Secretive carbon startup brings Condoleezza Rice and $26m on board

A secretive US startup specialising in energy and emissions management has revealed that it has raised $26m (£16m) in funding and put together a board dominated by influential political and business figures including former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.

The company, known as C3, was founded a year ago by Thomas Siebel, the entrepreneur who sold his business software firm Siebel to Oracle $5.7bn, and over the past two weeks has filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) confirming that it has brought in $26m in funding from undisclosed investors.

Intriguingly, the company has also revealed that it has put together a heavy-hitting board of directors, including Siebel himself, former Siebel and Oracle executives Patricia House and Edward Abbo, Jay Dweck, a managing director at Morgan Stanley, Condoleezza Rice and Spencer Abraham, a former Republican senator and secretary of energy.

However, beyond a description of "energy and emissions management", the company has failed to disclose further details of what it plans to produce and what it will do with the new funding round.

The secrecy has sparked widespread speculation about the company's plans, fuelled in large part by the involvement of senior Republicans.

The involvement of Siebel, House, and former Siebel chief technology officer Abbo suggests the company is keen to break into the market for carbon management and reporting software – an increasingly crowded market that is expected to accelerate rapidly when and if the US adopts a national emissions cap-and-trade scheme.

However, the involvement of Rice and Abraham further complicates attempts to predict the direction of the new company, given that the bulk of the Republican party is working overtime to kill off the proposed cap-and-trade bill. Siebel himself is also a staunch Conservative and was a vocal supporter of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin in the last presidential election.

As Camille Ricketts at the VentureBeat blog observed: "Why does C3, a seemingly conservative company, look like it will be measuring carbon emissions for the express purpose of making a cap-and-trade system work better?

"The only argument that seems to make sense is that C3 will be more focused on the energy security piece of carbon and emissions management… But this prediction is inconsistent with comments made earlier this year by the C3 team suggesting the company would be developing enterprise software to help companies keep track of and reduce their carbon emissions. Still, it's unclear why Rice, Abrahams and Siebel would be rallying behind a startup with such modest ambitions in an already crowded space."