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Charlotte Arnold's Philadelphia-based venture capital firm doesn't have a dime invested in Pittsburgh-area companies.

After spending three days here this week kicking the tires on area start-ups and networking with local investment firms, that is almost sure to change.

Of the four-to-six investments Arnold's firm expects to make in the next year, at least one is likely to be in a Pittsburgh company, she said Wednesday.

"We're a diversified fund, and there was a lot to see here, both in the life sciences and in software," she said.

Arnold, vice president of Meridian Venture Partners, is emblematic of the kind of exposure that organizers of the first Three Rivers Venture Fair wanted to generate for promising young companies from western Pennsylvania and as far away as Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio, and State College.

One by one yesterday, entrepreneurs from 31 companies took to a podium in the glass-walled east gallery of Heinz Field to explain their company to more than 400 investors, some of whom registered on the day of the event, writing checks for $400 to get in.

Arnold said venture capitalists who would have bypassed Pittsburgh in the past are no longer turning up their noses at the region that President Bush last month dubbed "Knowledge Town."

"The dynamic has shifted. It used to be, 'Why should I bother going to Pittsburgh?' Now it's more like, 'I'd better go to this event in Pittsburgh because I might miss something.' I think that kind of momentum is going to continue," Arnold said.

After making their presentations, entrepreneurs returned to their exhibit booths and waited to see if the investors would stop by to learn more.

"We've made the best contacts we've ever had with firms from (Washington) D.C., Boston and New York," said Mark Vernallis, cofounder of Oakmont-based Logic Library Inc., a business software start-up. "The capital requirements in Pittsburgh far exceed what local investors can provide."

Arthur Boni, managing director of life sciences for Saturn Asset Management, a Pittsburgh-based venture capital firm, said that five years ago, an event like the venture fair would have drawn next to no interest from outside investors.

"Now we have more companies, better companies, that are further along in their development," he said. "People are discovering there are opportunities here, and after today, we're going to work to bring them back."

Boni said Saturn Asset will follow up on contacts made this week to discuss assembling syndicated deals, where more than one venture capital firm is involved in financing a company's growth. Venture capital firms are gravitating to those kind of deals to spread the investment risk.

The investors who attended the fair were pleased not just with the technologies they saw, but also the proven entrepreneurs who have built successful companies in the past, said Dennis Yablonsky, chief executive of both the Pittsburgh Digital Greenhouse and the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse — state-sponsored development groups that are working to encourage growth of the digital chip technology and life sciences industries in the region.

"They're investing in the people as much as in the technology," he said.

Nearly all of the entrepreneurs presenting their businesses had previously launched and nurtured companies to an initial public offering or a sale.

An example is Dr. M. Stephen Heilman, chief executive of Lifecor Inc., which is developing a wearable automatic heart defibrillator device for people at risk of sudden cardiac arrest.

Heilman previously founded Pittsburgh-based medical device manufacturer Medrad, which he sold for $180 million.

Philip Yeske, chief operating officer of Harmar Township-based Flourous Technologies, said he was excited to see the number of outside venture funds attracted by the fair, even though his young biotechnology company is more interested in raising its profile among local investors.

"It was good to have this concentration of investors in one place. We could get invitations to meet these people one at a time. But to have them all here in one place at one time is very efficient," he said.

Tom Patton, chief financial officer of Carnegie Learning Inc., a start-up provider of math curriculum that started at Carnegie Mellon University, said the fair has validated Pittsburgh in the mind of investors.

"This has helped put us back on the map," he said.

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