GigaOM » Pierre Lamond

Khosla Ventures appears to be raising second seed fund

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 14:17:25 +0000

Venture capital firm Khosla Ventures looks to be raising a second seed fund, according to a filing. The filing doesn’t disclose a fund size, but the fund is called Khosla Ventures Seed B, and the fund follows behind the first Khosla Ventures Seed fund, which raised $300 million and closed in 2010. The filing says the first sale has yet to occur on the fund.

Khosla described that initial seed fund back in 2009 as available for the “highest risk projects,” that “often cannot find any other funding.” The California pension fund committed to invest about $60 million into that first early stage seed fund. At the same time, back then Khosla Ventures also closed a more traditional $750 million fund, and these two funds were one of the first times that Khosla Ventures had used outside investors for a fund — previously Vinod Khosla had been investing his own funds.

Fast forward to late 2011, and Khosla Ventures closed on its fourth fund of $1.05 billion. When that was fund was closed, Khosla Ventures said that it would not be changing its strategy of investing, and would continue to invest in Internet, mobile and clean tech ventures “roughly in the same ratio as previous funds.” Essentially the firm was saying it’s not moving away from cleantech investing.

But the returns for most venture capitalists in cleantech have been hard. Khosla Ventures Partner Pierre Lamond told the San Jose Mercury News recently that Khosla Ventures “still invests in cleantech,” but “the firm is getting fewer pitches from cleantech entrepreneurs.” “People are shying away from cleantech and it’s clearly slowed down,” said Lamond, though he also said that there are bright spots still for batteries for electric vehicles and energy storage.

The fact that the fund is a seed fund is an indication that Khosla Ventures, like many other traditional venture investors, are now looking to find web and mobile startups at the very early stage. There’s been an increasing amount of competition at this level by incubators and accelerators, like Y Combinator and 500 Startups.

We’ll add more information about this filing for the Khosla Ventures Seed B when we know more.

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Next-gen battery startup Seeo raises $15M

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 22:57:19 +0000

A next-gen, lithium-ion battery startup — backed by Vinod Khosla’s Khosla Ventures — called Seeo has raised another $15 million from investors, according to a filing. Khosla Partner Pierre Lamond (who joined Khosla Ventures in early 2009 from Sequoia) is listed on this latest filing, as is investor Atiq Raza and GSR Ventures investor Richard Lim. Seeo previously raised at least $10.6 million.

Seeo has been rather quiet about its battery innovation, but we do know that the company has been developing a nano-structured, lithium-polymer battery, and in particular, has been working on a solid electrolyte that was developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. The material, which Seeo began licensing from the lab in 2007, allows for a more stable battery with higher energy density, in contrast to the more easily flammable liquid electrolyte that can present a safety risk in some conventional lithium-ion batteries.

Seeos batteries are supposed to be able to be operated at a much higher temperature than competing batteries, which means they could be used in environments with extreme temperatures — like outdoors attached to a solar system — and the team is looking at using the batteries for electric vehicle applications, too.

Seeo lists other investors on its website including Google’s philanthropic arm Google.org and Presidio Ventures, and Seeo also won a $6.2 million grant from the Department of Energy to develop and deploy a 25 kWh prototype battery for the power grid. Back when that was awarded, the DOE described Seeo’s grid project as demonstrating “the substantial improvements offered by solid state lithium-ion technologies for energy density, battery life, safety, and cost,” and the technology as targeting “utility-scale operations, particularly community energy storage projects.”

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Sequoia VC Veteran Joins Khosla, Focuses on Cleantech

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:01:11 +0000

One of the granddaddies of venture investing, Pierre Lamond — the National Semiconductor co-founder and partner at Sequoia Capital for almost 30 years — has opened up a new, greener door. At the spry age of 78, Lamond has joined Vinod Khosla’s firm Khosla Ventures, where he will focus on different sectors in cleantech, the New York Times reports and we’ve confirmed. Lamond tells the Times that he joined the firm instead of retiring this year (“I don’t feel that I’m 78,” he says), and that he appreciates Khosla Venture’s focus on “growing companies from scratch.”

Lamond is an affable guy, and I interviewed him last year for an article looking at Sequoia’s small but compelling cleantech portfolio. Sequoia has invested in only a handful of cleantech firms, and they would have a fantastic batting average for the sector if one of their plays, lithium ion battery darling A123Systems, goes through with plans to go public. However, those plans emerged before the downturn, and we’re still waiting to see if the battery maker will — or can — go public.

But it’s interesting that Lamond told us back then that Sequoia’s cleantech strategy was to “not invest in concepts,” and that “the company has to have a real product and a competitive advantage” to attract his investment. While that’s not necessarily mutually exclusive with wanting to invest in companies from scratch, it’s a somewhat different strategy. Perhaps Lamond is looking for some more risk-taking investment fun in his almost-octogenarian years.

Lamond also told us that he and Sequoia decided to take a less-risky cleantech approach after watching the big hits and major misses in the dotcom boom, and that he didn’t want to recreate some of the hype-induced failures of the late ’90s. On that note, he told us that he had looked at many ethanol companies and passed on all of them . . . Hmm, wonder if he mentioned that to aggressive ethanol-backer Khosla in the interview process.

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