5 Cities to Find Your Green Investors

Now we have seen 2009 was truly a beginning of the "Green Investment" era with many more predicting 2010 is going to be a stellar year for Green investments. We have gathered information throughout 2009 by following deal-flows announced; and determined where the best cities are for 2010 for green investments.

Not surprisingly, USA still dominates the list, and we believe the trend will continue as USA remains the world's biggest venture capital & private equity market, and frankly speaking, it is quite difficult to see how this will change over the next decade or two. While China is rising, its investments are mainly driven by Government funding, the venture capitals are starting to become influential in China, with most of them actually set up by their US or European counterparts.

Therefore, amongst the major Green venture capital cities, they are still represented by the US cities, but we will cover other cities in future articles.

New York City

Undoubtedly still the best place to raise your capital, although many may wonder if New York City is a "green city" itself? The answer is yes, there are a lot of consistencies between Green jobs & Green investments. New York City has created perhaps more green jobs than any other cities in 2009; this was driven by the significant demand from internal usage, such as the world's largest transportation system, strong demand for smart-grid and also high concentration of Green finance professionals. New York City is the first choice when comes to Green investments, just like other venture capital investments!

San Francisco

San Francisco has always been a "green city", and with its population highly proactive in adopting green lifestyle, as we know, it also has very large LOHA population. Their attitude towards green lifestyle is a fundamental factor behind its population's support in green economies.

Additionally, supported by the existing IT & technology investment capability, the venture capital groups have been learning how they can utilize their skills in expanding into the green tech sectors.

Comparing to other Californian cities, which we have also compared Los Angeles & San Diego investment environment; San Francisco remains as the hot favourite destination for green investments.

Boston

Back to the east coast again; there is also very significant increase of green investments coming from Boston. Interestingly, our research shows this is a different evolution compared to San Francisco.

The foundation of the transformation in San Francisco evolved from technology / IT venture capital investments; in Boston, this was evolved from their long-time involvements in life-science/biotechnology investments.

Interestingly, when you make the comparison, we have seen Boston has participated in more non-technology investments such as investing in environmental science, chemical related environmental improvement applications or renewable energy opportunities instead of technologies.

Boston also has a strategic advantage that with its universities able to support & commercialize new developments & technologies; many universities in Boston are providing grants for both graduates and MBA students in developing greentech applications; this is a perfect ground for entrepreneurs, the network in Boston for green investments is also very strong and well organized.

Detroit

We put Detroit down which can be a surprise to many, in fact, we were thinking about Seattle, Charlotte, Chicago as alternatives. Detroit offers something more unique, it is an automotive city, it has been hurt by recession more than anyone else.

Yet, it is because of the recession; we have found Detroit entrepreneurs and investment institutions are devoting more efforts to green technologies than others; and wish to use this as an opportunity to revive Detroit into world's Green Car City.

Although the car industry is not active in investments anymore; they do have technology capabilities to support new developments, many are related to automobile industries; but these can be transferred to other transportation industries as well; more fuel efficient engines, better grid systems, improvements in gas stations; solar cars, better batteries; it has been a great year for Detroit green inventors, and this will continue to attract new investments.

Portland

We have also selected Portland to wrap up this first article. Portland is in an interesting situation. Some $70m of venture capital investments were made into cleantech sectors of Portland in 2009; it is also one of the "lowest-carbon-emission cities" in North America. You can see that from the number of people choose to bike or walk to work each day in Portland. It also has initiatives to encourage electric cars such as free parking, and very complete public transportation system; which use alternative energy.

To sum up, this makes Portland a place with strong support for green economy, green alternative transportations and green products. It is also one of the cities that has created the most green jobs in 2009. The combination of these factors have made Portland a nice place to find green investments; both from institutions and also from individual investors.

Does the location really make a difference? The whole green investment era had just started about 2 or 3 years ago, and more changes will happen. But if you use both technology & natural resources investment history as an example, you could argue that; by being in "Where money is" does help, California based tech companies tend to find investors more easily, because they are in the "hub"; and mining companies always want to concentrate in key mining funding hubs like Texas; or Calgary in Canada, or Utah.

A big reason for that is to see how much support the local investors have in your company / industry. If you conduct an technology IPO, you can see Californian investors have much higher dominance in terms of shareholders, even higher than New York in many instances; and we did an IPO in the past for a healthcare sector; we could also see significantly higher proportion of investors from major health capital centers like Boston and also from Cleveland.

Every sector is different and every opportunity is different as well; but do conduct some research if you are looking to establish a new office or appointing a new advisor to find investors; this can make a big impact sometimes.

Thomas Su is the owner of ResearchWhitePaper ( http://researchwhitepaper.com ), ResearchWhitePaper provides a wide range of researches & reports relating to capital raising, venture capital, biotechnology, financial career and cleantech / greentech industries. It has published many reports relating to Capital Raising Strategies and Industry Specific Reports.

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