Challenge
- 2021 marked a dampened year in terms of new company entrances and exits. There were the fewest companies founded since 2003 this year (1), which was Electric Hydrogen, a company out of Los Altos, CA that is developing a large-scale green hydrogen system for the industrial sector. Five companies also went out of business in 2020 and 2021 (2 and 3, respectively). These companies were: Axiom Exergy, BEAD (Business/Productivity Software), Bluehouse Group, Gridline AI, and Local Roots Farms.
Highlight
- While fewer companies newly formed, 2021 was a record year for “Mergers/Acquisitions” among California Companies. There have been 11 Mergers/Acquisitions this year, which is 42 percent of the total Mergers/Acquisitions in Clean Technology in California. All 11 were in either “Energy Transition” 118(4) or “Transport and Mobility” (7). Seven of the 11 were reverse mergers, where a private company takes over a publicly-traded one, resulting in the private company becoming public without having to undergo an IPO. Stem, an AI-driven energy storage company out of Millbrae, CA, completed the largest of these deals in 2021, when they acquired Star Peak Energy Corporation for $323 million. The resulting entity is currently traded on the NYSE under the ticker symbol, STEM.
118 Energy Transition is a Clean Tech category consisting of companies aiming to move on to greener energy sources. The subcategories are Analytics (Energy Transition), Battery Tech (Energy Transition), Energy Storage, Geo-Thermal, Green Hydrogen, Grid Management, Monitoring, Nuclear, Ocean, Ocean/Hydro, Smart Grid (Energy Transition), Solar, Thermal, Waste, Waste Heat Management, and Wind.
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