The funds make Silver Lake Kraftwerk the majority share owner, and the deal is the first co-investment by Silver Lake Kraftwerk and Kleiner Perkins. The investors bought major share equity from private equity firm WHEB Partner, who remains an investor.

The new investment will help Friedola Tech open up a new facility in Greenville, South Carolina. Friedola Tech already has a North American division in Greenville, which has been operating under the name ConPearl North America.

Friedola Tech both recycles incoming waste materials and also processes those materials and makes products out of them. Recycled plastic products that Friedola Tech makes include plastics for the automotive sector (think car interiors and seat fixtures), packaging (like large, sealed containers) and artificial leather (picture car seat covers).

It’s not surprising that recycling innovation is coming out of Germany, and being used in the U.S. Germany has one of the most sophisticated recycling systems in Europe, and the U.S. has a pretty poor history of reusing and recycling goods.

This is one of the few investments that Silver Lake Kraftwerk has done in a while — the private equity firm invests in growth companies and is particularly focused on international markets. They were trying to raise a $1.2 billion fund over a year ago, but more recently closed on $350 million, according to Dow Jones VentureWire this summer. Previously they also backed matured solar installer SolarCity.

Silver Lake Kraftwerk has backing from George Soros. The investors in the fund include former Foundation Partner Adam Grosser, former DFJ Partner Raj Atluru, and former DOE exec Cathy Zoi.

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The second half of 2011 hasn’t been a particularly easy time for raising a cleantech fund, thanks to macroeconomic conditions and a backlash against cleantech investments in the U.S. Silver Lake Kraftwerk has another almost $1 billion to close. Khosla Ventures has also managed to raise another billion dollar cleantech fund this year.

Silver Lake Kraftwerk has been able to put together a sort of cleantech dream team, bringing on Adam Grosser from Foundation Capital, Raj Atluru from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Cathy Zoi, who was formerly the Department of Energy’s second in command under Steven Chu. More of the team is now listed on the Silver Lake Kraftwerk site, including Bryce Lee from Credit Suisse, Martin Fichtner from Elevation Partners, and Josh Raffaelli from Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Grosser and Silver Lake’s Managing Director Greg Mondre told me in an interview earlier this year they think a cleantech “renaissance” is coming. That second wave — or Cleantech 2.0 — will likely be more focused on private equity, will look to scale some of the already proven innovations past the so-called Valley of Death, and will be far more global in scale, said the partners.

The Silver Lake Kraftwerk team spent a year looking at what had worked and what hadn’t in cleantech investing and are trying to create a new investment thesis, including: 1) focus on growth scale financing; and 2) go global.

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The syndicate’s structure allows the 11 families and their own money managers to pool their knowledge and resources in making investment decisions. Black Coral, for example, makes investments on behalf of one family. Other families have their own money management, which they had in place before the syndicate, said Rob Day, a partner at Black Coral.

McNally and Black Coral will play a key role in bringing deals before the families, but they won’t be the only investors working with the group. One of Black Coral’s advisors is Michael Ahearn, the current chairman and former CEO of First Solar. The group declined to the disclose names of the families.

The syndicate will consider investments in a wide variety of cleantech segments, including energy efficiency, energy storage, solar, chemicals from renewable sources, water, biofuel and recycling, and will invest in both early and late stage deals, Day said. Mostly the investments will be done in companies in North America.

The families and their investment managers don’t have to agree on every deal presented to them and can instead choose which ones they want to place their bets on. “There are a lot of startups that need corporate capital, but they also need project financing, yet the project financing community sometimes view them as too early,” Day said. “We have the flexibility to play multiple roles under the same company.”

These families already were actively investing in cleantech before forming the syndicate. Some have been developers of wind farms and rooftop solar projects while others have founded solar technology companies. The group also includes real estate and fleet vehicle owners who are interested in fuel efficiency technologies.

The investment flexibility of family funds sets the syndicate apart from venture capital firms, which tend to go after high risk, high reward early stage companies. VCs typically expect five to ten times in returns on their investments within a certain period (around seven years). But after years putting money in the cleantech space, many VCs have learned that the amount of capital and time it takes to nurture a startup is a lot greater than they expected. Many greentech startups have run out of money before they could complete technology development, or haven’t been able to raise capital from banks or other investors for building a needed factory, refinery or power plant to start selling their products.

There has been a lot of soul searching in the greentech investing community over the years, and some VC firms have toughened their selection processes, narrowed their investment focus or just plain fled the sector. New investment funds have cropped up to target companies that need later-stage capital for bringing their products to the market. Earlier this year, Silver Lake announced it was launching a new fund, with money from billionaire George Soros, that aims to finance the build-out of more proven technologies worldwide.

With this new syndicate model, the family investors don’t have to follow certain rules that venture capital or institutional investors follow, like the same aggressive investment return goals, which often put pressure on finding exits through an initial public offering or sales. Family investors can consider lower-return, but also lower-risk, investments like financing renewable power project construction.

