Green Giant

When cleantech companies seek to raise cash from public offerings or sell themselves to strategic buyers, one thing is clear: They’ll be calling Morgan Stanley.

The company has emerged, at least in San Francisco, as the go-to cleantech investment bank. It was a co-lead underwriter on Tesla Motors’ and Amyris Biotechnologies’ public offerings this year and led Recurrent Energy’s recent $305 million sale to Sharp.

The investment bank has been tapped for the upcoming IPO filings of solar-thermal power-plant maker BrightSource Energy and solar-module maker Miasole, and for the rumored offering of Silver Spring Networks.

The New York-based investment bank, which has an office in Menlo Park, has a storied history in high-tech, taking companies like Google, Netscape, and Cisco public. But four or five years ago, it noticed its venture-capital clients were spending a lot of time looking at cleantech, said Kevin Genieser, managing director and head of clean technology for Morgan Stanley, who is based in New York. “We devoted senior resources early and tried to target those leaders in the cleantech space and make sure we focused on the best areas.”

Rob Day, a venture capitalist with Black Coral Capital in Boston, said Morgan Stanley is winning a bulk of the deals in cleantech. While it has a good reputation with strategic buyers and a known focus on cleantech, “It’s not like Morgan Stanley is the only game in town,” Day said. “They are at a nice intersection of having a good reputation just in the institutional-buyer community and having a good focus on cleantech. But Canaccord Adams has that, and there are other firms that have good reputations as well.”

Day isn't sure why the firm has been able to land so many of the cleantech deals of late.

“It’s probably indicative of, if nothing else, just how tough it is to IPO,” Day said. “If there’s a flight to quality in other sectors, there’s probably a flight to a proven ability to get an IPO out the door.”

Recurrent Energy, which develops and finances solar projects, said it considered several investment banks before selecting Morgan Stanley when it looked at how it would finance its project pipeline.

“The team at Morgan Stanley stood out because of their track record and their knowledge of the buyer universe we wanted to target,” said CEO Arno Harris.

For more on how Morgan Stanley is winning cleantech clients, click here for the full story from the San Francisco Business Times (subscription required).

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Lindsay Riddell writes for the San Francisco Business Times.