Three Harvard Business School alumni are standing around at the annual reunion, calculating the potential net worth in the room. People of all ages working for companies at all stages of development are walking around, informally trying to get help, advice, and funding,when it hits these three guys: there's no one currently on- or offline doing anything to get these grads together to do deals. "School alumni are a pretty chummy bunch, but there was no one harnessing the raw potential of those close relationships until we came along," says James Marcus, HBS '94, CEO of UniversityAngels.com.

When he and fellow alumni Rick Sasner and Charles Sanford left the reunion last June, they immediately began to form their idea of an online venture capital network that draws on collegial ties. More than a year later, there are 75 subsites, one for each school, where an alum or a current college student can post a business plan and graduates of the college and professional programs can take a look and decide whether to invest. The online fraternity includes Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Northwestern, and other top-ranked universities.

Money-seeking entrepreneurs post their business plans directly to UniversityAngels, where they're scrutinized for clarity and profit potential. In June, for instance, UA received 2,000 plans, but only accepted 100. Those that make the cut are posted in summary form on the alma mater's subsite. Alum investors, who must have either a certified net worth of at least $1 million or an annual income of at least $200,000, can review the entire plan, but must sign a nondisclosure agreement. After two weeks, a plan is opened up to perusal by any certified investor.

UA does not discriminate against business types (it dared to close a business-to-consumer deal this summer), saying it doesn't scrap yesterday's news, but it does emphasize good business plans. Investment bankers and VCs are hired to give constructive criticism, and UA helps members do rewrites in person, by e-mail, or by phone.

So far, UA has created good deal flow for its 2,500 investors (Mr. Sasner says Wharton School of Business ranks first in terms of activity). It has vetted roughly 3,000 business plans for listing and, from those, has closed five deals. One was Galileo Development Systems, an Atlanta-based applications service provider whose CEO, Rebecca Bass, is an HBS alumna. She pulled in a substantial amount of her $1.1 million in initial funding from fellow graduates, one of whom lives in Cody, Wyoming.

No UA deal has yet made the institutional rounds, but it is highly likely that some of its registered investors are institutional VCs looking to get in early on deals. Mr. Marcus doesn't want UA to act as a cherry-picking filter for institutional deals, yet he doesn't rule out closer collaboration in the future.