SiliconBeat

For those who care, we thought we’d provide an update on Planktos, the carbon-credits business formerly located in Foster City.

It’s now based in Palm Desert and has a new majority shareholder — an entity known as Maidon Services Limited bought 45 million shares of Planktos, or 53.1 percent of its outstanding stock, for $200,000, from Solar Energy. $125,000 was delivered on the deal’s closing date, with the rest payable within the next 14 months. Solar Energy maintains the option of converting the final $75,000 it owes into Planktos shares for 25 cents each.

We have posted about Planktos a few times over the last year, first in September 2007 after the company said it had secured up to $2 million in a private placement from an investor it didn’t name.

A year ago Planktos said it was considering “winding down” its operations, and in March the company said it was forced to indefinitely postpone its ocean fertilization efforts once intended to restore marine plant life and generate ecological offsets for the global carbon credit market .

In our first stab at business matchmaking, we’d like to introduce Climos, a San Francisco startup company focused on “large scale techniques to mitigate climate change” that rounded up $3.5 million in a first-round venture funding today, to Planktos, the public company based in Foster City that looked to cash in on the “rapidly expanding multi-billion-dollar market” for carbon credits to fight global warming through its “eco-restoration projects,” including an ocean fertilization project it was forced to postpone indefinitely last month that sounds very much the same as Climos’s first endeavor.

Planktos has a boat you might be able to use, having recalled its research vessel Weatherbird II and crew back from the Portuguese island of Madeira last month where they had been docked “awaiting the resources necessary to initiate and monitor its first research plankton blooms.” The resources never showed up.

Planktos blamed the moved on a “highly effective disinformation campaign waged by
anti-offset crusaders has provoked widespread opposition to plankton restoration in the
environmental world, and has caused the company to encounter serious difficulty in raising the capital needed to fund its planned series of ocean research trials.” The company’s shares, which trade on the Pink Sheets (Ticker: PLKT), closed Wednesday at two cents.

Climos backers are evidently unphased by such “anti-offset crusaders” and instead see attractive shades of green to be made. Its investors in the round include Braemar Energy Ventures and Elon Musk, a “well-known entrepreneur and technology investor,” according to a company press release.

Planktos, the Foster City company we first wrote about in September when it reported receiving a $2 million funding in its carbon-credits business from an unnamed investor, says it “has been forced to indefinitely postpone its ocean fertilization efforts once intended to restore marine plant life and generate ecological offsets for the global carbon credit market,” according to a press release it issued Wednesday.

The company blamed the moved on a “highly effective disinformation campaign waged by anti-offset crusaders has provoked widespread opposition to plankton restoration in the environmental world, and has caused the company to encounter serious difficulty in raising the
capital needed to fund its planned series of ocean research trials.’

Planktos has recalled its research vessel Weatherbird II and crew back from the Portuguese island of Madeira where they been docked “awaiting the resources necessary to initiate and monitor its first research plankton blooms.”

Management has “radically downsized the company’s staffing” while its board has formed a new committee to explore “all options,” including a possible re-launch of planned marine operations, should it find more funding, “new partnerships, as well as the possible pursuit of other promising business opportunities in the environmental sphere.”

No mention was made of the company’s other project, a plan for “the planting of indigienous trees in the national forests of Hungary. The press release ended on a dramatic note:

“The board of directors continues to believe in the urgent ecological necessity of its ocean restoration plans and the scientific speciousness of objections voiced to date. However, ideological hostility to and misrepresentations of this work will continue to stymie progress
until the true gravity of our climatic and ocean crises is more widely understood.”

Planktos shares, which trade on the Pink Sheets, closed at 3.3 cents Wednesday, down one-tenth of a penny. Amazingly enough, 78,471 shares changed hands that day.

Remember Planktos, the company we first wrote about in September when it reported receiving $2 million in its carbon-credits business from an unnamed investor?

The Foster City company said Wednesday in a “shareholder update” distributed by Business Wire that it is considering “winding down” its operations. (We couldn’t find any mention of the news with the SEC or on the company’s own web site as of the time we posted this.)

The profitless company, whose focus is “sequestering carbon dioxide in the environment utilizing known technology intended to restore the world’s oceans and forests”, has been unable to line up the additional $2 million in funding that it said it needed to continue operations through its next fiscal year in its quarterly financial filing on Dec. 10.

Planktos had other bad news to announce. Its shares were removed by Nasdaq from its Over-the-Counter Bulletin Board Wednesday and will now trade in the Pink Sheets, because the company was too often late in filing its financial reports, according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a regulator set up by Nasdaq in July to help protect investors.

One of the company’s two projects to create carbon credits includes restoring plankton
life underwater. It was dealt a setback when the company’s research vessel was denied entry to the port of Las Palmas in the Canary Islands where it planned to take on scientific equipment from its partners at the University of Las Palmas to begin joint research activities into the company’s “ocean fertilization” project.

In September, when Planktos reported the $2 million investment from a mystery shareholder, who reportedly paid $1 a share in August, its shares were trading at 54 cents. They closed Wednesday at 12 cents.

At least one voice is wondering why various filings by Planktos over the last several months don’t seem to add up.

Planktos, a Foster City company with no sales, 20 employees no employees and less that $15,000 in cash as of June 30, said Wednesday in a press release it secured up to $2 million in a private placement by an investor it didn’t name.

(I’ve been told via e-mail by Planktos Chief Operating Officer William Coleman that in fact the company has “13 employees in Foster City and 7 on the Weatherbird currently berthed in Ft. Lauderdale. — JD 9/17/07)

The investment valued Planktos at $1 a share. A stock chart on the company’s Web site was last updated Aug. 15, when the shares traded at $1.04. The shares, which trade over the counter, closed Wednesday at 54 cents.
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