Five intriguing green start ups seek angel bucks on Earth Day

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Thursday, April 23, 2009 | By: Luke Timmerman

[[Updated 9:30 am Pacific with winners]] I wasn’t around for the first Earth Day back in 1970, but I figure it’s safe to say there weren’t any investment forums celebrating the capitalist pursuit of opportunities in the green revolution.

It occurred to me, on Earth Day 2009, that it’s pretty remarkable to see how far we’ve come as a society and yet how far we still have to go in environmental awareness. I watched a dozen hungry entrepreneurs deliver 7-minute pitches to investors about how they plan to get rich while making the planet more sustainable. The occasion was the third annual Zino Society Green Investment Forum, held yesterday at the Pan Pacific Hotel in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood.

Yesterday’s eclectic lineup of presenters showed how many opportunities have emerged in this megasector, including companies that aim to produce hydropower from canals and streams, (HydroVolts), electric scooters (American International Motors), more efficient alternatives to neon signs (TeslaVision), and cheaper solar panels for homes (MSR Innovations). They were among the competitors vying for a $50,000 investment from the Zino Society, to be awarded a month from now, and angling for more capital than that. The room was packed with 120 people, making it hard for me to find a seat. So apparently some investors think they still ought to keep hunting for opportunities during the recession.

The award for best investment opportunity went to HydroVolts, and best presentation went to Wend Media. Finalists for the angel investment were TeslaVision, HydroVolts, and Springstar, says Mary Holmes, Zino Society’s vice president of business development.

Here were five companies that caught my attention:

—Clarian Technologies. This Seattle-based company was founded by Chad Maglaque, who starts off his pitch with an intriguing question. What if an individual consumer could buy a renewable energy production unit, plug it into a wall outlet, and have it pump energy into his home? Clarian’s idea is to market a wind turbine called Jellyfish you can install on your roof, a home solar power production unit called Sunfish, and backpack storage units.

These would be equipped with Wi-Fi so Clarian can track and monitor the power output of these devices and sell the capacity to utilities. The devices would sell for $199 to $399 at places like Costco and Home Depot. By putting these kinds of devices in front of consumers, Clarian says it can carve out a new market segment, and possibly generate $160 million a year in U.S. sales by 2015. It’s about allowing individuals to do their part to make the planet greener. “Renewable energy is out of the reach of most consumers now,” Maglaque said.

One possible fly in the ointment—an investor asked Maglaque if the wind turbines kill birds and tick off environmentalists. He avoided the question, saying that Clarian doesn’t wholly depend on wind turbines for its sales. Oops.

—Eco Carpet. This Seattle company plans to recycle used carpet into nylon fiber. Every year, 5 billion pounds of used carpet gets chucked into landfills, accounting for 3 percent of all the waste there. Some of that carpet is recycled now by other companies that grind it up as insulation, but Eco Carpet has a patented method to extract the nylon from carpet for recycling. Nylon is a $50 billion industry, said co-founder Peter Klauser.

The company gets its raw materials free from landfills that want to get rid of them, and the recycling process is cheap enough that each Eco Carpet facility in a municipality can be profitable in the first month after it’s fully operational, Klauser said. Founder Walter Levoff is leaving Solex West, a division of the world’s largest textile recycler, to run this new company, Klauser said.

—SpringStar. This Woodinville, WA-based company has developed technology for killing mosquitoes—those bugs that carry many of the big lethal diseases of the developing world—with 99 percent less pesticide than existing methods.

The company’s latest product is called a Lethal OviTrap, which lures breeding female mosquitoes into a cup-like device, loaded with a tiny amount of pesticide that has low toxicity to humans, but kills mosquitoes, said founder Mike Banfield. The U.S. Army, as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, have supported development of the device, which is being aimed at stopping Dengue fever and dengue hemorrhagic fever and killing the Asian Tiger Mosquito.

The company, founded in 1998, has 15 employees and partnerships with Bayer and DuPont. Its competitors are traditional bed nets and pesticides sprayed broadly in the air and water, which didn’t sound too attractive on Earth Day, after all. He predicts the company will grow from $1.5 million in current annual revenue to $50 million in five years, by which time it will get acquired, Banfield said.

—Elektronova. This Seattle-based company, led by Lawrence Winnerman, plans to sell kits to consumers that will connect monitors to home appliances that will display email alerts or text messages when the appliances are consuming too much energy.

These kits will cost $27 to manufacture, and Electronova plans to sell them to retailers, pocketing $11.50 in profit for every kit it sells, Winnerman says. The target consumer, who will pay about $60 retail for the kit, is a member of the LOHAS demographic, coined by Neilsen as people who value “Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability” or basically the Whole Foods shopper demographic. By the fifth year on the market, Elektronova envisions capturing 60 percent of the LOHAS market, or about 18.9 million homes.

Winnerman, a veteran of Microsoft and Amazon, said he envisions boosting Elektronova’s profit margins over time by selling more software services as the company matures. He sees using Facebook, iPhone apps, blogs, and magazines as ways to generate buzz for his company’s products. One word of caution: Elektrova has no patents, and the field crowded with competitors, like EnergyHub, Tendril, and even Google.

http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2009/04/23/five-intriguing-green-startups-seek-angel-bucks-on-earth-day/2/

—Wend Media. This Portland, OR-based media company was offering print magazines in the conference foyer, which might have seemed like a good idea 10 years ago. With newspapers and magazines struggling to survive as advertisers migrate to the web, publisher Ben Finklea acknowledged upfront that a magazine investment might sound odd.

It actually makes sense, Finklea said, because three-year-old Wend is establishing a brand that stands for authenticity in the outdoor, adventure travel media business. The paper for its pages is grown, milled, and printed all within 100 miles of its home office. Wend uses partially recycled paper, and soy-based inks. The irony of competitors like National Geographic Adventure or Outside is that when you buy them, “You’re reading a story about the outdoors by someone who is cutting down the outdoors,” Finklea says.

But nobody would listen if this was all about print. Wend is seeking investment capital to expand its online offerings through iPhone apps and Amazon’s Kindle, among other offerings. The company’s website is currently getting 140,000 unique visitors a month, and some big advertisers like Toyota and Subaru have shown interest in taking the company to a new level once Wend exceeds 250,000 uniques, Finklea said.