Venture-capital firms, which provide seed capital for turning concepts into companies, have been ramping up their investments lately. In the fourth quarter of last year, VC firms invested $4.5 billion into 496 rounds of financing, according to the VentureOne/Ernst & Young Venture Capital Report. These are the highest quarterly numbers in more than a year. The most active sectors were software and biopharmaceuticals. It's also worth noting that famed Silicon Valley VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers–an early investor in tech successes such as America Online, Amazon.com, and Sun Microsystems–seems to be increasingly interested in nanotechnology. Earlier this month, Kleiner Perkins led a $17.5 million financing round for ZettaCore. ZettaCore manufactures data-storage molecules about 1 nanometer in size–or 100,000 times as small as a human hair–that contain a few hundred atoms and could be placed on traditional silicon wafers to boost memory.

# posted by James M. Pethokoukis at 2:00 PM EST
Return to Next News
Go to the archive