Vinod Khosla Thinks Big on Green Energy

Vinod Khosla, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems who has more lately been investing his own money in green energy companies through his Khosla Ventures, now has a whole lot of other people’s money to play with in the cleantech space.

Khosla has raised $1.1 billion in two funds that will be directed toward investments in green energy. It marks the biggest amount raised for a venture capital fund since 2007, and the biggest first-time fund raised since 1999, the New York Times reports.

VentureBeat reports that Khosla has also added some firepower to his team of investors, hiring former Facebook CFO Gideon Yu and James Kim of CMEA Ventures as general partners.

Khosla’s main, $800 million fund, will be used to make $5 million to $15 million bets on companies. A second, $275 million fund, will be used to make very early stage seed money investments of about $2 million.

The venture capitalist’s new fund and philosophy contradicts current conventional venture capital wisdom that funds should be smaller and make smaller bets.

He tells the Times now is the time for venture capitalists to step in with big bets that could create the technology to address climate change. “We’re really about reinventing the infrastructure of society, which is the only way we’ll get the carbon footprint down, and we’re not afraid to fail.”