Green Tech Once upon a time, Martin Tobias raised 250 million dollars for Imperium, a venture capital firm that focused on big green tech projects--high capital intensive ones like biodiesel and algae. Then Imperium fell apart, due to trouble in the credit markets.

Lesson learned: New technologies that banks are eager to get into in good times are the first ones to lose capital in leaner times. That's why big ticket biodiesel, ethanol, and solar projects are encountering real financing problems these days. Many of these projects are big dollar, soup-to-nuts things, with no existing platform to build off of.

To start a next-gen biodiesel businesses, like one concerned with algae, for example, it still costs a hundred million to build a plant--and it can be hard to raise hundreds of millions in this capital market, It's "not something I really had the stomach for," Tobias dryly noted.

His latest project is much cheaper: Called Kashless, it's essentially an eBay where everything is free. You put the stuff in your garage up on the site, and people who need it will take it. Plus you get all the necessary tax receipts. "It's basically an online marketplace that enables reuse and recycling," says Tobias. Sound an awful lot like Freecycle? Kashless actually posts your listings out to Facebook, freecycle, craigslist, and others, making it a sort of meta-freecycling site. Kashless is only in Seattle at present; look for it to expand across the country later this year.

Originally posted to

Arrow Complete Green Tech Coverage Arrow