Smart Green Dealflow: myTaxi, Comuto, Younicos, Solarkiosk, Smartblue and FFK

Taxi 2.0: myTaxi, a very useful mobility service of Intelligent Apps, today raised €10M from car2go (Daimler), T-Venture (Deutsche Telekom), Xing Founder Lars Hinrichs (Cinco Capital, Hackfwd) and KfW. myTaxi is the taxi centre for the Mobile Economy and the app is available for iPhone and Android. Interestingly, Robert Henrich, CEO of car2go, believes that “car2go and myTaxi do not compete but complement each other.” In fact, I partly disagree as one way car sharing actually enables short trips from A to B leaving the car behind, the same way taxis do.

The main differences are cost, car availability and who is driving. In the use case business trip from A to B during the day, both services compete, in the after-party use case taxis often are the only choice. Now I wait for the proof that myTaxi can also save empty KM for the taxi drivers and thus increase daily revenues while reducing useless carbon emissions. Moreover, myTaxi should asap integrate with Flinc to enable realtime taxi ride sharing – Greenrider – my favourite mobility service I invented, but not implemented, in 2010.

Smart Green Dealflow

While taxi ride sharing is the future, ride sharing in private cars is very big for many years. Accel Patners strongly agrees and just lead a $10M round into Comuto which is also called covoiturage (France) and blablacar (UK). Comuto CEO is the mobility pioneer Frederic Mazella from France who competes with ECO12 Award nominee Carpooling.com from Germany. We believe the sharing economy is smart and green and support all kinds of car and ride sharing startups, provided the quality of service is high.

Energy storage is a very important technology to accelerate the transformation to the Smart Green Economy powered by 100% renewable energy. Now Berlin-based Younicos can put down the accelerator big time thanks to €20M provided by secretive Aeris Capital that manages the family office of SAP founder Klaus Tschira. Younicos likes to make whole islands energy autonomous and send the fossils to rest in peace. Younicos CEO is solar pioneer Alexander Voigt who co-founded Q-Cells and Solon and is a well-known serial solar entrepreneur.

Another smart green startup in Berlin worth knowing is Solarkiosk. Solarkiosk is still in stealth mode but recently got an undisclosed amount of seed funding from a German solar business angel. As the company name implies, Solarkiosk will be a kiosk powered by solar energy to enable commerce in rural offgrid scenarios, preferably in Africa. The founders are friends of mine and if you like the idea and want to partner with Solarkiosk, please get in touch. Journalists have to wait until their launch 😉 Before flooding their inbox, you may want to watch their pitch at Green Venture Summit 2010 – Part 1 and Part 2. Solarkiosk is designed by Graft Architects.

In December 2011, ECO12 Silver Sponsor High-Tech Gründerfonds seed financed Smartblue. Smartblue develops smart technology to monitor and improve the performance of solar installations. This is a great example of using ICT to increase the performance of existing and new PV systems.

FFK Environment is one of the 3 deals zouk Capital announced in November 2011. FFK is active in waste management and recycling and was established in 1992. FFK is a typical deal for late stage Cleantech VCs such as zouk who make big efforts to discover unknown deal jewels first, e.g. the ones hidden deeply in the German Mittelstand. zouk’s other recent investments are OZZ Electric providing electrical contracting and va-Q-tec offering a new vacuum insulation for buildings and industrial applications.

I hope you enjoyed this smart green dealflow and look forward to receiving your deal announcements and press releases.


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