Sep. 7--FOR A promising solar-energy start-up launched in a research laboratory at the University of Toledo, investment cash has poured in from California's Silicon Valley, Zurich, and Amsterdam.

"We are excited to have the opportunity to make this investment and look forward to supporting the company with its growth ambitions," Adam Anders, of the Netherlands' Rabo Ventures, said in announcing it was taking the lead in a large investment in Toledo's Xunlight Corp. The investment, $11 million, was the Dutch fund's first outside Europe.

It was part of $40 million that private investors have committed over the past 16 months to the solar panel developer and manufacturer on Nebraska Avenue.

And Xunlight has plenty of company.

As world attention has increasingly turned to new ways to keep lights burning, cars moving, and air clean, firms involved in alternative energy have reaped the benefits.

In the three-month period ended June 30, venture capital firms' investments in such firms in North America, Europe, China, and India zoomed 58 percent from the same period a year earlier, according to a group that tracks the sector.

Some investors are comparing the trend to the dot-com investing craze of the late 1990s.

"It's a feeding frenzy, it's so hot now," said Greg Knudson, who heads a local fund called Rocket Ventures at Toledo's private Regional Growth Partnership.

And solar companies and other alternative-energy ventures in northwest Ohio are well positioned to cash in on the bonanza because of the success of Arizona-based First Solar Inc., a Toledo-born company that had the fastest-growing stock on Wall Street last year. The firm's lone U.S. factory is in Perrysburg Township.

Its success has attracted attention to the area's budding solar-energy industry including a respected research institute at UT and several start-up companies. "It's putting us on the map and helping build momentum," said Mr. Knudson.

Rocket Ventures is working with 10 firms involved in alternative-energy and related areas that eventually could attract venture capital firms. If the local businesses can prove their worth, there will be no shortage of potential pools of cash for them to try to tap.

Seventy-four percent of investments made by venture funds in the second quarter, or $1.5 billion, went to U.S. firms, according to Cleantech Group LLC, San Francisco.

The firm said that major beneficiaries are companies developing solar thermal systems, which use steam to power turbine engines to make electricity.

Other big winners have been companies using algae, plant stalks, and other noncorn sources to make gasoline alternatives.

Investors have even coined a new term for this category of company benefiting from the trend: "clean tech" or clean technology.

It includes solar panel producers like Xunlight, firms involved in making and installing windmills, companies developing long-range batteries for automobiles, producers of biofuels, and manufacturers of advanced materials with the potential to reduce consumption of fossil fuels.