Business Blog

With the promise of a $75 million loan from the Mississippi Development Authority in hand, Redwood City, Calif.-based Virdia is ready to begin scouting for a site to convert the state’s soft pine into sugars for biofuel makers. The one certainty about the plant’s location is that it will be near an ample supply of [...]

Update: Today (Jan. 27) KiOR announced that it has closed a $75 million four-year term loan with a lender group comprised of an affiliate of Vinod Khosla and two Canadian corporations owned by certain pension fund clients of Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo). KiOR is listed along with Achillion Pharmaceuticals, Sears Holdings and Rite Aid [...]

Range Fuels, a manufacturing startup that planned to convert wood chips to cellulosic ethanol has declared bankruptcy, Bloomberg reports. The company was heavily backed by venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, whose Khosla Ventures is also backing four green energy startups to which the Mississippi legislature has authorized tens of millions in state aid: Soladigm, KiOR, Stion [...]

Twin Creeks Technologies and Stion need high-tech success to compete with cheap overseas labor See related MBJ story: “Calisolar lays off 80 Calif. workers” With the continued controversy over the Obama administration’s support for the now-bankrupt Solyndra, which came weeks after the collapse of Spectrawatt and Evergreen Solar, the renewable energy industry is eagerly watching [...]

Every year, hunters flock to the Delta to take advantage of some of the best public hunting land in the state offered by the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries & Parks’ wildlife management areas (WMAs) and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s Theodore Roosevelt National Wildlife Refuge Complex. This year, however, hunters are wondering if [...]

By Amy McCullough Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, says Mississippi’s green energy start-ups have a 90 percent chance of failing. That means Stion, Soladigm and KiOR, all of which are backed by Khosla Ventures, and all of which have been allocated tens of millions of dollars by the Mississippi Legislature, are very likely to [...]

By Amy McCullough Quite the heated exchange on the Wall Street Journal editorial page between the editors and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. In a previous editorial, “The Range Fuels Fiasco,” the WSJ used Khosla’s failed Range Fuels business to say that government shouldn’t get involved with startups. (WSJ is now locked down. Most of the [...]

By Amy McCullough See related story “Good Idea or Not?” and blog post “Haley Barbour and Khosla Ventures.“ A Wall Street Journal Feb. 10 “Review & Outlook” column (“The Range Fuels Fiasco“) details failed energy startups backed by Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures. Khosla Ventures, along with other investors, is backing three green energy startups [...]

By Amy McCullough Gov. Haley Barbour and a venture capital firm backing three of the most recent green energy startups purchased by the state of Mississippi will both be speaking at a California energy conference for high-rollers hosted by the editors of The Wall Street Journal. ECO:nomics “will bring together the world’s top CEOs, policymakers, [...]