deals for the grease, and makes money by selling the biodiesel.

Aside from trapped grease, the company also is going after industrial waste, such as oil used in factories that pre-cook food so it can be quickly reheated in a home microwave, for example, or cooked more quickly at a restaurant. While most of the grease at the Idaho plant comes from restaurants, one of the sources is a potato processor that pre-cooks things like French fries, tater tots and hash browns, Reddy said. Some of the oil can be reused or resold, but the contaminated oil that’s unusable for other applications gets sent to BioFuelBox’s plant. For future plants, BioFuelBox also plans to make use of fats from municipal and agricultural facilities, such as animal rendering facilities that produce plenty of excess chicken, pork or beef fat.

BioFuelBox’s technology was developed by its chief scientist, Greg Anderson, who developed it to eliminate the fuel cost for his local senior citizens’ bus, Reddy said. Founders Steven Perricone, CEO, and Patricia Bright, vice president of sales, found him through mutual acquaintances and saw the potential to use that technology for a larger purpose. The company is in the process of raising its second round of funding now, Reddy said.

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Update to My Gmail Setup: Night Shade

James Kendrick — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:02:31 +0000

A lot of folks found my custom Gmail setup to be helpful, and one of the most common questions I received was which theme I was using when the image was made (Dusk). It reminded me that the way a program looks is very important, so I’ve been trying out different themes from Google. I’ve found the one I’ve been using over last few days to be very soothing, especially given the amount of time I spend staring at it. It’s known as “Night Shade”:

As you can see, I’ve also decided to keep multiple inboxes pane below the inbox.

What Gmail theme are you using?

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Deeya Nabs Another $30M for Energy Storage

Josie Garthwaite — Tue, 05 May 2009 23:53:22 +0000

For Deeya Energy, good things come in threes. The Fremont, Calif.-based startup, which is working on energy storage technology for three applications — replacing diesel generators, stockpiling renewable energy, and stabilizing the electric grid — has just closed a third round of financing. The oversubscribed $30 million round brings Deeya’s total venture capital investment since its founding in 2004 to $53 million.

New investor Technology Partners — which has also backed Abound Solar and Tesla Motors — led the round, and existing investors BlueRun Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and New Enterprise Associates also joined. At this point, the company says it plans to use the new investment to expand operations and ramp up production of its so-called L-cell technology. Deeya’s modular devices (pictured) are an example of flow battery tech — they use large tanks full of dissolved electrolytes to store power at utility scale.

Large-scale energy storage is getting to be a crowded space these days. Fellow startups EEstor, Altairnano and A123Systems are all looking to connect high-capacity, fast-charging energy storage devices to the energy grid. To be sure, updating the electric grid to make better use of wind and solar resources (which can’t be called up on demand like a coal-fired power plant) remains a work in progress. But the idea is to store excess energy generated at night or during other periods of low demand, and then deploy that clean power when demand spikes instead of firing up polluting power plants.

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Element Partners Rakes In $486M for New Cleantech Fund

Josie Garthwaite — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 01:00:36 +0000

Six months ago, Element Partners Managing Partner David Lincoln heard a persistent question about cleantech investment, according to a Philadelphia Business Journal report: Was cleantech in the midst of a bubble?

Excitement over growth in the industry had started to jack up the cost of investments. But with the economic downturn, the party’s over — and Element (formerly DFJ Element, since it’s part of Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s network of partner funds) sees opportunities as a result. Now it has a fat new fund to take advantage of them.

The Pennsylvania-based venture capital firm announced today that it just closed on $486 million for its second fund, convincing limited partners to pony up $86 million more than the firm’s initial target. According to the Business Journal, most of the commitments came in prior to the fourth quarter of last year, when fund raising took a dive — but closing on a fund of this size, in the current economic climate, represents no small task.

Unlike Index Ventures, which we wrote about earlier this week when it closed a new €350 million (about $440 million) fund meant in part to expand its sparse cleantech portfolio, Element has cleantech as its founding focus. The firm’s 22-company portfolio is dominated by ventures involved with energy efficiency, water treatment and clean energy technologies.

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Attero Picks Up $6.3M for Indian e-Cycling

Craig Rubens — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:13:25 +0000

Millions of computers and electronics get shipped overseas from the U.S. to the developing world, where they are cheaply, and often haphazardly, broken down for recycling. Now, millions of dollars of U.S. (and Indian) venture capital are following that disassembly chain. Attero, an e-waste recycler based in Noida, India, has raised $6.3 million (approximately Rs. 25 crore) from NEA-IndoUS Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Attero offers end-to-end recycling, pledging to pickup products to be recycled from consumers and keeping them updated throughout the disassembly process. The company plans to use its new funds to build a huge high-tech recycling center in Roorkee to process techno-trash, including old computers, cell phones, network gear, and TVs — known in the business as WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment). The plant will use mechanical separation techniques as well as a metallurgical process being developed in-house to extract precious metals, the company claims.

The Indian Supreme Court has been fighting the importation of e-waste for years, which is considered a hazardous waste. But despite a ban on the import of such waste back in 1997, e-waste is the country’s fastest growing waste stream. Industry lobbyists estimate that over 2,000 trucks dump around 12,000 metric tonnes of e-waste in Delhi every day.

According to a USA Today article citing Karnataka, India’s state pollution control board, 80 percent of U.S.-generated e-waste is exported to India, China and Pakistan to be recycled. But as developing countries raise the levels of disposable income, they’ll be generating more and more of their own e-waste, too. Either way, both are opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors to deliver more efficient, and more eco-friendly ways to recycle those junked gadgets.

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