khosla

A consulting firm owned by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has inked a deal with venture capital firm Khosla Ventures.

RiceHadleyGates announced today that it will provide "strategic insight" to Khosla Ventures in an effort to help the venture-capital firm's portfolio companies "make critical business decisions around expanding to markets like China, India, and Brazil."

"We look forward to putting our network and experience to good use by helping the Khosla companies navigate the tricky waters of political, policy, and regulatory issues around the world," … Read more

littleBits, makers of the eponymous educational circuitry kits, has announced the close of its series A funding round this morning, having taken in $3.65 million from various investors. True Ventures, funder of companies like MakerBot and FitBit, leads the group, with Khosla Ventures, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and Lerer Ventures pitching in.

Along with the funding, littleBits has also announced that supply chain and manufacturing firm PCH International will be helping to scale up production.

littleBits kits are made up of a series of electronic modules that connect together with magnets, with a color-coding system to guide assembly. Each … Read more

Liquid Metal Battery, an MIT spinoff backed by Bill Gates, has secured an additional $15 million in series B financing in a funding round led by Khosla Ventures, the company announced today.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based company, which aims to build a cheap battery for bulk storage of wind and solar power, also announced that Andrew Chung, a Khosla Ventures partner, would join the board.

"Our Liquid Metal Battery technology is tremendously exciting because it has the potential to dramatically change the electric power system everywhere," Liquid Metal Battery CEO Phil Giudice said in a statement announcing the … Read more

Here's an upbeat tidbit to end the year: 2011 is on track to the biggest year in venture capital deals in a decade.

Big years make for daring bets, and for this year I've chose a dozen influential investors to single out for their role in fueling startups of all sorts.

If the final quarter shapes up as it looks like it will, venture capital deals will total $30 billion for the year, a 25-percent jump from 2010, according to Anand Sanwal, whose firm, CB Insights, tracks investment activity among VCs and some big angel investors.

"I … Read more

Famed tech investor Vinod Khosla and his venture firm, Khosla Ventures, announced today the firm had closed a $1.05 billion venture fund, one of the largest new venture funds this year.

The Khosla Ventures IV will make early-stage investments in the areas of clean tech, IT, mobile, and Internet technology, with half the fund going toward clean tech, he said.

"We have identified the 'Clean Dozen' companies in clean tech that can achieve unsubsidized market competitiveness and the 'Cool Dozen' categories in Internet and mobile in the post-PC world such as big data, emotion, interest graphs and consumer … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Vinod Khosla is famous for investing lots of money in green technologies. But when it comes to his role models, it's all Steve Jobs, not Al Gore.

Khosla was interviewed today at the AlwaysOn GoingGreen conference here, where he espoused the idea of making big bets on potentially game-changing companies.

Even though Khosla got into green-tech investing out of environmental concerns, he said environmentalists have been a barrier to green tech because they assume that people need to pay more for cleaner alternatives to the status quo. They understand what the problems are, but when it comes to … Read more

Michigan-based start-up Danotek Motion Technologies has scored $15 million in Series B funding, the company announced yesterday.

Danotek, develops converters and permanent magnet generators (PMGs) for wind turbines. Investors include Khosla Ventures, CMEA Capital, GE Energy Financial Services, and Statoil Technology, among others. All four were also investors in the company's previous $50 million Series A funding.

The company claims the efficiency rate of its PMGs exceeds 98 percent, that they are half the weight of conventional generators, and that they contain no "wear-and-tear" parts, making them extremely durable.

"At Khosla Ventures we invest in technologies … Read more

The ethanol industry has not made progress as fast as expected on a more environmentally sound successor to corn ethanol. But so-called advanced biofuel companies are making progress scaling beyond the demonstration stage.

Pasadena, Texas-based Kior said yesterday it intends to raise as much as $100 million by going public on the stock market. The money will be used to fund construction of a commercial-scale biofuel facility in Mississippi, which is now under construction and is expected to be opened next year.

The company already has a demonstration facility making what it calls "gasoline and diesel blendstocks," or … Read more

WeatherBill, a company that uses high-end computing to reduce risk in agriculture, yesterday said it raised $42 million from Khosla Ventures, Google's venture arm, and existing investors.

The San Francisco-based company, founded by two former Google employees, provides insurance plans to farmers to hedge against lost income due to extreme weather.

WeatherBill has built an application that continuously analyzes reams of weather-related data from multiple sources, including short-range forecasts, seasonal effects such as El Nino, and long-term trends. The same cloud-based platform is also used to provide insurance for travelers.

Vinod Khosla, which heads a green technology venture fund … Read more