At the same time, these types of family investors are looking for more guidance about investing in greentech. They don’t always have a large cadre of money managers and researchers, and they don’t always network with each other partly to protect their privacy. As a result, they often follow the VCs’ lead, focus on angel investments, or simply avoid early-stage cleantech investments. With the syndicate, the families, whose collective net worth is over $30 billion, can share resources to improve their investment portfolios.

The syndicate is looking for investment partners, and it plans to launch a European Cleantech Syndicate later this year.

Image courtesy of David Beyer via Flickr.

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That’s essentially a cleantech investing dream team. At Foundation, Grosser worked on investments in firms like Silver Spring Networks and EnerNOC and he was the only investor I put on this list of Top 15 Smart Grid Influencers back in mid-2009. At the DOE, Zoi has had a prime spot to observe and connect with a multitude of energy startups. Soros has said before that he planned to invest more than $1 billion of his own money into clean energy technology.

The so-called Silver Lake Kraftwerk fund (love the band; couldn’t resist the photo) will be the first clean energy fund for Silver Lake, which has been making investments in the tech sector for years. While Silver Lake hasn’t disclosed the size of the fund, the firm operates on the private equity investing scale, so I’d bet the fund size will be in the multiple hundreds of millions to billions.

To me, the new fund represents a second wave in cleantech investing. A variety of venture capitalists over the years have gotten burned investing in expensive clean energy technologies like solar technologies and biofuels that have taken a lot of capital to scale and haven’t delivered returns in the time frames they got used to during web investing. Perhaps the Silver Lake Kraftwerk fund, with the combined experience of the partners and the investors, will lead to smarter investments. Here comes cleantech 2.0.

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Rapidhare had been sued by a rights holder for distributing copies of movies like An American Crime and Eagle vs. Shark, and a lower court issued a preliminary injunction against the file hoster last summer. That injunction followed similar court decisions against RapidShare in lawsuits waged by music and e-book rights holders. However, the Dusseldorf-based court was not impressed with the arguments in these cases, noting instead that “most people utilize RapidShare for legal use cases.”

The court decision, which was published a few days ago, points out that RapidShare is not operating any type of index or search engine that would make files stored on its service publicly accessible. Instead, it’s the users that decide whether or not to publish a link to files they have uploaded — and the fact that some of them abuse the service is not enough to sanction RapidShare itself.

German law does provide the ability to go after companies that willfully enable infringement, which has some implications for forum owners and file hosters, one of them being that a hoster has to not only take down specific copies of an infringing file, but also try to prevent further copies from being uploaded. However, RapidShare won’t have to try too hard. The Dusseldorf-based court found that it’s easy to circumvent any upload filters and than manual control of all uploads is simply not feasible.

The court also brought up an interesting point: German copyright allows users to make copies of movies and music files for their own use, as well as to share them with a limited number of close acquaintances. Automated filters would make it impossible for users to save a legal backup copy of a movie on RapidShare’s servers.

RapidShare has been fighting with rights holders in courts for years, but the company has also in recent months made some attempts to appease entertainment companies and help the monetize their content. It premiered a movie download service last December, and its CEO recently told rights holders that he wants to help them sell content to RapidShare users.

Related content on GigaOm Pro: The Quest to Monetize File Sharing (subscription required)

Given the current state of the negotiations in Copenhagen — African delegates have walked out of the talks for the time being over concerns that the Kyoto Protocol draft is being ignored — and the fact that there has been little progress on getting long term financial commitments from many developed nations to help developing nations mitigate and adapt to climate change, the REDI funds could be seen as a minor side note that falls flat.

The UN says that the developing world will need $10 billion per year in funding just to kick off the process of adaptation and mitigation of carbon emissions. The U.S. has agreed to give “its fair share” to that funding, but on Monday several high profile delegates said little had been decided on the issue of long term financing. Some are calling that $10 billion per year inadequate, including billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros who last week presented an idea to move $100 billion from the International Monetary Fund to help the developing world fight global warming.

The developing world clearly needs a lot of funding and fast. Some of the nations in the developing world will be the first hit by the effects of climate change. Tiny island nations like Tuvalu, Micronesia and the Maldives made big headlines last week telling the world that adapting to climate change is literally an issue of survival. The African continent will be one of the first and hardest hit by water shortages exacerbated by climate change.

Image courtesy of D.Light.

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During a press conference at the Copenhagen climate talks, Soros said that the current $10 billion proposal from the developed world is “not sufficient” and that the gap between what developing countries want and developed nations are likely to give “could actually wreck the conference.” His idea is to move $100 billion from the IMF, which is being used for financial systems that have been hit by the economic downturn, to help countries mitigate and adapt to climate change.

All week in Copenhagen the developing nations that are already being hit by the effects of climate change — many of them tiny, island nations like Tuvalu, Micronesia and the Maldives — have been calling for countries in the developed world to decrease their greenhouse gas emissions and step forward with increased contributions for helping the most vulnerable nations adapt to the effects of climate change. The UN has suggested that $10 billion per year should be put into a fund initially (with more investment needed over time), and the Obama administration has said it will contribute “its fair share” to that $10 billion per year.

