Shortly after Richard Harris took over as managing general partner, Reston, Virginia-based SpaceVest Capital became RedShift Ventures.

The change came with April’s retirement of founding partner John Higginbotham. “Space-Vest was originally founded with the idea of commercializing space-related technology,” Mr. Harris explains.

The thinking was the space industry fostered plenty of technologies that could be readily commercialized. “That continues to be true,” he explains, “but just limiting ourselves to that area is too narrow.”

Strayed EarlyIn fact, the firm had already strayed out of space, investing in wireless biometrics, wide-area networks, thermoelectric components, even ultra-bright light-emitting diodes.

Since it began in 1999, the company typically invested in one satellite company per fund, but today, space investment accounts for less than half of RedShift’s $270 million in assets under management.

But despite the name change and RedShift’s widening portfolio, some things remain the same: it still has a penchant for commercializing technologies that got their R&D start with government, university, or nonprofit funding. “If you look at 16 of our last 31 deals, all of them are companies that leveraged external R&D investments,” Mr. Harris says. “We were doing this back in the late ’90s, but a lot of VCs have caught onto this.”

RedShift continues to seek out companies funded by, for instance, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—indeed any companies that continue to have government contracts or grants.