Gore Venture Fund Raises $1.2B for Green Tech Investment

A Silicon Valley venture-capital firm announced yesterday it's raised $1.2 billion to invest in green technology—with an assist from new partner Al Gore. One Kleiner Perkins fund will invest in established companies, while the other will back clean-tech startups, the San Jose Mercury News reports. “He is spending time with us," an exec says of the Nobel-winning ex-VP, "helping us think about global opportunities.”

"We urgently need to advance our green-tech industry at a speed and scale commensurate with the challenges we face," said one exec at KP, which isn't buying that another bubble could be forming in the Valley. "We believe green technologies are both the key to solving our energy crisis and a tremendous business opportunity." (More Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers stories.)