Home energy management provider EnergyHub raises $14.5M

EnergyHub, a provider of energy efficiency products and associated software, announced today that it has raised $14.5 million in its second round of funding.

The company builds web-enabled home energy software that tracks electricity usage. It sells outlets, surge protectors, thermostats and the like that plug into a home’s network and then exports that data to a web-based interface. It then gives home owners suggestions — such as powering down an air conditioning unit — to save money on electricity.

“We market those solutions through two channels — utility companies and soon, directly to consumers,” EnergyHub’s marketing director Eric Fleming told VentureBeat.?”When smart meters are present, utilities can leverage EnergyHub systems to implement demand response programs.”

Right now the company sells its hardware to utility providers that then install the devices in homes. It plans to sell its energy efficiency hardware directly to consumers and homeowners soon, but Fleming didn’t say when those products would be publicly available.

The company is one of several that are developing “smart grid” technology — that is, managing an electrical power grid with advanced computer algorithms to promote better energy efficiency and reduce electricity waste.

The company also sells a “home base,” a small tablet-like device that tracks all the electricity in a home. EnergyHub already has mobile versions of its application for devices running Google’s mobile operating system Android or the iPhone operating system. But Fleming said that it makes sense for most consumers to get the home base to serve as a hub for the information.

“In order to get individual appliance-level control and information about energy use, you need an in-home network,” Fleming said. “Our Home Base integrates this capability into an in-home display.”

Next Story: A look at life inside Y Combinator from a two-time alumnus?(video)
Previous Story: Steve Jobs’s most ambitious product: Apple?Inc.

Tags: energy efficiency, Smart Grid

Companies: EnergyHub

People: Eric Fleming

View the original article here

Druva raises $12M for protecting enterprise data

Druva, a startup that protects data on enterprise laptops, said today it has raised $12 million in a second round of funding.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company makes Enterprise inSync software to back up data on enterprise laptops, smartphones or tablets. It can also retrieve data as needed. Intel recently said that the cost of a lost laptop with unprotected data is $49,000.

Druva’s backups are more efficient than a standard backup because the company “de-duplicates” data, where it saves only a single copy of data duplicated across users. That makes backups 10 times faster and allows them to save 90 percent bandwidth and storage. Druva can store its data on a company’s premises or in the cloud, or web-connected data centers.

The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners, and existing investor Sequoia Capital also contributed. The funding will be used to expand both products and sales and marketing in several regions. Jaspreet Singh, co-founder and chief executive of Druva, will also become chairman. Other board members include Shailendra Singh, managing director, Sequoia Capital; Jishnu Bhattacharjee, principal, Nexus Venture Partners; Ramani Kothandaraman, co-founder and chief operating officer of Druva; and Yoram Novick, CEO and founder of Topio.

Druva was founded in 2007 and it has more than 750 customers. It protects 300,000 laptops and other devices. Druva has 90 employees and competes with EMC Avamar, Symantec, and Iron Mountain (now Autonomy). It has raised $17 million to date. The name Druva comes from Sanskrit and means “North Star.”

Next Story: Reddit begins the holiday shopping season early, acquires?Redditgifts.com
Previous Story: Logitech launches two cool goodies for work and play on an?iPad

Tags: enterprise laptop backup

Companies: Druva

People: Jaspreet Singh

View the original article here

Fuel cell manufacturer ClearEdge raises $73.5M

ClearEdge Power, a manufacturer of fuel cells that run on natural gas, announced today that it has raised $73.5 million in its fifth round of funding.

The company manufactures fuel cells that?run on natural gas, which is broken down into a hydrogen-rich gas. The natural gas mixes with oxygen in the fuel cell, inducing a chemical reaction and generating electricity within the cell. The reaction also produces heat, which can be used in commercial heating applications — such as keeping a hotel hot during the winter or heating water for a home instead of requiring a separate water heating source.

The funding was led by Artis Capital Management.

ClearEdge Power’s funding is one of the largest investments in clean technology this year outside of electric vehicle manufacturers. The other largest investments this year have come in the form of a $60 million investment in efficient light-emitting diode (LED) manufacturer Bridgelux and trash-to-fuel company Enerkem’s $60 million investment. The funding is mainly geared toward marketing and expanding the company’s sales team, ClearEdge power vice president of marketing Mike Upp told VentureBeat.

“We’re still doing research and development, but we’re no longer a laboratory,” he said. “We’ve been shipping product for a while, so the funding is more on the marketing and sales side to expand beyond California to the East Coast, as well as Korea.”

The cells capture energy in the form of both electricity and heat, so they capture about 90 percent of the available energy from the reaction. The fuel cells plug into a typical power grid, but there are plans to make them independent of a power grid, the company said in its announcement.?The fuel cell is about the size of a?refrigerator, costs around $56,000 and generates 5 kilowatts of power and 5.8 kilowatts of energy in the form of heat — so it’s a little impractical for typical residential owners.

