US venture capitalists have become so risk-averse that President-elect Clinton’s good intentions with regard to improving the tax climate for venture capital investment had better be transformed into deeds as a priority if many more promising US start-ups are not to go to the wall over the next couple of years, and having excellent technology has never been enough if funds are lacking. Latest company to run into the buffers is Acton, Massachusetts low-end massively parallel processor builder Wavetracer Inc. The company has had to halt active marketing of its Zephyr deskside machine after its investors declined to put up new cash for development of a follow-on system, Electronic News reports. The company says that its backers were worried at the number of majors preparing to muscle in on the massively parallel act, and believed the climate would become much tougher for small start-ups. The company is now putting together a new business plan that is expected to see it majoring on software development and systems integration rather than hardware. Most of the employees are thought to have been dismissed, but the firm would not say how many were left. It had sold 35 of its systems, based on a proprietary 1-bit processor, but failed to attract third party software developers to write for Zephyr as quickly as it hoped.
