Solazyme Raises $52 Million

Wade Roush8/9/10

The South San Francisco company that pioneered the idea of using algae to make biofuels, Solazyme, said today that it has raised $52 million in Series D financing. New investor Morgan Stanley and Braemar Energy Ventures led the round, which also included all of the company’s major existing investors—CTTV Investments, Harris and Harris Group, Lightspeed Venture Partners, the Roda Group, San-Ei Gen, VantagePoint Venture Partners, and Zygote Ventures. As Xconomy’s Luke Timmerman reported in a recent profile of Solazyme, the 90-employee company uses molecular biology techniques to engineer strains of algae that convert high-cellulose materials such as sugarcane into different varieties of oil inside large fermentation tanks.

Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent and editor of Xconomy San Francisco. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/wroush.