Capital Chaos

 St. Petersburg Times staff writer, Kris Hundley, is down at the 17th annual Floria Venture Capital Conference which is being held this week at the Renaissance Vinoy Resort.  The two-day event which kicked off yesterday has seen an overwhelming number of both participants (1,200) and VC firms (200) ready to be engaged. 

Kris reports that, “venture capital firms from across the country are here looking to invest in early- to late-stage companies. The stock market may be nervous, megamergers may be out of the question and bank lending may be tightening. But venture funds like the ones drawn to the statewide conference in St. Petersburg still have money to spend.

“There’s a lot of capital in these funds looking for opportunities,” said Don Blair, managing director at Raymond James investment bank. “The valuations will be more attractive to investors, but as long as sellers are willing to accept that, we should have an active year.”

Matthew Lorentzen of Sea Venture Investments in Palm Beach said venture investors have such a lengthy time frame before they expect to see a return on their capital that the current economic situation in not particularly relevant.

“It’ll be five years before we see our first exit,” he said. “So this is not a cycle that affects us.”

Venture investors pumped money into Florida companies last year at a rate not seen since 2001, with 63 companies landing $608-million, according the PricewaterhouseCoopers’ MoneyTree report. Included in those deals were 18 of the 24 presenters at last year’s Florida Venture Capital Conference, which attracted more than $125-million in investments.

This year, 23 companies are on hand to promote themselves, selected from among 360 applicants. The companies were given 12 minutes each to pitch to investors and ranged from a startup Web site for divorced women to a developer of micro unmanned air vehicles for the military.

Among the candidates from the Tampa Bay area was Field Forensics Inc., which licensed explosive-detection technology from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2005. Craig Johnson, the company’s founder and president, developed an easy-to-use, portable version of the detector.

The product is now used by U.S. and Spanish soldiers, cruise lines, airports and nuclear power plants to test for explosive residue on everything from hair to vehicles.

Other local presenters included computer software vendor Persystent Technologies and biotech firm Intezyne Technologies Inc., both of Tampa. Habib Skaff, Intezyne’s chief executive, was confident as he sought the first round of institutional funding for his company’s targeted drug-delivery technology. “There are always dollars in health care,” he said.

But F. Scott Moody, chairman and chief executive of AuthenTec, a Melbourne maker of fingerprint sensor systems, warned entrepreneurs it would not be easy. Though his company has been successful, going public in June, he still remembers searching for investors after the technology bust.

“We were down to pennies in the bank,” Moody said. “I’d get up in the morning, throw up and go to work.”