By 2012, two trends dominated the funding of clean energy entrepreneurial firms. On the one hand, early-stage investing was declining – there was less experimentation – and on the other hand corporate investing in late-stage companies was growing. More than 50 percent of the $2.6 billion in Californian clean energy investments in 2012 came from corporations whose main focus was late-stage companies. Previous involvement by corporate VCs had been lower, in 2005, just 19 percent of the $520 million invested; in 2008, 29 percent of the $3.47 billion invested; and in 2010, 40 percent of the $3.2 billion invested. Increasingly, the aim was to scale up, commercialize, and implement technologies that showed promise. Late-stage project deployment was overtaking early-stage research and testing.

Corporate investors such as Intel Capital and Google Ventures responded favorably to laws in California relating to climate change that mandated a goal of 33 percent renewable energy, which drove demand. Overall clean energy funding in California, however, had declined by close to 20 percent between 2010 and 2012. Clean energy was not the only category in which Intel Capital or Google Ventures made deals. Intel Capital, for example, backed a broad range of startups in areas such as semiconductors, the Internet, and hardware, software, and services as well as clean energy. Google Ventures too had a diversified portfolio of entrepreneurial ventures in areas such as consumer, mobile, commerce, enterprise, and data and life sciences, and it was not exclusively focused on clean energy. The degree to which Intel Capital and Google Ventures should remain committed to clean energy was a question both firms had to ponder.