“Potential angel investors invited to this meeting had to have a net worth of at least 1 million dollars,” said Kevin Wiley, executive director of Alaska InvestNet.

Alaska InvestNet, an Anchorage-based nonprofit that aims to connect entrepreneurs with investors, hosted an investment opportunity meeting Nov. 27 at the Hotel Captain Cook in Anchorage.

Five technology companies made presentations at the invitation-only meeting in front of potential angel investors and faculty of the University of Alaska Anchorage.

Angel investors are individuals who seek companies ready for private funding in which to invest. Unlike a typical investor, angels come into a project at a very early stage. These rough-around-the-edges business pursuits are risky. However, the return on a successful investment can be rather lucrative for an angel, who looks for a return in terms of a multiple — 10 or 100 or even 1,000 times — of their initial investment, rather than a percentage.

The ideology that offsets angels from other investors is that of mentorship. While the angel investor's monetary participation in a project is obviously important, perhaps of more importance is the investor's role as a mentor to the entrepreneur.

Representatives from Biopar LLC, Borealis Broadband, Dalson Energy, MontAska Technologies Inc. and Variance Dynamical Corp. made their case for private investment financing to angel investors who sat with poker faces listening to each pitch.

The rules were stiff, and the presentations brief and to the point.

“The hardest part for us was the limitation of a 10-minute presentation, and only five minutes of Q&A,” said Gerald Jerry Winchester, chief executive officer of Variance Dynamical. “How do you explain why you need funding if an investor doesn't understand what you are doing.”

Variance generated many questions from investors with its concept of using how the mind works to create machine intelligence that will allow computers to recognize speech and vision, much like humans do.

“It was difficult to boil this down into 10 minutes when other people, like Doyon Ltd., gave us hours to make our point,” Winchester said later.

Variance had its mastermind, Paul Goodwin, a PhD who founded the company and is chairman of its board, on hand to answer investors questions.

“I was looking at Variance both from a personal and a business development aspect,” said Wayne Westlake with Kikiktagruk Inupiat Corp., the Alaska Native village corporation for Kotzebue. “I am just getting back into Alaska and feeling out the lay of the land.”

Westlake, who worked in Washington, D.C., indicated that he had queried several of his Washington, D.C., contacts in the defense industry about Variance's technology after the presentations.

“I am doing my homework right now and checking this out,” Westlake said.

One of the main supporters of angel investing in Alaska is Allan Johnston of Wedbush Morgan Securities in Anchorage. Johnston, who attended the presentations, agrees the due diligence and networking between Native corporations is needed to instigate early-stage investment growth in Alaska companies.

“That's just what is needed — more cooperation between Native companies who may not even know what each other is doing,” Johnston said. “This could become a vehicle to finding other strategic partners — that is important to making business stronger and better in Alaska.”

The variety of the presenters ranged from a medical data transmission device by MontAska Technologies to woodchips being burned to create energy for rural use in diesel, gas or turbine engines by Dalson Energy.

Biopar LLC rocked the house with a large funding request, when its presenter, Barbara Bach, asked investors for $4.2 million. The funding would allow Biopar to continue with its development of a patent-pending invention that digitally creates a database of animals by using automated pattern recognition, similar to what is used with humans' fingerprints.

Investment funding requests ranged from $500,000 to $4.2 million. If any of the potential investors at the meeting were interested in funding any of the projects, none tipped their hands to their intentions.

Representatives from well-known Alaska investors were present at the meeting, including Mead Treadwell for the Hickel investment camp, and John Wannamaker representing the Rasmusons. But there were some new faces too.

“We have to invite in the known investors, but this also attracts some newcomers,” said Alaska InvestNet's Wiley. “Those coat-tail investors are just as important as the better-known entities.”

Johnston characterizes Alaska investors at the bottom of the heap nationally. “We have a very new and immature angel investment network here in Alaska,” Johnston said.

There was no word from the presenters about potential angels who had come forward. InvestNet officials indicated that the exercise is just the beginning.

“We spent a year getting these investors together and setting this up,” Wiley said. “This is just a door-opener for these companies. Besides, we wouldn't have invited the press if it was strictly to make a deal.”