California leads in green-tech funding

When it comes to US venture capital funding for the most promising new green technology firms, there's California and there's everybody else, Your Olive Branch reports.

Californian companies raked in $2.8 billion, or 57%, of the $4.9 billion in venture capital offered up in the so-called clean-tech category of funding nationwide last year, according to a recently released analysis from Ernst & Young.

Green-tech companies nationwide raised a total of about $688 million in initial public offerings last year, The Los Angeles Times writes.

Rentech, a Los Angeles provider of clean energy solutions, raised $136.8 million in November. Its products have included a renewable synthetic diesel fuel. Intermolecular, a San Jose research and development company for the semiconductor and clean-energy sector, raised $96.5 million.

Northern California green-tech firms received three times as much funding as their Southern California counterparts last year. But Mark Sogomian, an Ernst & Young partner and leader of its clean-tech group in Los Angeles, said there were promising opportunities for green-tech growth in the Southland, in part because of efforts to reduce pollution at the nation's two busiest cargo container seaports, Los Angeles and Long Beach.