Monday, April 14, 2014

Expose Takes Aim At Cool Planet's Mike Cheiky

A new expose from The Verge--published Monday--has taken aim at Mike Chieky, the founder of three of the Southern California clean technologies companies to gain the most venture capital in this region in recent years: Cool Planet, ZPower, and Transonic Combustion--and called him "too good to be true". According to the article, Chieky is an "egotistical genius" who convinced venture capitalists to invest in his "shoddy science". Chieky's companies have raised funding from such top tier investors as Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, General Electric, Venrock, Khosla Ventures, and others. Cool Planet just raised a giant, $100M round for its biofuel technology, which it says provides carbon negative biofuels.

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