Bank of America to Raise $100M for Clean Cooking Stoves for the Developing World – 11/21/14
BofA announced that it is partnering with Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (GACC) on the initiative to help provide clean cooking solutions to millions of households in the developing world. At the United Nations Climate Summit in September, BofA announced that it was committed to attracting $10B of capital towards investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and energy access.
On-Demand Car Sharing Firm Getaround Raises $24M Series B – 11/20/14
Getaround is a peer-to-peer carsharing service that allows drivers to rent cars from private car owners. Its platform allows trips to happen within a few hours and is currently available in San Francisco, with plans to expand to the east coast. The investment was led by strategic investor Cox Enterprises. It raised $13.9M in Series A funding in 2012.
Essess Raises $10M Series B for Mobile Thermal Imaging to Assess Building Efficiency – 11/20/14
Boston-based Essess, founded in 2011, provides software that collects and analyzes building energy efficiency performance information on individual buildings. Essess manages a fleet of vehicles that have been repurposed with a custom designed thermal imaging rig to identify and quantify energy losses across millions of buildings. The company has raised a total of $10.7M from investors including: Vocap Investment Partners, DFJ Athena, and Constellation Technology Ventures, Tamarisc, and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center.
LeddarTech Raises $7M in Private Equity from BDC Capital and GO Capital – 11/18/14
Quebec-based LeddarTech develops and markets advanced detection systems based on light emitting diode (LED) lighting systems used to improve traffic flow by municipalities and DOTs, as well as for parking assistance, automatic parking, blind-spot detection, lane-change assistance, and pre-crash detection applications in the automotive industry. It has now raised 16M total in venture capital in three rounds from investors.
Project Developer RENEW Energy Partners Raises $25M to Finance Efficiency Retrofits – 11/17/14
Advanced Energy Capital provided the funding for up to $25M in energy and water efficiency and on-site clean energy retrofit projects in commercial, institutional and industrial (“CI&I”) buildings. RENEW Energy Partners expects to close the first set of transactions in Q4 of this year, with the bulk of the projects expected to close in 2015.
Impact Investing Gets a Boost from Bill Gates – 11/16/14
Gates joined technology entrepreneurs Vinod Khosla and Romesh Wadhwani in investing $4 million of new funding into Unitus Seed Fund. Founded in 2012, the $25M Unitus Seed Fund is part of the Unitus Group, a financial services group which works in India and other emerging markets. Its investment focus includes agriculture, water and energy sectors and it has already announced 14 investments in India.