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The Daily Start-Up: Cleantech Sees Plenty of Green In Q1

Top stories in today’s VentureWire:
Art by Mike Lucas
U.S. venture capital investment in cleantech companies increased by 54% to $1.14 billion in the first quarter of 2011 from $743.3 million in last year’s first quarter, despite a 13% decrease in deals year on year from 79 to 69, according to an Ernst & Young analysis based on data from Dow Jones VentureSource. Solar power companies accounted for 39% of the total dollars raised for the quarter with $362.7 million, a 162% gain from Q1 2010.
After receiving over $10 million in its first round of funding, online flash sales clothing retailer fclub.cn is already returning to the market to raise at least $40 million in a second round, VentureWire has learned. The Shanghai-based company’s founder previously ran a company that manufactured clothes but has moved into the more high-tech business of selling clothes cheaply online. That’s a move that the central government in Beijing is hoping more entrepreneurs will make.
Also, Matrix Partners said it has closed a pair of new funds aimed at China and India totaling $650 million and more than doubling its commitment to the Asian nations…Kaminario Inc., a maker of high-performance storage systems, is expected to announce today that it has secured a $15 million Series C round…and PopCap Games Inc. announced the acquisition of ZipZapPlay to infuse social gaming into its portfolio and more aggressively compete against Zynga Inc.
(VentureWire is a daily newsletter with comprehensive analysis of all the investments, deals and personnel moves involving start-ups and their venture backers. For a two-week trial, click here.)
Elsewhere around the Web:
News of Osama Bin Laden’s death was first leaked on Twitter, credited to Keith Urbahn, the chief of staff for Donald Rumsfeld and a former intelligence officer who wrote: “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.” But hours before, it was an IT consultant in Abbottabad, the northern Pakistan town where Bin Laden was killed, who unwittingly reported on the raid on Twitter. Sister blog Dispatch detailed how news of Bin Laden’s death rolled across the Web. In the end, a lack of technology infrastructure at Bin Laden’s compound may have ironically brought him down, says All Things Digital.
Facebook’s business is growing even faster than it forecast several months ago. Sources tell WSJ that its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda, is on track to exceed $2 billion in 2011. Now about that valuation…
The sequel is rarely as good as the original. That goes for movies, record albums and, according to Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, start-ups. “[I]t is often hard for the serial entrepreneur to produce a second startup that is good as their first,” Wilson writes. “It takes a lot of patience and collaboration with others, two things they probably did not use much of in their first startup.”