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Alternative Energy - Thursday, September 25, 2008

GridPoint Buys V2Green After $120M Round

Arlington, VA's GridPoint has raised a monster $120M in fifth-round funding. Gridpoint has now raised around $220M in total VC funding. It used some of the funds to buy V2Green, a Seattle-based developer of plug-in electric vehicle grid integration technology. No financial terms of the acquisition were disclosed.

GridPoint applies IT to the electric grid to provide utilities with an intelligent network of distributed energy resources that controls load, stores energy and produces power. Gridpoint offers utilities a single interface, located in a utility’s control room, for managing a variety of distributed energy assets including plug-in electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines, advanced storage technologies and household devices such as thermostats, electric water heaters, pool pumps, etc.

That's a lot to bite off for a startup. The startup is a bit scary to us for this reason. It reminds us of startups who peaked during the dotcom bubble that raised warchests with plans to own whole sections of the Internet economy. We like some of the ideas here and think that GridPoint will benefit from civic efforts to go green. They have won part of a deal with the city of Boulder, CO. But it still looks like a big ship to navigate some small and changing seas.

Oddly, GridPoint did not identify investors although is says that most of the cash came from prior investors: Goldman Sachs, NEA, Susquehanna Private Equity, Perella Weinberg Partners and Robeco.

V2Green Demo

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