I'm going to give them a shot at the brass ring; but from what I saw on their website and what I heard on this show, I don't see that their requirements are any different.

They say they want the technical founder at the early stage, and they will handle the business management side, but they still want the technical founder to already have a paying customer.

One of the problems faced by early staged opportunities is the inability to afford the patents in the many countries that they are needed in. So in order for the technical founder to bring the paying customers that investors want, he must forego some of the patents and make the business less profitable.

Some Angels and VCs claim to be filling the early stage void, but this patent and customer requirement means they are only looking for very smaller deals.

The irony of it in my case is to have something that works but no patent yet, while life-science and bio-tech opportunities have neither something that works nor a patent and they get funded while I, who am half way there, does not get funded.

Sales for the current technological standard that I am trying to replace are at about one billion individual sales per year. That's number of units, not dollars. From that I calculate about 200 million potential early adopters per year, because I make those users more profitable.

That's a lot of room for error, or a lot of room for the learning curve. We don't have to produce 200 million units to start.

But potential investors want a few patents now with smaller sales potential rather than being willing to help get more patents and much larger numbers.

Because MVM wants the existence of paying customers, they only have one criteria difference from TCA. MVM is willing to supply the CEO. Other than that, the criteria are essentially the same.