Five-year-old Coulomb installs and manages electric car charging stations for its customers, like businesses and government agencies. Coulomb says it operates the largest global electric car charging network in the world. Electric cars are still a small and emerging market, but companies like Coulomb are looking to get in front of the curve as more cars like Nissan’s LEAF, Tesla’s Model S and GM’s Volt make it onto the roads.

Coulomb announced a large round of $47.5 million in funding in May, but back then hadn’t yet announced BMW i Ventures as an investor. Other investors in that round included new investors Kleiner Perkins and Toyota Tsusho, and returning previous investors Braemar Energy Ventures and Rho Ventures.

BMW’s investment is interesting because it shows that the car company’s venture arm is also interested in strategically investing in electric car technology, not just mobility tools for traditional vehicles. BMW has only been modestly interested in electric cars — the company has their prototype Mini-E’s and has talked about creating its MegaCity Vehicle by 2013.

While the electric car market is only emerging, charging stations could one day be a substantial source of revenue. Other companies that are building electric car charging networks include NRG Energy, which won a controversial deal in California recently, and Ecotality, which has sued California regulators to stop the NRG Energy California deal.

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SolarBridge raises $25 million, series D: SolarBridge makes solar microinverters, which are miniature versions of conventional central solar inverters that are necessary for converting the direct current generated by solar panels to alternating current for feeding the grid or to be used onsite. Instead of matching a central inverter to a dozen panels at a time, each microinverter serves one panel. This design allows the microinverters to calculate and adjust the optimal energy output of each solar panel and prevents poor-performing panels from affecting the power output of the best-performing ones.

SolarBridge raised $25 million in a series D round led by Shea Ventures and including Battery Ventures, Rho Ventures and Osage University Partners. The company has raised more than $71 million to date, including a $19 million series C round last year. SolarBridge says the funding will be used to launch “new hardware and software products, increase sales and marketing efforts and expand the company’s operations globally.”

Solar microinverters are the future of solar inverters, but are still at an early market phase. Enphase Energy is another leader in the microinverter space and Enphase went public earlier this year.

Redwood Systems raises $11.75 million, series C: Redwood Systems makes a control and sensor system for LEDs that runs over an optimized version of Ethernet cables. The company just closed $11.75 million in a series C round from investors including Battery Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, Index Ventures and Mitsui & Co, Ltd. Japanese conglomerate Mitsui started backing the company a year ago.

Redwood Systems is four years old and some of its customers include SAP, Volkswagen, Johnson Controls and most recently, Facebook. Commercial building owners and data center operators can use Redwood’s LED system to cut the amount of lighting used throughout the building — in some cases, up to 70 percent over standard non-networked fluorescent lighting systems. LEDs are more efficient than fluorescents, but Redwood’s management system also monitors the building environment, including temperature and room occupancy, and can dim and manage the lights to help maximize efficiency.

Lighting Science Group raises $140 million: LED maker Lighting Science Group has closed on $140 million in private funding, led by private equity firm Riverwood Capital, and including Pegasus Capital Advisors. Lighting Science Group is already publicly traded on the OTC bulletin board, and over a year ago indicated that it wanted to go public on the Nasdaq and raise $150 million.

Lighting Science designs and makes LED lamps and other light fixtures for the residential, commercial and industrial market. The company has been selling LED lighting for nearly a decade and owns factories in Satellite Beach, Florida and Monterrey, Mexico.

GreenBytes raises $12 million, series B: GreenBytes makes data de-duplication storage gear, which are tools that reduce redundant data as well as store data on energy efficient storage solid state drives. The company raised a $12 million series B round from Battery Ventures and Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management.

“Primary storage”, or top tier storage, is comprised of hardware designed for quick data access and are usually reserved for active or just-created data.  Beneath this are “secondary tiers” devoted to backup storage, archives and storage of lower priority business data. GreenBytes’ appliances are deployed close to the top tiers of storage so that fewer data trickles down to other tiers and the greater the potential cost and energy savings overall. Despite the promise of data deduplification, IT managers are still wary about it, according a GigaOM Pro report “De-Duplicating the Storage Industry” (subscription required).

Solar Mosaic raises $2.5 million: According to a filing, the kickstarter of solar, SolarMosaic has raised $2.5 million. The company is just about to launch the truly disruptive part of its business: as early as this Summer SolarMosaic plans to start offering people a way to buy into rooftop solar panel projects, and make back a return on their investment over time.

Soladigm raises close to $5 million in debt, option: Soladigm, which makes electrochromic “smart” windows that tint when electricity is applied to them, has raised $5 million in debt and options according to a filing. The startup was founded in 2007 and is based in Milpitas, Calif.

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As I pointed out when Luca withdrew its IPO filing, the hope that there was a greentech IPO revival brewing is now officially debunked. An investor in BrightSource, DBL Investor’s Nancy Pfund, lamented in an op-ed this week the sad state of a society and marketplace that won’t allow a solar thermal to go public at the valuation it wants, but in the same week can support a large secondary offering from Dunkin’ Donuts.

