venture capital
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You can't buy one at your local car dealer, but electric transit buses have a significant role to play in reducing vehicular emissions and expanding the spread of electric-vehicle technology. Two companies have a majority of the U.S. market for electric buses, which is growing quickly if perhaps more quietly than that for electric cars. The U.S. company Proterra has 60 percent of the market for such vehicles, and now it has a new backer. DON'T MISS: One third of new transit buses will be electric in 2020, all by 2030: Proterra CEO BMW i Ventures, the venture-investment arm of German luxury...
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Lyft ridesharing service, part-owned by GM, said to raise half a billion dollars more
Lyft has reportedly raised a new round of funding to support its on-demand ride hailing service. It’s believed that investors have put $500 million more into the company’s coffers, probably invigorated by its recent market growth and Uber’s stumbles. A Lyft spokesperson declined...
VentureBeat's GreenBeat -
Dyson walks away from (three) Sakti3 solid-state battery patents: updated
Just 18 months after its $90m acquisition of Sakti3, the British consumer-products company Dyson is taking a step back. Dyson has chosen to relinquish its rights to three patents co-owned by the company that were part of the core intellectual property of the Michigan based start-up company. Its...
Green Car Reports -
Dyson Buys Solid-State Battery Startup Sakti3 For $90 Million
Dyson, the U.K. company famous for its bagless vacuum cleaners, has acquired solid-state battery company Sakti3 in a deal worth $90 million. The news comes just seven months after Dyson announced a $15 million investment in the company, a spin-out from the University of Michigan. Sakti3 represented...
VentureBeat's GreenBeat -
Faraday Future: Startup Promises Long-Range Electric Car In 2017
Over cocktails, two former Lotus colleagues met up in Irvine, California, the mecca for car design. They realized they shared a common dream: to create a next-generation electric vehicle... With a photo of a drink on a bar napkin, so begins the creation myth for Faraday Future, the secretive...
John Voelcker -
Five Cities Get Free Electric-Car Charging Stations At 'Socially Responsible' Businesses
Volta Industries asked companies that value sustainability to underwrite its charging network.
Stephen Edelstein -
Three years ago today, the very first production Tesla Model S electric luxury sedan was delivered to its buyer. That would be Silicon Valley venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, who's also a Tesla board member. The delivery took place, on a weekend, as soon as the Model S had been fully certified for sale by all relevant U.S. government agencies. DON'T MISS: First 2012 Tesla Model S Delivered To Earliest Depositor Steve Jurvetson: Video (Jun 2012) The event was captured on a video that Jurvetson himself posted to YouTube just a couple of days later. Revisiting the video after three years is a...
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Tesla Needs Cash? $6 Billion Required Through 2025, Says Goldman Sachs
Carmaking is very, very, very expensive. A conventional vehicle platform or architecture generally costs about $1 billion to design, engineer, test, certify, and put into production. And the various models derived from that architecture usually last about seven years. Multiply that by multiple...
John Voelcker -
Why Silicon Valley Venture Firm Kleiner Perkins Bet On Fisker, Not Tesla
Venture capitalists fund a lot of startup companies, and most of them don't pan out. So famed venture firm Kleiner Perkins' stake in Fisker Automotive--which is still trying to sell itself, but hasn't built a car for 12 months--could be viewed as just another failed investment. On the other hand...
John Voelcker -
Tesla To Issue More Stock, Pay Off Energy Dept With Proceeds
Since Tesla issued its first-quarter financials last week, its stock has been on a tear. Not only did the company have its first profitable quarter ever, but the many investors who had shorted the stock of Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] are now faced with the threat of expensive margin calls. So Tesla is...
John Voelcker -
Is Fisker The Most Tragic VC-Backed Debacle In Recent History?
In January 2005, legendary car designer Henrik Fisker founded a company to bring innovative new thinking to the automobile industry. Between that date and today, Fisker Automotive would create perhaps the most beautiful car ever made, raise almost $1.4 billion dollars from investors as diverse as...
VentureBeat's GreenBeat -
Value Of Early Fisker Stake Drops By Two-Thirds After New Money
Investing in startup companies is a risky way to make money. And if the startups are carmakers, it may be even riskier yet--as the Illinois Student Assistance Commission found out recently. The state agency managing the College Illinois prepaid tuition program had invested $10 million in the stock...
John Voelcker -
In April, Tom LaSorda--then CEO of Fisker Automotive--said the company was raising additional capital. Today, Fisker announced that it had closed a new round of financing, with more than $100 million coming into the company's coffers. It will use the money, it says, for "continued product development, market expansion, and a new global marketing campaign for the Fisker Karma." The product development work will be for the Fisker Atlantic, the company's second and more affordable car, after it shelved plans for the Surf and Sunset models of the larger Karma. The mid-size Atlantic sedan was...
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Tesla CEO Gets More Stock Options, Fisker Seeks More Cash
We’ve said it many times before, building an auto company from scratch is extremely hard, and expensive. That’s probably why only two major plug-in car startups have made it to the point of building and selling cars globally: Tesla and Fisker. In order to continue, both firms are...
Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield -
Goodbye, Solar? Greentech Investors Shift To Electric Cars, Consumer Tech
The green technology investing boom has slowed. But if you ask investors, greentech isn’t disappearing, it’s just changing. Between 2006 and 2007, cleantech and greentech emerged as hot terms in the investor vernacular. Startups focused on big-picture energy needs, including solar and...
VentureBeat's GreenBeat -
Irate Investor Sues Fisker: A Little Lesson In Venture Capital
This is the week when driving impressions of the 2012 Fisker Karma have started to appear, as Fisker invites in waves of automotive journalists for a half-day of driving in and around Los Angeles. (We'll have our report early next week, but we had a brief drive a few weeks ago, and another with...
John Voelcker -
Will Tesla Succeed Like Apple, Or Vanish Like Altair?
Of every 10 companies started by entrepreneurs, half or more fail. Some are sold for the parts or the people, a couple of lucky ones may be bought by larger companies, and only the very lucky ones survive as independent companies over the long term. Tesla: Apple or Altair? For every Apple, in other...
John Voelcker -
Coda Secures More Funding, Continues March Towards 2012 Sedan Production
Californian electric automaker Coda Automotive might have recently opened its first showroom and signed a deal to open a final assembly plant in Benicia, California where it plans to install the electric drivetrain in its 2012 Coda Sedans -- but it has only just closed an eight-month funding round...
Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield -
Electric car manufacturer Fisker Automotive is in the process of raising a $200 million funding round that would value the company at $2.2 billion, according to a report by Fortune. It would be the company's third funding round in six months. Fisker Automotive raised $190 million just five months ago to help fund the production of its electric cars. The company finished off a recent $100 million round in May, led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “If you look at what they are trying to achieve relative to Tesla in terms of producing 15,000 vehicles annually, then Fisker’s...