Cleantech Investing Hits Bottom and Stabilizes

At a cleantech panel about business opportunities running up to the 2012 Olympics in London, Dallas Kachan, managing director for the Cleantech Group, said that the second quarter “looks a lot like the first quarter” for cleantech investing so far.

In other words, it’s still down from last year, but deals are still happening and money is still available, he said. “The amount of investment is not continuing to plummet; it’s stable,” Kachan said. “Some might say we’ve reached bottom.”

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It certainly seems like we’re hearing more deals this quarter, though nothing like the dealflow we were seeing for most of last year. Energy-management startups Tendril and AlertMe both raised money ($30 million and $13 million, respectively) this week, for instance, and Solazyme, which is developing algae-based fuel, raised $11.6 million. Earth2Tech’s Katie Fehrenbacher noted in April that she thought the stimulus was starting to warm cleantech funding.

New Energy Finance last week also said that second-quarter clean-energy investing was up by a third from the first quarter, indicating that “the worst is past.”

Image courtesy of glennharper via a Flickr Creative Commons license.

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