After some management changes and questions about the success of early deployment experiments, pond scum-biofuel developer GreenFuel Technologies Corp. closed a $13.9 million venture investment from insiders Access Private Equity, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Polaris Venture Partners. The funding will help the company continue development of proprietary technology for growing algae and converting it to fuel, while using waste gases as an accelerant.
The deal comes as an extension of the company's Series B round, on top of about $20 million GreenFuel has raised since it was formed from technology developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology four years ago, and retires $6.3 million in debt, leaving $7.6 million in new capital. Polaris general partner Bob Metcalfe, who assumed the position of interim CEO last year, characterized the deal as the close of the company's "so-called interim period," as it moves forward from demonstarting proof-of-concept to establishing commercial partnerships.
Metcalfe, an information technology industry legend who invented the Ethernet connectivity standard in the 1970s, founded 3Com Corp., and is a champion of MIT projects in general, made a $6.3 million investment from Polaris in the first extension of the B round, and has been a vocal supporter of the company's novel technology. Though his background is far afield from the company's mission, Metcalfe provided a high-profile endorsement of the company's technology in taking the helm as CEO.
With a small pilot production facility at MIT, GreenFuel has remained somewhat of a science project, but the company expects to move into the market with the help of deep-pocketed industrial partners seeking to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, and the company has been working on a still-unannounced algae farming project since January. GreenFuel's technology calls for greenhouse gases to be pumped through algae ponds to accelerate growth, and for algae to then be converted into ethanol and biodiesel. The company potentially will partner with power plants, cement plants, corn ethanol plants, and other industrial facilities.
Metcalfe said that in addition to the new funding and a number of partnerships, GreenFuel expects to announce a new CEO in the near future. --Clifford Carlsen
See July 2007 story from Xconomy
See May 14 press release from GreenFuel Technologies Corp.
See October 2007 post from TechConfidential
For more, see Seeker Blog,
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well-paid report.There are not ponds in this tecnology,and thermodinamics don`t prevent(to the contrary of one liar).It has a future