“We’re still interested in residential, high-end residential cells — a 5,000 square foot house or larger,” Upp said. “Those are our early customers, that’s a market focus for us, but the main focus is light commercial or institutional customers, like schools or businesses.”

The company recently secured a $2.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy that gave the company capital to install 10 fuel cells at businesses in Oregon. The funding came from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), which will monitor the fuel cells to see if they are producing the kind of energy savings expected for the businesses that purchase them.

Next Story: Claritics expands into mobile analytics for Android?apps
Previous Story: Engine Yard acquires Orchestra for added PHP?power

Tags: energy, energy efficiency, fuel cells, natural gas, Smart Grid

Companies: ClearEdge Power

View the original article here

Social incubator YouWeb raises $2M

Technology company incubator YouWeb has spawned incredibly successful social and mobile game companies. Now the Burlingame, Calif.-based incubator has raised $2 million in funding for itself.

YouWeb is raising the money from existing investors to help fuel its expansion. The company has also hired ex-Walmart executive and tech veteran Michelle Yee Sangster (right) as senior vice president of business development. Peter Relan, chairman of YouWeb, said in an earlier interview that he was accelerating the pace of investment at YouWeb and was driving faster expansion for YouWeb’s portfolio companies, which include CrowdStar, Sibblingz and iSwifter.

YouWeb already had one exit from its social game portfolio when Japan’s Gree bought OpenFeint for $104 million. Sangster will help drive business development at YouWeb companies such as iSwifter, which streams games and other entertainment to iPads. YouWeb will also expand into non-game markets. Target markets include mobile, commerce and advertising.

Relan said YouWeb’s goal is to create disruptive startups. Sangster has 18 years of experience in consumer media, search, commerce and social media. At Walmart, she was responsible for the company’s @WalmartLabs’ partnerships in social media.

“Michelle has a long history of success in mobile, social media and e-commerce,” said Relan. “Michelle will be integral to YouWeb’s development as it continues to generate disruptive and creative incubations.”

Sangster is a seasoned tech executive with over 18 years of experience in consumer media, search, commerce and social media. Prior to working at YouWeb, Sangster was VP of business development at Walmart where she was responsible for @WalmartLabs’ partnerships in social media.

Next Story: Y Combinator’s Interstate lets you share your roadmap with the world (or your?employees)
Previous Story: Samsung cites Kubrick’s ’2001′ as legal defense in Apple patent?battle

Tags: Open source

Companies: CrowdStar, iSwifter, OpenFeint, Sibblingz, YouWeb

People: Michelle Yee Sangster, Peter Relan

View the original article here

Sentilla raises $15M to supercharge data center management

IT infrastructure software maker Sentilla wants to turn IT departments into profit centers instead of financial burdens, and they’ve just raised?$15 million to work towards that goal.

Sentilla’s software uses physical equipment and virtual cloud IT?infrastructure?to improve data center efficiency by discovering, monitoring, analyzing, planing and automatting data center workloads. Sentilla’s energy management platform is currently in its sixth generation.?Sentilla’s service is subscription-based and the company says it currently helps customers reclaim around 18 to 20 percent of their power capacity.

If the terms “IT infrastructure” and “IT department” have the tendency to make your eyes glaze-over, this might make you sit up: Sentilla has patent-pending Virtual Meters that compute the power consumption of unmetered assets. These meters perform “what-if” analysis to predict future performance and then track application?performance?in both virtual and dedicated environments. This information has been hard to track?historically, making these meters very valuable.

“We’re leading the charge to turn IT upside down and deliver more services using less resources,” said Mike Kaul, CEO of Sentilla, in today’s press release. “Sentilla is the only company that can provide the diagnostic insight to drastically reduce data center costs AND increase company revenue as well as profitability. This funding is a validation of what we’ve been seeing in the market and hearing from our valued customers, and provides us with the resources to accommodate growing demand.”

Today’s financing round is lead by SingTel Innov8 Ventures with participation from Sentilla’s existing backers ONSET Ventures and Claremont Creek Ventures. Founded in 2003, this is the company’s third round of institutional funding. They have raised a total of $26.3 million.?Sentilla will use today’s funding for “sales and marketing expansion.” The company is headquartered in Redwood City, CA with a branch in London.

Sentilla competes with?Power Assure,?Modius,?VMWare?and?SynapSense?(used by Facebook).?HP recently jumped into the game?with a “Discovery and Dependency Mapping Service for Data Center Transformation.” Besides the Virtual Meters, what sets Sentilla apart is the company’s experienced team.?CEO Kaul has an impressive resume. A former United States Air Force pilot, he has more than 20 years of experience in software. Before Sentilla, Kaul was president and CEO of diCarta. Prior to that he was Charman of BuildPoint, after being CEO of HotDispatch, and the former VP and GM of Oracle’s New Technologies devision.

Sentilla has won the Cool Vendor award from Gartner in data center infrastructure management. The company was also included in GigaOM’s Structure 50 list of the top cloud computing and infrastructure companies. The company was co-founded by CTO Joe Polastre who was featured in?the 2009 Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal 40 Under 40 award and named one of BusinessWeek’s Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs. Polastre has held software development and product manager positions with IBM, Microsoft and Intel.

