The Burlington Free Press

Following is an excerpt from this piece. To read the complete original article, please click here: Vermont Investors

The Vermont Investors Forum annually brings together venture capitalists and creative Vermonters with young businesses on the verge of maturity.

Eleven companies, with ideas ranging from sophisticated health care management software developers to organic wool yarn traders, were given about 12 minutes to convince investors to take a chance. The presenters' requests ran from about $100,000 to about $2 million.

The companies making their pitches represented a wide range of the types of businesses that should thrive in Vermont - most involved green products governed by a mission-based philosophy or intellectual property, such as software or in one case a revolutionary way to provide industrial heating. The forum also included a lightning round in which five more startups had two minutes to capture the group's imaginations.