Soros acknowledged that it might be difficult to get congressional approval on such an issue. President Obama plans to arrive in Copenhagen towards the end of next week when the heads of state will do the final negotiations over an agreement for countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Back in October Soros announced that he plans to invest more than $1 billion into green technologies, marking the latest move by a high profile investor who hasn’t commonly been connected to the cleantech space. The billionaire investor has already made a couple later stage investments in clean power, including clean coal company Powerspan, and cellulosic ethanol company Qteros. At that conference in October he said he would “look for profitable opportunities,” but “will also insist that the investments make a real contribution to solving the problem of climate change.”

Image courtesy of Flickr user New America Foundation (Creative Commons)

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Last month numbers from the Cleantech Group showed that clean technology, for the first time ever, had become the number 1 investment category in the U.S. in the third quarter of this year, moving ahead of biotech and IT investing. As TechCruch points out Vinod Khosla’s recent $1 billion raise (the majority of which will go to cleantech) made up the bulk of the funds raised for the entire venture capital industry. While these numbers say a lot about the venture investing industry in general (the numbers are still relatively low right now), cleantech is an area that has seen a massive amount of government funding (largely from the stimulus) and international attention. And there’s more supportive legislation in the works. This is an environment that investors clearly like.

Soros joins a list of other big wig celebrity investors that haven’t traditionally been connected to cleantech, including Warren Buffet, who invested in Chinese electric car maker BYD, and Richard Branson, with his Virgin Green Fund and $25 million carbon reduction contest. Of course former oil barren T. Boone Pickens got into the clean power and natural gas markets a while ago.

Soros has already made a couple investments in clean power, including clean coal company Powerspan, and cellulosic ethanol company Qteros. We can probably expect him to make more investments like those — later stage companies with large markets — as opposed to some of the early stage, high risk cleantech startups that Vinod Khosla and David Gelbaum have been looking for.

While Soros is a longtime philanthropist and policy advocate, he was clear that he’s looking at clean power from an investing standpoint. He told the conference in Copenhagen that “I will look for profitable opportunities, but I will also insist that the investments make a real contribution to solving the problem of climate change.” Soros also plans to open up a watchdog group called the Climate Policy Initiative, based in San Francisco, that will “protect the public interest against special interests.”

With any investor that plans to suddenly drop a whole lot of cash into the space, Soros will meet a steep learning curve. Here’s a tip: Study the previous investments of Vinod Khosla, who also invested his own money over the past several years and has seen mixed results.

Image courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.

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Google has come to terms with the fact that mainstream consumers, not those who follow the tech world, end up using whatever browser is installed on the new computer they take home. I see this all the time, and whenever I ask my non-techie friends which browser they use, I often get a confused look in response. It is evident that many “regular” people do not even think about what a browser is. I have to follow up with another question — whether they use Firefox, Chrome or Internet Explorer. They almost always get it at that point, and answer that they use IE. The question “why” always gets the standard “because that’s what was on the computer.”

This deal with Sony means Google has the chance to become the browser “that is on the computer.” It is a win for Google — and most likely not the last deal it makes with OEMs.

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Noticeably absent from the list of investors is South Dakota’s VeraSun Energy, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October. VeraSun took a minority stake in Qteros, then SunEthanol, in August 2007. (Qteros CEO William Frey tells us via email that despite not participating in this round VeraSun continues as a shareholder in the company.)

The Series B financing was led by new investor Venrock, along with previous investor Battery Ventures. Other new investors include London’s BP, no stranger to cleantech fundings, and Soros Fund Management. Series A backers Long River Ventures and Camros Capital also participated.

BP already has a hand in cellulosic ethanol, putting $90 million into Cambridge-based Verenium, another Massachusetts-based biofuel firm, in August. BP has also invested cash in the Energy Biosciences Institute, an academic and industry collaboration, as well as California biofuel startup Synthetic Genomics.

Qteros has what it says is a unique microbial solution for converting non-food plants and waste into biofuel; its Q microbe simplifies the process, eliminating the need for a separate enzymatic breakdown step. The technology was originally seeded and spun out of the University of Massachusetts Amherst by Battery Ventures.

Earlier this year, Qteros picked up some talent from chemical giant DuPont for its executive team, naming William Frey as its new CEO in June. Frey previously led DuPont’s work in advanced biofuels and cellulosic process technologies. Former Qteros CEO Jef Sharp, who continues to sit on the board of directors, now serves as executive V-P at the company.

That same month, Qteros signed a deal to work with Harvard University on developing new strains of the company’s Q microbe, with Harvard researchers looking to boost the amount of ethanol that can be produced with the microbe. And Qteros made another deal in August, announcing that it would work with MBI International to scale up its Q microbe process.

Qteros said it’s ready to scale up with this latest funding, with plans to build a pilot plant and eventually move to commercial operations, and said it’s hiring additional engineers and scientists as part of the expansion. The company is getting new digs for all those new people, opening up a research center in Marlborough, just outside of Boston. Qteros currently has its research center in Amherst.

The company has yet to pick a location for the pilot plant, but according to its web site, Qteros is looking at its home state of Massachusetts as well as neighboring Connecticut for the new facility.

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