Mascoma: Lone Massachusetts Company in First Quarter's Top Ten Venture Deals

The PriceWaterhouseCoopers/NVCA MoneyTree Report covering Q1 activity just came out.

Part of the news is that there was a worrisome drop in the amount of capital poured into New England companies during the first quarter.

But the other interesting tidbit comes from the list of the top ten money-raisers in the quarter: companies like Slide (developer of Facebook apps), Asthmatx (medical devices for asthma sufferers), and Infinia Corp. (Stirling engines and generators), each of which raised $50 million.

Company #10 on the list is a mysterious Brighton, MA biotech company that raised $44.99 million from firms like Atlas Venture, General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, and Khosla Ventures. It's the only Massachusetts company to make the list.

Though the MoneyTree survey labels the company and its business as "undisclosed," all signs point to Mascoma Corp., a company turning cellulosic materials (plant-based schtuff like wood, straw, and switchgrass) into biofuels. (This was earlier reported as a $50 million combo of equity and debt, but there's no press release on Mascoma's site.)

Interestingly, the #1 money-raiser in the quarter was another cellulosic ethanol company, Colorado-based Range Fuels, which took in an eye-popping $130 million. Range and Mascoma have one investor in common: Vinod Khosla's Khosla Ventures.

(Both Range and Mascoma are classified by MoneyTree as "biotech" firms, but it seems to me they'd fit better in the "industrial/energy" category, though they do rely on living organisms and biotech processes to make their fuel.)

A Sunny Day in Massachusetts

This expansion of Evergreen Solar's manufacturing facility in Harvard, Mass., doubling its size and adding 350 jobs, is really good news. From Sacha Pfeiffer's story:

For Evergreen, a public company founded in 1994, the state's commitment to solar power played a key role in its decision to expand in Massachusetts, Feldt said.

Before [Gov. Deval] Patrick took office, Evergreen was considering building its first US manufacturing facility in a state such as Oregon or New Mexico that offers hefty incentives to clean energy companies, Feldt said. But during his gubernatorial campaign, Patrick visited Evergreen's Marlborough headquarters to try to persuade it to construct its plant in Massachusetts, according to Feldt.

Ultimately, the $44 million financing package dangled by Massachusetts - including $23 million in grants and $17.5 million in low-interest loans - was not the most generous Evergreen was offered. But "what really tipped the scales was the Patrick administration's focus on alternative energy," Feldt said.

"Deval said he was going to create an environment that is solar-friendly, and that was really important to us, and he's really done that," Feldt added. "So while the financial incentive was attractive but not the best, it was the genuine interest - and then the follow-through - in making solar important in Massachusetts that had us stay here."

This is a solid step in making Massachusetts a magnet for cleantech innovation.

Sunday's Globe column: 'Green solutions start at grass roots'

Sunday's column offers an overview of some of the grassroots and entrepreneurial efforts around New England to make power generation more environmentally sensitive.

Here's the video, which includes an interview with David Marcus of General Compression and Rick Hess of Konarka Technologies.

You Heard It Here First: $300K in Prizes for MIT Entrepreneurs

As this blog suggested back in September, the prize money at MIT's entrepreneurship competitions has leapt from $100,000 to $300,000, with the addition of a $200,000 prize for "Clean Energy Entrepreneurship".

Money comes from NStar and the US Dept. of Energy. Prize, according to Robert Gavin of the Globe, "will go to the team that develops and presents the best plan for commercializing alternative energy products and services."

Coming Up: Cool Events Around Boston

Some events that look good in the next week or so...

- PopTech starts Wednesday in Camden, Maine -- one of our region's great gatherings of brainiacs. There's a free, live Webcast, too.

- At Boston Start-Up Weekend, a group of people will try to build a Web business between Friday and Sunday (that's this Friday). It's free.

- On Sunday in Lexington (October 21st), Steve Strong, the guy who put solar panels on the White House and is now doing the same with the San Francisco Giants' baseball stadium, is giving a talk titled 'Sunlight is Life! The Path Toward a Sustainable Future: A visual presentation on solar- and wind-powered buildings.' Admission is free.

- There's one (maybe two) seats left at next Tuesday's free Tech Blogs event at Cambridge Innovation Center.

- PodCamp Boston happens October 26 - 28, and it's free.

Today's Globe Column: The Amazing Story Behind EnerNOC

If you're running a start-up and you need some motivation, today's column is especially for you. It's the story of EnerNOC, a company founded in the midst of the dot-com aftermath, in which the main lessons are about persistence and unshakable belief in one's ideas.

Here's the opening:

The first time I met Tim Healy, at a cocktail party in 1999, he was an associate at Commonwealth Capital, a Waltham venture capital firm.

The next time I bumped into Healy, at a cocktail party last month, the 38-year-old entrepreneur had taken his company, EnerNOC Inc., public on Nasdaq, and he was on his way to Manhattan to ring the stock market's closing bell.

What happened in the intervening eight years is an entrepreneurial fairy tale.

(That makes it sound like all I do as a reporter is go to cocktail parties. Close to the truth..)

The video is below, in which Healy talks about the challenges he faced raising VC money, and how he tried to tilt the odds in his favor. There's also an e-mail message from Healy, when I asked him about a rumor that he funded the company, pre-VC, with credit cards.



During the process of working on today's column, I asked Healy how much credit card debt he accumulated. He responded via e-mail:

For a variety of reasons, I don't give out how much debt we accumulated but I can tell you that at the time EnerNOC raised its Series A, I had approximately 17 different credit cards open by that point and I am pretty sure almost all of them had a balance. I can only imagine what David's personal situation looked like [David Brewster, Healy's co-founder] but we tried not to talk about the debt since talking about personal debt wasn't a whole lot of fun and we always believed it would be worth it in the long run. For a little while after we first got funded I couldn't really afford a place to live in Boston so I actually slept in my car and in my office for a month before a friend's place opened up and he graciously let me stay there for a while. I remember that I also bunked at another friend's place -- John Pepper's. The only reason I mention it is that John is the CEO and founder of the Boloco chain of restaurants in town (formerly The Wrap) and also a Tuck and Dartmouth grad so we shared a lot of early startup stories back then, keeping each other motivated and convincing one another we weren't crazy. After I allocated some friend and family stock to him in May, I feel as though I finally repaid him for those free nights and the great dinners his wife made me....needless to say, he's very happy now, since our stock is up and we just finished telling Wall Street about the great growth we see ahead. [EnerNOC's first quarterly conference call was this past week.]