Venture capitalists have made their presence very conspicuous in modern day business efforts almost everywhere, but especially so in the Silicon Valley.Last year alone, an amount in excess of $ 25 Billion has been made in venture capital companies.About 2500 new enterprises/ companies stood to get funds from these investments.!

These venture capitalists almost always look for start-ups which will have products that attract millions of people.The financiers put up their dollars in firms which build technologies definitely not belonging the mainstream. Some has the potential to change people's lives. Some will even turn out to be much ahead of their time.

As per Forbes's surveys,investments made by venture capitalists last year, included big deals for companies with hitherto unknown technologies in surprising market niches.Those technologies-ranged from gadgets that only the military could advantageously utilize to gadgets and devices that could wind up in our own cars-show how diverse are the areas the Silicon Valley's financiers are prepared to put in their money.

Insitu,is an example.A start-up located in the small town of Bingen, Wash., they found one wealthy business partner in Boeing company,which has a major presence in Seattle; Washington State. Insitu's two main products are called ScanEagle and Insight.These are autonomous, unmanned aircrafts which are used to run border patrols,to monitor migratory characteristics of whales and to check out security of long cross country pipelines carrying oil and gas.

The US Navy and the Australian Army are also large customers.Insitu closed its Series D round of financing led by Battery Ventures' Roger Lee in December 2007.The company has now formulated plans to release a new autonomous aircraft in 2008.

Obviously such information will be of great help to potential venture capitalists, who should look for similar niches in the market.Information feeding to venture capitalists should be able to highlight the potential and possibility of novel ideas that has a far reaching utility spread.

Here are some more examples on similar lines to feed information to prospective venture capitalists.

As is well known now,China isn't just one of those places for making available cheap manufacturing facilities,any more.Incesoft,a recently launched Chinese Web robot technology company, has an innovative product named as the intelligent Web bot Xiaoi. An avatar after any VC's dream, Xiaoi can play games, give the latest traffic updates on busy highways and even provide information about the current constellations of stars in the night sky. Draper Fisher Jurvetson and ePlanet Ventures were among the financial backers ana VCs who pledged financing to this Chinese firm last year.

There are also ventures having come out with defense applications that even James Bond would simply admire. Among these one is the California-based A4Vision which has developed a 3D facial imaging and recognition system.This works together with its already established fingerprint identification and verification technology.

Clients for this system include high-security organizations such as the US Department of Defense and even some Swiss banks.

New developments are underway in bio medical engineering devices,optometry etc.

Learn more about this author, Madhusoodanan.K.P..
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

---

Add your voice

Know something about Care and feeding of (information to) venture capitalists?
We want to hear your view. Write now!