Sentilla will be showcasing its cloud analytics tool at VMworld in Las Vegas, starting August 29. You can read more about the tool on the company’s blog.

(image courtesy?wiki.engr.illinois.edu)

Next Story: Twitter agrees to meet with UK government about recent?riots
Previous Story: HTC launching 2 Windows Phone Mango devices Sept.?1

Tags: data centers

Companies: Sentilla

View the original article here

Biochemical developer Aurora Algae raises $22M

Aurora Algae, a developer of biofuels and biochemicals produced from processed algae, announced today that it has raised $22 million in its most recent round of funding.

The company is part of a small set of funded biologically-produced chemical companies that produce a diverse number of biochemical products, such as feed stock and transportation fuel. These types of companies have experienced a recent string of successful exits. Biofuel makers Solazyme, Amyris and KiOR all successfully filed to go public and made their trading debuts in the past year. While investing in the biofuel sector as a whole fell last year, companies that produce a diverse range of products from their biochemicals experienced record investing, according to a report by Lux Research.

“You’re?starting to see a realization that we came to a year ago, if you’re growing a base commodity you should go after the highest-value markets and not just biofuels,” Aurora Algae chief executive Greg Bafalis told VentureBeat. “Biofuels will eventually come, but they shouldn’t be your focus now.”

Investors made fewer investments in the biofuels sector as a whole, and invested a larger amount of money in a smaller set of companies. That’s because most biofuel companies have started to mature, and with fewer new biofuel companies emerging in the past year, they are either in a position to raise their third and fourth rounds of funding or to go public.

“I think you’re starting to see a little bit of a shakeout for the companies that are a little more advanced in their processes,” Bafalis said. “We’re?starting with the low-hanging fruit, the easy stuff to start off with that has high value.”

Aurora Algae produces chemicals that the company converts to “nutriceuticals,” which basically equates to feed stock and protein-rich biomass products. The company cultivates a strain of algae that is rich in omega-3 fatty acids and, when processed, creates a petrochemical that is similar the palm oil the company converts for a number of other products.

The company plans to use this funding to start construction of its first facility to produce commercial-grade biochemicals. The company is currently running trial runs at a demonstration plant in Australia, which should be complete later this year. Aurora Algae has raised $72 million to date.

Next Story: Report: webOS ran twice as fast on an iPad 2 than on the?TouchPad
Previous Story: Zurb pulls its annual all-nighter for Rebekah Children’s?Services

Tags: algae, biochemicals, biofuels, investing, Venture Capital

Companies: Amyris, Aurora Algae, KiOR, Solazyme

People: Greg Bafalis

View the original article here

Biochemical developer Aurora Algae raises $22M

Aurora Algae, a developer of biofuels and biochemicals produced from processed algae, announced today that it has raised $22 million in its most recent round of funding.

The company is part of a small set of funded biologically-produced chemical companies that produce a diverse number of biochemical products, such as feed stock and transportation fuel. These types of companies have experienced a recent string of successful exits. Biofuel makers Solazyme, Amyris and KiOR all successfully filed to go public and made their trading debuts in the past year. While investing in the biofuel sector as a whole fell last year, companies that produce a diverse range of products from their biochemicals experienced record investing, according to a report by Lux Research.

“You’re?starting to see a realization that we came to a year ago, if you’re growing a base commodity you should go after the highest-value markets and not just biofuels,” Aurora Algae chief executive Greg Bafalis told VentureBeat. “Biofuels will eventually come, but they shouldn’t be your focus now.”

Investors made fewer investments in the biofuels sector as a whole, and invested a larger amount of money in a smaller set of companies. That’s because most biofuel companies have started to mature, and with fewer new biofuel companies emerging in the past year, they are either in a position to raise their third and fourth rounds of funding or to go public.

“I think you’re starting to see a little bit of a shakeout for the companies that are a little more advanced in their processes,” Bafalis said. “We’re?starting with the low-hanging fruit, the easy stuff to start off with that has high value.”

Aurora Algae produces chemicals that the company converts to “nutriceuticals,” which basically equates to feed stock and protein-rich biomass products. The company cultivates a strain of algae that is rich in omega-3 fatty acids and, when processed, creates a petrochemical that is similar the palm oil the company converts for a number of other products.

The company plans to use this funding to start construction of its first facility to produce commercial-grade biochemicals. The company is currently running trial runs at a demonstration plant in Australia, which should be complete later this year. Aurora Algae has raised $72 million to date.

Next Story: Report: webOS ran twice as fast on an iPad 2 than on the?TouchPad
Previous Story: Zurb pulls its annual all-nighter for Rebekah Children’s?Services

Tags: algae, biochemicals, biofuels, investing, Venture Capital

Companies: Amyris, Aurora Algae, KiOR, Solazyme

People: Greg Bafalis

View the original article here