When Altira Group started a decade ago, the Denver-based venture-capital firm practically had to beg people to invest in energy technology.
By the end of next month, Altira expects to tie the bow on a $250 million fundraising effort that will create one of Colorado’s largest current venture-capital funds.
“We were investing in energy tech when energy tech wasn’t cool,” said Peter Edwards, a principal of the firm, which Dirk McDermott founded in 1996.
Altira’s previous fund backed Southwest Windpower, an Arizona provider of wind turbines, and Galveston Bay Biodiesel, a Texas company.
Altira plans to fund alternative and electrical-power technologies as well as more traditional natural-resource technologies.
Investments in individual companies will range from $3 million to $20 million.
It also will focus on developing companies with sales revenues but will look at promising start ups as well.
“For the right technology, we will go all the way to the garage,” Edwards said. “We might have to go through 20 or 40 deals to find one that is worth investing in.”
The venture-capital fund is the fifth for Altira, which managed to raise only $4 million for its first fund in 1997.
“We used to have to bang the table to get people’s attention,” Edwards said. “There are so many institutional investors who are now interested in this area.”
U.S. energy and industrial companies combined to raise $1.8 billion last year from venture capitalists, up 107 percent from 2005, according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Alternative-energy companies accounted for 40 percent of that total.
In Colorado, energy/industrial companies combined to raise at least $98.6 million last year, the report showed.
Altira offers a perspective that newcomers from a technology or purely environmental background may lack – an understanding of how alternative energies fit into the bigger energy economy, including oil and gas.
“These guys are not grandstanders,” said Chris Onan, principal of Appian Ventures in Denver. “They have been around for a while.”
Altira also takes a broader view of what is a clean-energy technology, including innovations that make coal burn cleaner or that extract more oil and gas out of an existing field.
If oil is selling at $60 a barrel and a new extraction technology can boost production levels 10 percent, the payoff can be measured, Edwards said.
Staff writer Aldo Svaldi can be reached at 303-954-1410 or asvaldi@denverpost.com.
