Happy Holiday Season!

As the year approaches its well deserved finishing line, I would like to wish all people who have been reading my blog or have given me suggestions and feedback along the last year a very happy holiday season and all the best for the upcoming year!
2006 was exciting for the VC and start-up business! I [...]

Cellulosic Ethanol taking off in USA

Cellulosic ethanol, the production of ethanol from a number of biomass products i.e. paper sludge, wood chips, switch grass and corn stover, is taking off in the US! Often referred to as the “holy grail” in biomass-to-ethanol, this new approach would allow to use various input sources, not just expensive corn or crops.
One of our [...]

Update on Isilon IPO!

Update on my previous article on our portfolio company Isilon:
The Seattle-based company debuted on NASDAQ on Friday, December 15, 2006 under the symbol “ISLN” and opened at $25, up 92% from its IPO price of $13. It’ll be the third biggest opening day gainer of the year and will have market cap far above $1.4Bn! [...]

Isilon IPO on Nasdaq!

Isilon, one of our portfolio companies, a worldwide leader in clustered storage systems and software for digital content, today went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Isilon is enabling enterprises to transform data into information and information into breakthroughs. Customers include media power houses such as NBC, mySpace, LexisNexis or ABC.
My dear fellow Fred Destin [...]

Lilliputian Systems and MicroOptical get recognised as WEF Tech Pioneers 2007

Congratulations to two of our portfolio companies, who were nominated recently for the World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer Award 2007:
Lilliputian Systems, one of our Cleantech investments, developing micro-fuel cells for portable devices, Interview with Ken Lazarus, and
MicroOptical, providing a new “viewing” experience for digital content, Interview with Kip Kokinakis – No wonder, Paris Hilton love [...]

SAM Private Equity becomes Emerald Technology Ventures

SAM Private Equity announced yesterday, that due to the recent “merger” of Robeco and SAM Group, the private equity arm of SAM is buying out the entire private equity business to create Emerald Technologies. SAM Private Equity is one of the leading Cleantech oriented VCs managing 3 funds with a total of €250M in committed [...]

BASF fuels its product offering with Pemeas Fuel Cell Technologies

A ping by one of the people close to Pemeas Fuel Cell Technologies has alerted me to the recent announcement that BASF is buying Pemeas Full Cell Technologies, a leading company in the fuel cell business. Pemeas was founded in April 2004 as a spin-off of the former Hoechst Group’s fuel cell activities. The company [...]

Datango – Expansion Financing Round to fuel international growth

As Valerie has pointed out nicely on her blog, Datango, one of our portfolio companies from the early internet days, has completed a financing round with HassoPlattnerVenture and Extorel. Datango is an interesting turn-around story, which initially started in 1999 providing “web-rides” to consumers. After the burst of the bubble the company transitioned from the [...]