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The News in Brief

Enphase gets $15 million

PETALUMA – Enphase Energy, the Petaluma micro-inverter maker for the solar industry, closed a Series C round of $15 million in venture funding.

Launched just last June, the micro-inverters are in demand that even exceeds the company’s expectations, according to Enphase Vice President of Marketing Raghu Belur.

“We’ll be shipping tens of thousands by the end of the year,” he said.

The startup previously raised $6.5 million in Series B funding. RockPort Capital Partners led the new round. Existing institutional investors Third Point Ventures and Applied Ventures LLC, the VC arm of Applied Materials Inc., also participated.

The funds will go toward ramping up manufacturing and continued research and development, said Mr. Belur.

The Enphase system includes high-efficiency micro-inverts, communications and Web-based analytics to maximize energy harvest and simplify design, installation and management of solar projects. The systems increase energy harvest by anywhere from 5 percent to 25 percent and reduce labor costs by about 15 percent.

Enphase currently employs 50 in its Petaluma headquarters. Within the next 12 months it will grow its staff to about 100, said Mr. Belur.

ThermaSource expands

SANTA ROSA – ThermaSource, the geothermal driller and systems installer, acquired Tecton Geologic LLC, a Windsor-based geothermal well logging company.

Tecton provides on-site rig monitoring and mud logging for the geothermal drilling industry. Mud logging is the term for testing and keeping track of the microscopic nature of rock and the presence of liquid in wells during the drilling process.

Alan Frazer will continue as president of Tecton, which has 17 employees and has been in business for 17 years.

“With the acquisition by ThermaSource, Tecton will have the ability to add more capacity to meet the increasing demand for mud logging services,” he said.

No financial details were released. ThermaSource employs 242, about 40 in its Santa Rosa headquarters.

Dey to leave Napa

NAPA – Napa community leaders expressed sorrow at the announcement last week by pharmaceutical giant Mylan Inc. (NYSE: MYL) that it would relocate Dey L.P. out of Napa, where the company is the county’s sixth-largest employer with 530 workers.

Mylan said the relocation was part of its plan to retain the business of Dey.

“After carefully analyzing all the options regarding Dey, it became clear that retaining the business was truly in the best interest of all stakeholders. This became evident since we rebased the business in February and took more control of the day-to-day operations of the company,” said Mylan CEO Robert Coury.

“Dey ... was one of the gems of the community,” said Kate King, president and CEO of the Napa Chamber of Commerce. “It supported our theater, the opera house, nonprofits. Its employees were one of our strongest block of volunteers. The loss of Dey is a huge loss, not just to the employees who are left behind but to Napa as a whole.”

Mylan said it planned the following steps with Dey:

 • Relocating the company’s commercial operations from its Napa facilities to the East Coast

• Right-sizing Dey’s R&D functions and relocating them to other Mylan locations

• Transitioning Dey’s manufacturing operations out of the Napa facility

• Transitioning all G&A functions from Napa in parallel with the business areas they support

“These activities will position us to divest Dey’s Napa facilities over the next two years,” Mr. Coury said. “We are hopeful that we can find a buyer who may be able to maintain employment there.”

SMART wins in Marin

MARIN – Marin County Superior Court Judge Terrence Boren ruled five statements in the opposition’s argument against the Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit ballot initiative, Measure Q, be stricken.

On Sept. 2 a Sonoma County Judge ruled that one of the statements be changed on the opposition’s argument.

SMART argued that the statements slated to be printed in the voter information pamphlets were misleading and false. In Marin County it requested to have seven of the statements stricken or changed.

Two of the stricken statements that SMART had issue with were “... day and night, passenger trains, and freight trains up to 60 cars in length, would run at all hours through Novato, Terra Linda and San Rafael,” and “freight train operations, and gravel mining, facilitated by Measure Q, would severely damage the Eel River and its threatened salmon and steelhead.”

SMART said no freight will run south of Novato and that the statement about environmental damage was false and misleading.

 “We were disappointed that the hearing was set so late that the statements had to be stricken, not changed,” said Joy Dahlgren of the Marin Citizens for Effective Transportation opposing Measure Q.

Marin Supervisor Charles McGlashan, chairman of the SMART board of directors, filed suit Aug. 27 against the opposition claiming that the statements were false.