While others are talking about Pittsburgh being an untapped gold mine of technology, venture capitalist Qingsheng "Ching" Zhu and his partner Paul Schmitt are busy harvesting it.

Their Delaware County-based private equity firm, Pennsylvania Early Stage Partners, has poured more than $5 million into four local tech companies in the last year. And several more investments, or "deals" as they are known in investor-speak, are in the works, the pair said.

In a region that openly laments the lack of dollars for just-getting-started tech companies, Zhu and Schmitt insist their prolific investing pattern doesn't mean they aren't seeing something that other people aren't. They have a mission, according to Schmitt -- and they're sticking to it. "We felt Pittsburgh would be a great opportunity," he said.

And it has been -- nearly half of the 10 venture capital investments secured by Pittsburgh tech firms this year have had the PA Early Stage fingerprint on them, according to statistics compiled by Thomson Venture Economics and Innovation Works, the Hazelwood-based tech company engine.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that $15 million of the venture capital firm's $86.5 million in its investment coffers represent dollars earmarked for biotech ventures from the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse. In late 2003, PA Early Stage was tapped by the Greenhouse -- namely its co-chairmen, Carnegie Mellon University President Jared Cohon and University of Pittsburgh Chancellor Mark Nordenberg -- to add $5 million of its own to create a $20 million pool exclusively targeted at biotech ventures in the region.

The firm also agreed to set up a local operation designed to pounce on the best technologies flowing out of the universities and oversee the biotech investments.

Despite their prolific investment style, Zhu often acts as a one-man operation, working from shared space within the Greenhouse's airy offices in Hazelwood. Schmitt and another partner, Dean Miller, live near Philadelphia but travel to the region several times a month to review possible deals.

Many of the venture capital firm's local investments are in developments that are so young that they are often still ideas -- technologies created and patented by university researchers that are waiting for someone to wrap them into a product and sell them to the marketplace.

That's how Zhu and Schmitt spotted Azidex, an HIV-therapy drug firm now based in the Greenhouse's offices that Schmitt and Zhu put together from scratch, spending a year licensing technology from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Illinois, hiring a chief executive officer and infusing it with $500,000.

Last September, the duo visited a technology fair sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Office of Enterprise Development and met Azidex co-founder Mike Parniak, a Pitt professor who'd been developing an HIV-resistant compound, not unlike the well-known drug therapy AZT. Parniak had landed a $4 million National Institutes of Health grant with Illinois researcher Eric Oldfield. The pair had never met until Zhu and Schmitt brought them together at a dinner late last year.

The year spent on just getting Azidex going is not unusual, said Zhu, who said he spends much of his time hunting for the latest and best research being churned out of the universities.

At any given time, PA Early Stage is considering 15 possible investments, with most unlikely to pan out -- not because they aren't worthy but because a company "just doesn't fit our profile," said Zhu. The venture capital firm may consider the market potential to be too small or far off, for example, or the management's goals to differ from its own. "Just because we don't invest in the company doesn't mean it's not a good company," said Zhu.

Tech insiders say what sets Zhu and his partners apart from others are not only their commitment to putting young tech firms together from scratch, but their sheer tenacity in making it happen.

"PA Early Stage has done a good job digging and pushing," said veteran entrepreneur Lansing Taylor, whose latest tech start-up, South Side-based Cellumen Inc., received funding from the firm.

Taylor, who founded another local firm, Cellomics, that was sold to Fisher Scientific International this year for $49 million, said Zhu and Schmitt are making the rounds in town, connecting with universities, giving encouragement and advice to researchers, visiting faculty, courting other investors.

"They've done a good job of fitting themselves into the region, instead of trying to make the region fit them," said Matt Fleckenstein, a former executive at the state-supported tech incubator Innovation Works who now works at Downtown-based tech firm Peak Strategy.

It helps, local tech advocates say, that PA Early Stage has stepped in where other investors have failed to tread. Getting money for a tech start-up is never easy, but it's even harder for a region so rife with brain power and technology but with only a handful of venture capital firms with limited cash.

There are deep-pocketed venture capitalists in hot tech regions such as Boston and Silicon Valley, but local techies say those players have so much research flowing in their own back yards that it is hard to convince them that investing in Pittsburgh, an airplane ride away, is worth the time and money.

This isn't PA Early Stage's first dip into the Pittsburgh market. In the '90s, it invested in Storm LLC, a software firm that was later purchased by the RedLeaf Group, an Internet operating and investment firm with tentacles in several local dot.coms, many of which succumbed to the tech bust.

Storm ultimately was purchased and left the region, and by late 2003, when the storm clouds began to lift on the entire dot.com and tech arena, PA Early Stage was ready to have another go at the Pittsburgh market.

"It takes time to do really good deals," said Schmitt, addressing impatience in the local tech community over the nearly year-long wait between the time the venture capital firm received the $15 million from the Greenhouse and the time it made its first local investment.

But since he came to PA Early Stage a year ago June and set up shop in Pittsburgh, Zhu said he's had no trouble finding fresh new technologies worth selling to the marketplace.

"It was a big step for us to say we'll have an additional partner and plop him in Pittsburgh," Schmitt said. "We wouldn't work as effectively if we didn't have a guy on the ground here."

It took six months for Schmitt to entice Zhu to Pittsburgh, convincing him to leave his job developing medical devices to treat heart failure at the Minneapolis office of Guidant Corp.

It didn't matter that Zhu, a native of China who has a Ph.D. in biomedical instrumentation and an MBA, wasn't a venture capitalist. His expertise in medical devices and experience developing and bringing biotech-related technologies to market was precisely what the firm needed for its local efforts.

The firm's first investment this year was in medical devices, with an investment in March in Marshall-based home-based dialysis equipment maker Renal Solutions. PA Early Stage joined with local venture firms Birchmere Ventures and Draper Triangle Ventures to fuel the company with $16.5 million.

In May, Taylor landed an undisclosed investment in Cellumen, and this summer, Zhu and Schmitt went public with their investments in Azidex and Downtown-based BPL Global, the latter a company that falls outside the biotech arena, specializing in broadband service over power lines. Last year, it invested in another non-biotech firm, Haley Enterprises, a software firm in Sewickley.

"Now we feel good about our pipeline of deals in Pittsburgh," said Schmitt. "It's all about being able to recognize what's good and having the contacts around the world to help evaluate the technology."

Schmitt, who, joined PA Early Stage right after its inception in 1999 says his Rolodex is one of his best assets.

"There's a lot here," said Schmitt.