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Kleiner Perkins’ green tech investors are back in business

Kleiner Perkins in Menlo Park, California. Photo: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

Kleiner Perkins’ green tech investors are back in business, this time with a spin out fund named G2VP. According to a SEC filing, it has closed nearly $300 million, which it began raising last year.

The backstory: A decade ago, Kleiner Perkins made a lot of headlines for the disappointing results of its enthusiastic clean-tech investing.

  • Since then, its core funds have kept away from the sector, but in 2008 it raised a separate Green Growth fund to focus on later-stage investing in the area, which has done fairly well, as one green tech investor described to Axios.
  • Still, it’s not surprising that the firm is spinning out this second fund into a separate brand to truly distance itself from the sector.

Green trend: G2VP says it’s backing startups that are “digitizing industry” rather than focusing on cleantech like renewable energy, as it used to be trendy. Other veteran investors in the sector are also taking these alternative approaches to investing in green tech.

Update: The firm tells Axios that this isn't the final size of its fund, merely an update.

Venture capital