C3 IoT, an almost failed startup founded by a colorful billionaire who was trampled by an elephant, has raised another $100 million

Not the only Oracle executive to see an opportunity

Interestingly, Marc Benioff, the billionaire founder of Salesforce, was inspired by Siebel’s success to create a CRM company while he, too, was an executive at Oracle. His idea was to build it as cloud software. In Benioff’s case, he left Oracle with Ellison’s blessing and $2 million of Ellison’s money as an angel investment. Not long after, Oracle launched its own CRM software and Benioff famously kicked Ellison off his board. When Oracle bought Siebel in 2006, the competitive antagonism heated up between the two frenemies and these days Ellison and Benioff are at complete loggerheads.

Meanwhile, Siebel took his earnings from the sale and became a philanthropist and investor. His investment company, First Virtual Group, funds everything from agriculture to real estate to tech.

But it was a charity effort around sustainable energy that helped birth the idea that would eventually become C3 IoT.

Siebel was thinking a lot about energy with his philanthropic effort Siebel Energy Institute when he decided to build software to help electric grids manage energy flows to homes. In 2009, he contacted several wealthy friends and raised $20 millions over a single weekend to found C3, kicking in $6 million of his own money, reports Forbes Alex Konrad. He hired former Siebel systems executive Patricia House as his CEO.

Beware of elephants

Nine months later, he was trampled by an elephant while on Safari in Africa, which badly injured him.

During a nearly two-year recovery, he attended meetings in a wheelchair, the Mercury News reported. By the time he was fully recovered, oil prices were in tatters from the global economic meltdown and energy companies were not buying software. C3 was nearly bankrupt, Siebel told Forbes.

But Siebel saw a way out: all the data that was captured from sensors in wind turbines and along the grid. He restructured the company, laid off 110 of 150 employees including many people he’d known his whole career. With the remaining team, mostly engineers, C3 spent two years re-writing its software to focus on collecting and analyzing data from sensors and industrial machines, just as companies were starting to invest in the Internet of Things (IoT).

He relaunched C3 as C3 IoT in 2016 and today, with Siebel as CEO and House as a board member, it counts organizations like the US Department of Defense, 3M, Pella, as well as energy companies as customers.

Part of the new $100 million investment was from The Rise Fund, a socially responsible fund managed by TPG’s Bill McGlashan and founded by U2 frontman Bono and movie mogul Jeff Skoll who produced “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Siebel plans to use the cash to expand into new industries and new countries.

Business Insider also named C3 IoT among the 51 startups to bet your career on in 2018.