Alexander Haislip

Solar panels in space? It sounds more like science fiction than a business, but one early-stage company has raised money from investors to launch solar panels into space, and to then use high-powered radio waves to beam back energy back to Earth. Manhattan Beach, Calif.-based Solaren raised $600,000 from investors for its business of delivering power from space, according to a recent regulatory filing. The company says it will deliver power to California's Pacific Gas & Electric Co. by 2016, according to a statement on the utility's website. In fact, PG&E has already signed an agreement to purchase 200 megawatts of electric energy from the startup, company CEO Gary Spirnak said

Draper Fisher Jurvetson is in “very advanced discussions” to launch an affiliate fund in Japan, according to managing director Don Wood. The firm was poised to consummate and announce a relationship with a Japanese firm last year, but the deal was put on hold when the U.S. financial crisis occurred. Wood declined to name the firm it is working with until an official partnership agreement is in place. Venture capitalists have traditionally had a difficult time penetrating the Japanese market. “It’s historically been quite closed to outside investors,” says Wood. “There’s a tradition there where the smartest university graduates are tempted to join larger, stable companies. It’s harder to attract talent to smaller companies there.”

Venture capitalists invested $2.94 billion into 360 U.S.-based companies during the second quarter, according to preliminary, unaudited data from Thomson Reuters (publisher of peHUB). That’s down significantly from the $7.57 billion investors put into 1,042 companies during the same period in 2008, although is beginning to approach the $3.1 billion invested in Q1 2009 (and will probably top it, once all the surveys are counted). The official MoneyTree report from the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers, based on Thomson Reuters data, is expected to come out later this month. Biotechnology and health care investments buoyed the investment totals in Q2, accounting for nearly 45% of the dollars put to work during the three-month period. Four of the 10 largest deals done the quarter were health care deals. Investors put $145 million into anti-cancer company Clovis Oncology; $108 million into orthopedics company Small Bone Innovations; $50 million into light-therapy company PhotoThera; and $46 million into anti-infective medicine developer Cempra Pharmaceuticals.

There are few companies quite like General Electric. After all, it's not standard to employ 1,200 PhDs and have a hand in every aspect of energy from generation to transmission to lightbulbs? GE has also been active in investing alongside venture capitalists in promising startups, backing 33 companies over the past five years, according to Thomson Reuters (publisher of peHUB). Among the more notable is A123 Systems, the battery maker that recently filed to go public. It's easy to understand why GE would be excited about the company, especially if you talk with Kevin Skillern, the managing director of GE's venture capital operations. Kevin Skillern, managing director of GE's venture capital operations, last week spoke at VCJ's Financing the Cleantech Vision event in Palo Alto last week. He talked about how best to approach his corporate parent, and was kind enough to send over his notes, which you can get after the jump.

Rocket aficionado Steve Jurvetson and his DFJ partners have agreed lead a major investment in space transportation provider SpaceX, PE Week (peHUB's sister publication) has learned. The round could be worth upwards of $60 million, and would include existing SpaceX backer Founders Fund. Jurvetson declined to discuss the specifics of SpaceX’s financing. Regulatory filings show the company had raised $15 million toward a proposed $60 million round as recently as March. Jurvetson says that the round has either closed already or will close within the next 14 days. Executives at SpaceX were not available for comment. The Hawthorne, Calif.-based company has raised $112 million in funding since 2002, according to regulatory filings. Most of that financing has come directly from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who holds the title of CEO, CTO and founder of the company. Musk was

I spent hours studying vocabulary flash cards when I was in high school. Words, writing and reading were never my strong suit and I needed to beef up my SAT verbal score in a hurry. In a world of free web applications and content creators relying on eyeballs and advertising to pay the bills, VocabSushi has come up with a service that I could imagine paying for. I'm not the only one who would likely fork over for an improvement on flash cards. There's a constant captive audience of more than 1.5 million high schoolers who take the SAT and PSAT each year. Company founder Jeff Novich is looking to raise an angel round to accelerate his growth and add learning modules to the startup's existing offerings, he says--but he's not looking too hard (Disclosure: I went to grad school with Jeff).

Paul Kedrosky’s report on the size of the venture capital industry is an important and interesting piece of work, but it misses the fundamental reason venture firms are not getting good returns: they’re not investing in good, differentiated companies. The size of the venture industry — how many dollars are committed and invested — isn’t a […]

Loop’d Network issued a press release this morning saying it had raised an additional $800,000 in financing from Tech Coast Angels. I found myself scratching my head as I got further down into the release. Nothing seemed to make sense. It took me about three minutes to figure out that the release had come from […]

With the temperature here in Los Angeles set to stay above 80 degrees for the rest of the week, it’s time again for me to turn cast an eye to my shelves for some good summer reading. The books of summer should be a departure from one’s regular reading routine, a vacation from the mundane. For me, that means no business or tech books. Fiction is a good place to start, but it can’t be too dense. A weighty title might lead people to think you were mentally unprepared when they find you asleep in a deck chair next to the pool, book

Lots of chatter last week about music startup Imeem getting another round of financing, but few details. One of the reasons the company may not be talking about it is that the fundraising is ongoing. The company has raised $2.3 million of a $6.5 million round, according to a regulatory filing. The company launched its fundraising push on April 22, documents show. No idea if Sequoia has re-upped or not. Imeem was not listed on the firm's "Greensheet" email as a follow-on investment in May.