Solar inverter company Enphase Energy was the only greentech company that had intended to go public in recent weeks, and which actually did. On May 30 the startup sold nearly 9 million shares at $6 a piece, raising about $54 million. The company is currently trading at $6.86 per share, slightly above its debut price.

Enerkem is a Canadian company, founded in 2000, that develops technology that turns waste into biofuel. The company has won federal government backing — a conditional commitment for an $80 million loan guarantee from the USDA — and also counts giant trash hauler Waste Management, oil refiner Valero, Rho Ventures, Braemer Energy Ventures and the Westly Group as investors.

Enerkem gasifies various forms of waste — everything from old telephone poles to mixed municipal garbage — and then turns that syngas into various fuels including methanol and ethanol. Enerkem has inked non-binding agreements with Waste Management and Valero to sell its equipment, and those deals give Enerkem the option to co-own refineries with Waste Management and Valero.

Since 2008, Enerkem has been running a pilot plant in Sherbrooks, Canada, that can process 4.8 metric tons of feedstock a day, and its demonstration plant, in Westbury, Canada, was built to produce 1.3 million gallons of fuels per year. The company is now building a commercial refinery, located in Edmonton, Canada, that will be able to make 10 million gallons per year. It expects to get ready for producing methanol at the Edmonton facility in the first quarter of 2013; ethanol production should follow in the second half of 2013, says the company.

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The new app will launch sometime in the first quarter of 2012, Iskold said, and it will feature a lot more options to interact with content on the second screen while watching TV. One example: GetGlue wants to serve up “interviews with stars or clips that didn’t make it” into a TV show, Iskold explained. Some of that data will be crowdsourced, while other resources may come directly from TV networks. GetGlue is now partnering with 75 TV networks in the U.S. and the U.K., and plans to add more partners in Latin America later this year.

The company relaunched its iPhone and web apps Wednesday, and Android is next in line for a new coat of paint. However, don’t expect your Kindle Fire or Android tablet to get the same kind of love the iPad is going to receive with the next update. Iskold told me that GetGlue is supporting Android tablets with its current app, but that there are no tablet-specific plans for Android in store: “We are not in the business of building customized apps for every platform,” he said. Oh snap!

GetGlue started off with pure Foursquare-like check-ins for media content, but the company has been moving towards curating conversations around media, and especially TV in recent months. Part of that has also been an effort to channel conversations around a show that isn’t necessarily watched at the same time by everyone. New data from GetGlue shows that only 35 percent of its users watch a show live, but 70 percent tune in later the same or the following day.

GetGlue also announced a new $12 million round of financing Wednesday, which is led by Rho Ventures. Existing investors Time Warner, RRE Ventures, and Union Square Ventures, from which the company raised $6 million in November of 2010, are all part of this round as well.

GetGlue has now around 40 people on staff, and plans to grow its headcount in 2012. Iskold told me he hopes for social TV to become mainstream within the next 24 months, and he wants the company’s upcoming iPad app to be a big part of that. “A lot of really interesting things are happening on the second screen,” he said.

Update: A GetGlue spokesperson told us that the company is in fact working on an app for Android tablets as well.

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Here’s how it works: CUE makes a deal with a building owner, then plugs the company’s software into the building’s management system. Over a two-week period, the software crunches the energy consumption and HVAC system data, pulls in outside data like weather and temperature, and eventually creates a model and baseline for how the building consumes energy and how best to optimize that energy use.

The software then is able to shift parts of the building’s energy use via the HVAC system to times of day when a utility’s rates are lower and when there is less demand on the grid. So, say, a building could be subtly pre-cooled on a hot day, before the utility’s peak times occur and the rates are a lot higher. The software can do this without changing the comfort of the people in the building, says Battery Ventures Partner Jason Matlof.

CUE says it can save building owners 15 to 30 percent in energy savings from their HVAC systems. For utilities, the buildings are turned into sort-of thermal batteries that can store energy during peak times, and can enable building owners to participate in utilities’ variable pricing programs.

In contrast to many building management systems that use sensors and extra hardware installed throughout a building — and take weeks or months to integrate — CUE uses no extra gear, and just relies on the building management system and its model to start to work. The system can cost less than $10,000 to get up and running says Matlof, and the low capital required is one of the reasons Battery Ventures funded the company.

The smart algorithms came from the work of one of CUE’s founders, Gregor Henze, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who previously wrote his dissertation on optimal control of thermal energy storage systems. The model is able to accurately predict how the building is going to respond to the current environment in real time and adjust the HVAC system accordingly, says Matlof.

Battery Ventures has backed other low-capital-intensive energy efficiency software plays like networked lighting company Redwood Systems. “We’ve avoided the kinds of companies that get stuck in the Valley of Death, like thin-film solar, utility-scale solar thermal and electric cars,” says Matlof.

