Saturday, 19 January 2019
Golfing at the Woodway Country Club
Kevin Graetz is an experienced tech industry and real estate development consultant based in New Canaan, Connecticut. Away from work, Kevin Graetz enjoys staying active by playing golf. He is a member at the Woodway Country Club in Stamford.
Stamford’s Woodway Country Club features an 18 hole championship golf course occupying 184 acres of scenic greenery interspersed by the twisting Noroton River. There is perhaps no greater testament to the course’s natural beauty than the National Audubon Society’s recognition of Woodway as a bird sanctuary, the first golf course to receive such a distinction.
Designed by golf course architect Willie Park, Jr., Woodway is regarded as a challenging shotmaker’s course which measures 6,901 yards from the back tees. The course has hosted Connecticut Open Championship events in 1964, 1983, 1995, and most recently in 2016. In addition to the course itself, Woodway Country Club provides group clinics and individual training sessions, an active junior program, and a number of year round member tournaments.
Tuesday, 8 January 2019
NetLogic’s Strategic Acquisition of Raza Microelectronics
A respected Silicon Valley technology consultant and investor, Kevin Graetz seeks out positions in early- and late-stage growth companies with the potential to disrupt. Kevin Graetz has made impactful investments in companies including Raza Microelectronics (now RMI Corporation), which achieved a high-profile 2009 exit through a $184 million acquisition by NetLogic Microsystems.
Established in 2004, RMI Corp. raised more than $150 million in financing over a five-year period through venture capital firms such as Kodiak Venture Partners, Benchmark, and DAG Ventures. Establishing a niche as a fabless semiconductor company, RMI Corp. developed a suite of low-power, high-performance processors that met industry needs for converged IP networks.
Built to function on 3G/4G mobile wireless infrastructures, the firm’s multi-threaded, multi-core processors provided advanced “data in flight” capacities that met consumer needs in the enterprise, infrastructure, and consumer media markets. Its high-performance “system on a chip” solutions were augmented by ultra-low-power processors designed to meet high-volume application requirements.
The merger was described as enabling a significant expansion of NetLogic’s product and intellectual property portfolio, as well as bolstering its core OEM customer capacities.
Friday, 4 January 2019
Home Depot Partners with Bloom Energy in Renewables Deployments
Kevin Graetz is a longtime technology investor who has held leadership and investment positions in a variety of startups, including Amyris and Quantum Fuel Systems. Companies for which Kevin Graetz has raised significant money include Bloom Energy, which is rooted in K. R. Sridhar’s work to design a NASA fuel cell that would take the electricity produced via solar panel and direct it toward air and fuel generation.
Though the NASA project ended in 2001, the core research continued, with a venture-financed focus on generating reliable and clean energy from any location worldwide. As reported in Green Tech Media, Bloom Energy’s efforts are integral to the overall mission of Home Depot, which has earned Energy Star recognition over the past six years and been honored by the Environmental Protection Agency through supply chain and water awards.
Beginning in 2014, the nationwide chain initiated a partnership with Bloom Energy that resulted in nearly 200 two-hundred-kilowatt fuel cell system projects being installed at Connecticut, New York, California, and Massachusetts retail locations. The 27 projects that were completed in 2018 also featured newly introduced battery storage capacities.
This sustained effort sets Home Depot comfortably on track to achieve its goal of 135 megawatts in offsite and onsite renewable capacity by 2020. With approximately 130 megawatts already in place, projections are that the goal will be attained as early as mid-2019. Renewables also figure prominently into Home Depot’s retail strategy, with $50 million in solar panel systems sold annually and wind turbines also available to consumers.
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