Kleiner Perkins said to form 'Green Growth' fund

Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers is forming a "Green Growth" fund for green-tech start-ups looking to scale up their operations.

Kleiner Perkins investor John Doerr looks for late-stage Green Growth fund.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)

PEWeek reported on Thursday that the fund will be over $400 million and have input from Kleiner Perkins partner Al Gore.

The idea behind a late-stage funds such as this is to give up-and-coming companies the money to ramp up, rather than develop their core technology.

This late-stage funding is particularly important in the energy business because companies require a large amount of capital to test their technology at commercial scale.

Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, has also chosen to invest this sort of capital as part of its energy initiative to avoid what is called the Valley of Death--the transitional terrain that start-ups face when shifting from technology development to commercialization.

Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr last week gave the keynote speech at the MIT Energy Conference where he said that green tech needed much more investment.

Doerr said that although there were pockets of green tech where too much money is chasing too few good deals, the amount of money going into energy is far too little to address climate change.

Kleiner's first green-tech fund was closed in 2006.