HBD has made a R70m commitment to lending venture capital to firms focused on technology and the international marketplace.

HBD Venture Capital director Victoria Shaw said most of the companies in SA that refer to themselves as "venture capital" companies were private equity investors.

HBD is one of the few that invests seed capital in companies that have not been trading for more than a year.

Shuttleworth said the HBD team evaluated about 600 proposals before deciding on its latest three investments.

The first investment is MetriCap?, a plastic moulded closure for squeezable tubes containing semi-viscous fluids designed by Plusminuszero Design.
The company's main focus is on pharmaceutical products and for epoxy resins where the bonding of the product is best if precisely measured quantities of the two components are well mixed.

The company's second investment is in a company called Crusader Systems that has developed process engineering software, CSense. CSense identifies problems in manufacturing processes, the reasons for those problems and provides solutions.

It has already been used by local companies such as Sasol, SA Breweries and Impala Platinum. It is targeted mainly at the mineral processing, petrochemical, chemical pulp and paper, food and beverage and power generation industries.

The third investment is in Specialised Track Systems (STS) Panel Track, a new design for rail tracks.

STS owns the intellectual rights to the design, but manufacture is outsourced. The design uses no ballast, less concrete than traditional tracks, and it cuts down on the maintenance of the track and the rolling stock over the lifetime of the rail.

The market is not only operators such as Spoornet, but also for local mining companies. In SA there is about 30000km of track above ground and about 32000km of track below ground.

HBD's first four investments were in Sterizone, which developed ozone generators; Nucleus EcoPower?, which designed switch-mode power supplies; Kinetic Marketing Delivery Systems, focusing on mobile technologies for sales and marketing monitoring; and MyBeat? Interactive Technologies, a company focused on SMS.