But that bubble burst.

In 2007, ChannelAdvisor is the type of company that makes venture capitalists take notice.

The Morrisville business, which makes software to help retailers sell their products on the Web, has 3,900 customers, revenue that's on track to grow 67 percent this year and a steady stream of products in development.

The company will announce today that it also has raised $30 million in venture capital to help expand its software portfolio, its geographic footprint and its lead in the e-commerce market.

Investors are looking for more mature companies with solid financial fundamentals and a proven track record, and they're finding them in the Triangle -- so much so that ChannelAdvisor and other local companies are putting together the area's best fundraising year since the heady days of 1999.

Triangle businesses raised $224.8 million in venture capital in the first quarter, PricewaterhouseCoopers reported last week, their strongest showing since the fourth quarter of 1999, when North Carolina companies raised $259 million.

"The dollars are going into real companies with real revenues," said ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo. "It's not nearly as frothy right now."

During the late-1990s boom, it was easy for young companies to raise capital as investors placed their bets on what could grow into the next big public offering. AuctionRover.com, which became ChannelAdvisor, raised $3 million in 1999 with barely a business plan, Wingo said. He remembers an Internet trade show where venture capitalists were handing out checks at companies' booths.

With so much money focused on early-stage firms, it was harder for older companies to raise the money they needed to keep growing, he said.

Today, it's the opposite. Investors are interested in well-run companies with market traction, and even early-stage companies seem to need a product on the market, $2 million to $3 million in revenue and 100 customers to attract their first round of venture capital, Wingo said.

"I feel for those guys," he said. "That's a high bar, and it's hard to bootstrap yourself there."

The dot-com crash in 2000 taught venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to be prudent, spend money wisely and not get caught up in hype, said Jeff Clark, managing partner with The Aurora Funds in Durham. Today, there's an emphasis on building teams and real products and going after large markets, he said.

"The idea is to build sustainable products and sustainable companies," Clark said.

He doesn't think the Triangle is back to 1999 boom times yet. Still, it's a good environment for venture capital investments, Clark said.

"We're in a period of time where companies are doing well, knocking down their milestones and creating value," he said. "Capital will follow that."

And though fundraising might be tougher for young companies than it was eight years ago, it's no more difficult than before the late 1990s, said Patrick Kerins, managing partner at New Enterprise Associates, a new investor in ChannelAdvisor. In short, things have gotten back to normal, he said.

Meanwhile, as public investors look more critically at the fundamentals, companies are taking longer to go public and creating great late-stage opportunities for venture capitalists, Kerins said.

In the late 1990s, a market-leading company such as ChannelAdvisor would already be publicly traded, Kerins said.

"It's likely these investments in total will turn out better than those in total," he said. "We'll see. I'm hopeful."

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