CUE’s software reminded me a bit of some of the projects that smart thermostat service company EcoFactor has done, optimizing demand response events for utilities. Though EcoFactor is concentrating on residential buildings, and not, say, a 70-story commercial building that’s in CUE’s cross hairs, the two companies are similar in that they both use big data and predictive algorithms to focus on HVAC as the pain point in a building.

CUE has already done 12 pilots with its software (two in the Chicago area) and has just started selling its software commercially.

Image courtesy of CUE.

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Enerkem gasifies various forms of waste — everything from old telephone poles to mixed municipal garbage — and then turns that syngas into various fuels including methanol and ethanol. Valero is on one side of Enerkem’s supply chain, and could work with Enerkem on commercial relationships to process and sell the fuels. Waste Management is on the other side of Enerkem’s supply chain, and we could envision Enerkem working with Waste Management’s trash supply.

Enerkem has a couple of facilities in the works. One in Westbury, Quebec, which at one point was expected to produce about 1.5 million gallons per year of methanol from old telephone poles, with ethanol next on the list of biofuels to produce. Another plant, which is expected to cost $70 million and could crank out about 10 million gallons of ethanol per year, is being planned with Greenfield Ethanol, Canada’s largest ethanol producer, right next to an Edmonton, Alberta municipal composting facility. And there’s also a 10 to 20 million gallon per year, $200 million plant, in the works in Pontotoc, Miss., adjacent to a municipal waste dump, which Enerkem expects to break ground on this year.

Enerkem has received significant U.S. government support for that last Mississippi plant. In January, the USDA awarded Enerkem a conditional commitment for an $80 million loan guarantee to build it, which also followed on a $50 million Department of Energy grant. With this latest funding, Enerkem has raised about $130 million in equity funding, and received $130 million (combo of grant and loan guarantee) from the U.S. government. Trash to fuel technology seems to have gotten more attention in 2011, compared to making cellulosic ethanol from energy crops and agriculture waste.

However, even with this bright funding spot, the next-generation of biofuel production has been creeping forward. There have been three biofuel IPOs in the last 12 months — Gevo, Amyris and Solazyme — but these three companies are not yet producing biofuels at scale, and are instead making sales either off of specialty bio products like cosmetics, or reselling standard corn-based ethanol.

It will ultimately be the giants like Valero and Waste Management that will be able to get these biofuel products to scale. Both Valero and Waste Management are investing in quite a few biofuel and waste product companies. Valero has backed Mascoma, and has also taken stakes in algae fuel maker Solix Biofuels, and cellulosic ethanol maker ZeaChem.

Waste Management strategically invested in German company Agnion Energy, which invented a waste gasification process based on something called the heatpipe-reformer design. Waste management has backed startup Agilyx, which has developed technology that can turn plastic otherwise headed for the landfill, into a synthetic crude oil. And earlier this year, Waste Management announced a partnership with Genomatica, a San Diego, Calif.-based startup with a platform to create genetically modified organisms to turn biogas into a variety of industrial chemicals.

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Coulomb was one of the earlier startups to tackle the electric car charger space (see our video clip below), but there’s also been a rush of new charging station companies launched recently, including chargers from GE, Ecotality, Aerovironment, and Better Place. ClipperCreek, founded in 2006, is also an older startup that sells charging infrastructure. The Plug-In 2010 conference in San Jose in July was filled with new charging options.

Coulomb needs to ramp up quickly to be able to compete in a market that is getting rapidly crowded — hence the fund-raising. Coulomb just raised a Series B round of $14 million in February, and a Series A round of $3.8 million in 2009, bringing the company’s total funds raised to over $30 million.

Coulomb already has some significant sales, considering its startup status and the early state of the plug-in car charging market: The first mainstream all-electric Nissan LEAF just officially went on sale last month. Coulomb says it has shipped 850 stations to over 200 customers and has a Department of Energy-funded program that will lead to another 4,600 charging stations built in the U.S.

At the heart of it, the electric vehicle charging infrastructure business isn’t a great venture capital and startup play. It will eventually be a commodity business, which will be led by large companies that can scale quickly. The infrastructure will be standardized; the designs likely won’t play a huge role in differentiation; and it will eventually be the software that will be the valuable business proposition.

In the market’s nascent stage, some of these hardware startups could do pretty well. Expect acquisitions down the road, and then an eventual shakeout in the market. Coulomb was smart to partner with German energy and engineering giant Siemens as an investor and a strategic partner. Siemens has agreed to sell its smart grid IT products in conjunction with Coulomb’s smart electric vehicle charging stations, and Siemens Ventures is an investor in Coulomb.

The growing need for intelligent management of electric vehicle charging could create a $297 million industry in the U.S., and $1.5 billion globally as of 2015, according to analyst John Gartner of Pike Research. That market forecast encompasses the tech ranging from applications, servers, networking equipment and other hardware, to ongoing services for collecting and monitoring data about vehicle charging.

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