Venture-backed Bloom Energy has raised $1.1 billion in six rounds (CrunchBase) from folks like Goldman Sachs and Kleiner Perkins. It's customers have also received $400 million of the $1.4 billion distributed by California's Self-Generation Incentive Program despite doing nothing on the CO2 front.The State is getting tired of this crap and is considering kicking Bloom out of the program.
See GTM's "CPUC Staff to Bloom Energy: Your Fuel Cells Shouldn’t Get State Incentives"
See also "Bloom Energy misses salary, wages targets" on the $16 mil they took to create jobs and payroll.
From Reuters:
Bloom Energy share sale marks valuation drop of more than 40 percent
Last week, private equity firm GSV Capital Corp (GSVC.O) quietly announced that it had sold its small stake in the last remaining cleantech unicorn at a loss, calling it "dead money."
GSV was not a strategic investor in fuel cell maker Bloom Energy and its stake was worth less than $3 million, but the price represented a 42.7 percent drop in valuation from Bloom's last fundraising round, according to PitchBook, a private equity and venture capital database.
Investor enthusiasm for so-called "unicorns" - venture-backed companies valued in the private market at $1 billion or more - has waned since the end of last year, and valuations have contracted.
Bloom is a former clean energy technology, or cleantech, star which has taken far longer than expected to deploy its technology on a large scale, despite examples of big deals. It recently clinched agreements to power Morgan Stanley's New York headquarters and AEG's Staples Center sports arena in Los Angeles.
GSV sold its more than 200,000 shares of Bloom for $14.75 each, realizing a loss of $882,163, it said in a March 10 earnings report.
The new valuation is down from nearly $3 billion after a Series G financing round that began in 2011, according to PitchBook. At that time, shares were valued at $25.76 each.
Many investors had expected an initial public offering to follow in 2013. When that did not materialize, hopes set on 2014.
Bloom, a maker of fuel cell energy systems for large buildings, has raised more than $1 billion since 2008 from major Silicon Valley investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and New Enterprise Associates, among others. Neither investor responded to requests for comment.
One longtime investor in Bloom, who requested anonymity, said it was "within striking distance" of profitability....MORESome of our posts on this lipsticked pig:
Feb. 2010
Bloom Energy on 60 Minutes: "Can You Believe the Hype" (BLDP; FCEL; PLUG; GE; SI)
Is the Bloom Energy Payback Period 15 Years?
March 2010
Climateer Line of the Day: Truism Dept.
July 2010
Bloom Energy Targeting $100M Round For Power Generators"
April 2011
Bloom Energy Plays the Subsidy Game Like a Pro
Nov. 2012
Fortune Exclusive: Bloom Energy's Earnings
Things have changed since Kleiner Perkins Orchestrated the hype machine back in February 2010.
November 2012
Phi Scamma Jamma: Late Stage VC Investor Advanced Equities Shutting Down (Bloom; Fisker etc.)
Anyone keeping tabs would have been tipped as early as 2008 and definitely by the time we posted:
The Company you Keep: "Bloom, Fisker and Serious Materials Raising Cash from Advanced Equities"
We looked back at the role Advanced Equities played to gun the price of late rounds in Jan. 2016's "'Uber Is Raising More Money From Rich People' (Al Gore and Snapchat do cameos)"
To put it simply, these are fuel cells, not magic.
The technology has been around since 1839.
