Google Ventures Emerges as Investor in San Diego’s V-Vehicle Co.

Google Ventures has joined Silicon Valley’s Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as an investor in V-Vehicle Co., the San Diego-based startup automaker developing a new line of fuel-efficient cars. The company plans to build its cars in northeastern Louisiana.

Joe Fisher, a New York spokesman for the San Diego startup automaker, confirmed the corporate venture fund’s investment, which was not previously disclosed. The clue was in a recent regulatory filing, which lists David Drummond as a member of V-Vehicle’s board of directors. Fisher confirms he’s David C. Drummond, Google’s senior vice president for corporate development and chief legal officer. But the spokesman declined to say how much Google has invested.

V-Vehicle’s regulatory filing shows the green automotive startup has raised almost $62.26 million in venture funding, and plans to raise an additional $4 million in the current round. When V-Vehicle made its debut at a news conference with Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal about six weeks earlier, press reports indicated that Frank Varasano, the former Oracle executive who is the automaker’s founding CEO, already had lined up $100 million in venture funding.

At the time, the company said its prominent investors included Silicon Valley VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and T. Boone Pickens, the Texas energy maverick. Two Kleiner Perkins partners, John Doerr and Ray Lane, also have seats on the company’s board. But Pickens investment, if he’s made one, is not apparent in the filing. The filing lists V-Vehicle’s directors as Varasano, Lane, Doerr, and Drummond.

The VC funding qualifies V-Vehicle to a portion—about $10 million—out of an anticipated total of $67 million in Louisiana state economic development funds. The company plans to begin renovation next year of a shuttered auto parts factory in Monroe, LA, where it plans to assemble its “green” car. James Davison, a Ruston, LA, trucking magnate who owns the property, also was identified in June as an investor.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.