capital is still the most important thing they bring to the table. Wilson concludes: I don’t think you can make blanket statements about the VC business anymore. These two industries are very different from each other and will have very different business dynamics and risk and return characteristics going forward. To get a snapshot of the capital going into these two different VC industries, we ran some numbers through CrunchBase to compare funding rounds for consumer Web and ecommerce startups versus cleantech companies. The data in CrunchBase for cleantech companies is not nearly as complete as it is for Web startups, but the trends they highlight are instructive. (If you work for a greentech company, please add or update your Crunchbase profile). So far this year through the end of August, CrunchBase tracked $1.87 billion in cleantech venture financings versus $1.35 billion for consumer Web and ecommerce startups. But CrrunchBase captured four times as many deals for Web startups than it did for cleantech. What is even more interesting is that the amount of venture capital that went into Web companies actually went down 8 percent from the same period the year before (from $1.5 billion). For cleantech, the venture dollars increased by a whopping 77 percent (from $1.1 billion). When you look at the average deal size, the disparity becomes even larger. The average size of a venture round for a Web startup during the period was $5.2 million. The average size of a cleantech round was $30.7 million. Those numbers are across all funding rounds (seed through series F). Based on this snapshot, cleantech is nearly six times as capital intensive as the Web. Again, our cleantech numbers are far from complete, but the data does illustrate how much more capital it takes to fund cleantech than Web startups. Web and ecommerce Deals January-August, 2010 DEALS TOTAL = 262 SUM TOTAL = $1,353,564,659.00 AVG OVERALL = $5.2 million HIGH = $135,000,000 LOW = $2,500 AVG A = $3,184,272.99 AVG B = $8,173,997.92 AVG C = $16,849,999.80 AVG D = $10,068,750.00 AVG E = $9,416,627.75 (F) 1 deal = $33,000,000 AVG SEED = $534,132.10 AVG ANGEL = $987,200.84 Cleantech Deals January-August, 2010 DEALS TOTAL = 61 SUM TOTAL = $1,871,661,959 AVG OVERALL = $30.7 million HIGH = $350,000,000 LOW = $10,000 AVG A = $5,945,584.54 AVG B = $48,930,962.35 AVG C = $35,626,666.67 AVG D = $40,790,000.00 AVG E = $42,000,000.00 (F) 1 DEAL = $12.5 million AVG SEED = $1,064,600.00 ANGEL – NONE REPORTED 0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7Authors: Erick Schonfeld

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