Colorado cleantechs seeking Bay Area capital - San Francisco Business Times:

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Following a string of majotr partnershipsand grants, the state is drawinfg increased attention from major Bay Area venture capitalists and othef cleantech investors. “I think what’s happened is that everywhere that has science resources and that has nationa l labs or university labs has geared up for the increasexd interestin cleantech,” said Will Coleman, a partner at San Francisco-based “Colorado is one of thos e places that has a lot of resources.
” MDV has two Coloradi portfolio companies: OPX Biotechnologies, which developes microbes that make refining of biofuelss more efficient, and Zeachem, another biofuels-focused company currentlu based in Menlo Park but moving its headquartera to Colorado where it already has an office. In additio n to Mohr Davidow, other notable Bay Area cleantecy investors and have recently made investments in Coloradoocleantech startups.
And the California Cleab Tech Open chose Colorado as the firsft state to expand its business plan competition to when the groul goes national in the next few Coleman said the Bay Area will always dominate as a hub for but as the cleantech space becomewmore crowded, investors are being forced to look “If you’re going to compete you’rew going to have to look all over the placde to find good deals and I think Colorado is a centerr of excellence,” Coleman said. Investors are taking While Colorado typically averagesabout 2.5 percent of nationao venture capital investments, in the first quarter of this year, it pullerd in 4.
5 percent of venture investment nationally, a totalk of $311 million. Recently, a contingentr of 40 venture capitalists — includinfg Coleman and those from , Lightspeed Ventures, , and otherxs mostly from the Bay Area visitedthe (NREL) in Golden, as part of a field trip to the state also sponsored by . Cleantechn leaders showcased changes the statwe has made to easeinvesting there. One significant change: The Departmenyt of Energy formedan entrepreneur-in-residence program to help researcg labs better commercialize the science that comesa out of the lab, said Quentin Falconer, head of the cleantecb group at Silicon Valley Bank.
“The Departmen t of Energy has actually taken the initiativw to build bridges to the venture Falconer said. Meanwhile, Colorado has reeledf in major partnerships and grants from national companies includingt and ConocoPhillips forbiofuels research, established centeras for excellence around its cleantech resources and figured out new ways of gettintg science from the research lab to market. And there has been increasedx cooperation among the lab and includingv formingthe , a partnership of Colorado’ds three main research Universities and the The collaborative addressed a major impediment to getting fundingb for research in the state: everyone had theid own rules.
“The Collaboratory agreement went a long way in simplifyinvg that dramatically becauseyou don’t have to sign multipld agreements to fund research at multiple institutions,” said Paul Jerde, executivre director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at the , a member of the The Collaboratory formed the and Biofuels known as C2B2 — where biofuels stakeholders and the memberx of the Collaboratory get together to pursuee funding for research. Mohr Davidowq found Ryan Gill, a co-founder of C2B2, through a Bay Area connectiomn and invested in OPX where Gill is ascientififc adviser. “We found him througj being part of theColorado ecosystem,” Colemajn said.