CIA Venture Capital firm.

Was reading Elon Musk's bio about how he was starting SpaceX and In-Q-Tel 's name popped up.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cias-venture-capi…

In-Q-Tel differs from other venture-capital firms in an important way: It is a nonprofit. Instead of trying to make money, it seeks to spur the development of technology useful to the CIA mission of intelligence gathering.

In-Q-Tel uses public money, to which strict conflict-of-interest rules apply—at least $120 million a year, say people familiar with the firm’s financials.

Of about 325 investments In-Q-Tel says it has made since its founding, more than 100 weren’t announced, although the identities of some of those companies have leaked out. The absence of disclosure can be due to national-security concerns or simply because a startup company doesn’t want its financial ties to intelligence publicized, people familiar with the arrangements said.

Whats more interesting is that a large part of the companies the firm has invested in are connected to the trustees who are involved in the decision making process. Their background is 3/5 DoD/Intel and 2 VC.

I guess the obvious questions are:

1) is it preftigious? 2) what are the target unis 3) what are the target bank groups? special situations? 4) where does it rank etc

had a quick browse on linkedin and it seems to be a very top heavy VP/Partner firm. only 1-3/200 are associates with GS/MBB background. rest are vp/partner etc or tech staff.