OVERLAND PARK, Kan.

Venture-capital events like Invest Midwest  generally are billed as places for startup companies to raise money. And while the 30 companies featured here include some raw startups, they also include some companies that have been around for a few years.

Consider one of the eight St. Louis area representatives, DataServ.  Husband-and-wife entrepreneurs Jeff and Kathi Haller founded the company in 1994 and have funded it all these years with their own resources, internal cash flow and a bank loan. The company provides electronic document management services for medium-sized companies, allowing a small manufacturer, for example, to eliminate all the paperwork involved in paying its vendors. DataServ had revenue of $4 million last year, and was profitable; it projects revenue of $66.5 million this year.

Now, the company is looking for between $3.5 million and $5 million in venture capital financing. The money is needed, Jeff Haller says, to acquire  new technology and ramp up sales efforts. He says some VCs have already shown interest.

Another St. Louis company, Kereos, isn’t quite as old as DataServ, but it’s a familiar name to the venture capitalists here. Founded in 1999, the drug-development company has already raised more than $20 million from more than a dozen institutional investors. It’s now raising a $25 million “series C” round of financing to complete phase 2 trials on its imaging agent, which allows doctors to target chemotherapy more narrowly at a tumor.

Another veteran of the VC circuit is Global Velocity, a Clayton company that makes a network-security product. It was founded in 2000, has raised $5 million already and is seeking $10 million to finish developing its product and build a marketing team.

The forum’s organizers do still invite some entrepreneurs without all that experience, though.  Medros, a St. Louis drug-development company, was founded just last year. Co-presidents Thomas Baranski and Ross Cagan are both on the faculty of Washington University Medical School, and Baranski cheerfully admits that they’ll be replaced by experienced business people once the company is further along in its development. The company got $500,000 in startup funding from the BioGenerator in St. Louis, and is now seeking $2 million in venture capital. Its novel idea is using fruit flies to determine which chemical compounds show promise in fighting diabetes and cancer. (Who knew that fruit flies could contract those diseases? They can be made to show the symptoms, Baranski says.)

Other St. Louis entrepreneurs who made the trip west were Robert G. Mills of Envisioneering Medical Technologies, the folks from Edunn Biotechnology in Creve Coeur, Blake Ashby of GameRail and Michael C. Morey of NetLogic. Top managers at the latter two have a great tech provenance in St. Louis: They worked for notable 1990s success story  Brooks Fiber Properties.

I’ll write more about the conference in Friday’s column.

 UPDATE: I confused at least one reader with the GameRail/Brooks Fiber reference above. The executive with Brooks experience is Mark Senda, recently named CEO of GameRail. Ashby, the v.p. who spoke at  InvestMidwest, is a veteran of other local startups, including Primary Network.   By the way, GameRail was recently profiled on an industry Web site.