In the next six months, the company is expected to target India's intellectual capital base in the sphere of IT, chemical and agricultural engineering and bio-technology.

Founded by Bharat Sastri and Joseph Tung, the company has so far received funding of $33.5 million from Redpoint Ventures, Brentwood Venture Capital, Accel Partners and the Intel 64 Fund. Its board of advisors include Vinod Dham, (ex-Intel/AMD) and Kirk Hanson, director, Stanford Sloan Program.HelloBrain.com has two revenue streams: one, it secures a commission of between 5 per cent to 25 per cent on successful transactions. And secondly, it gets subscriptions from intranet ASP customers.

The market for intellectual-capital based R&D is estimated at $40 billion in the US. Also, the US companies will look outside for $10 billion of intellectual capital in the next year.

According to Hello.com, the Silicon Valley will spend $80 billion on R&D in 2000 and around 20 per cent of this will be outsourced.

The exchange is already addressing a range of segments - VLSI design and services; computers and workstations; PDA & handheld engineering; networking and communications; application and scientific software; database applications and programming; e-commerce and web applications; industrial automation and control; documentation and technical writing; and industrial and mechanical design.

Since Hellobrain.com went live in December 1999, 140 projects have been posted on the exchange, which now has 6,000 contributors from 81 countries. The average project on the exchange is worth $12,000 and around 60 projects have been completed between December 1999 and May 2000.

HelloBrain's intellectual capital exchange is positioned as an Internet-based virtual marketplace for the exchange of technology solutions. It addresses two markets-buyer's market and seller's market. In buyer's market, companies requiring specific solutions (like a complex piece of software) post their requirements on the exchange in the form of a `problem description'; while in the seller's market, companies or individuals advertise either a pre-existing piece of intellectual property (like a flight simulator module for a Palm Pilot) or the willingness to provide a specific class of solution.

HelloBrain.com provides some unique features to the traders: knowledge-based Inference Engine for best match; collaboration tools with project work flow archival; web-based tools for evaluation, debug and verification of digitally transactable intellectual capital in a secure manner; and a technology to protect digitally transactable intellectual capital.