Following on from a $200 million funding round in 2007, Better Place has raised a whopping $ 250 million Series B round valuing the business according to investors including HSBC, Lazard Asset Management and Morgan Stanley Investment Management. Better Place was founded by Shai Agassi. Better Place plans to set up battery swapping stations allowing consumers to lease batteries and swap them as they get low with freshly charged ones. Definitely innovative but if this gets big, you can expect them to have serious competition from all sorts of angles. Not for the faint hearted. The company does not expect to have product in the market until 2011.