Smart investors are looking to international markets for both investing and expanding businesses. Now gaining some interest in the startup world. While VC’s are on track to set a five year record on investing internationally, several notable Silicon Valley VC’s have announced expanded investment overseas. Recently, Ernst & Young reports that two­ thirds of global tech executives plan to allocate the majority of their acquisition capital to emerging markets in 2015.

Leading active investors such as 500 Startups and Accel Partners recently topped CB Insight’s list of VC’s investing globally and many others are copying their moves.

Now a new type of firm called ventureLab Growth Partners (goventurelab.com) is rolling out a ‘startup studio’ approach – a holistic approach to build early ­stage companies that specifically focuses on commercialization across different geographic markets. As Founding Partner Mike Prasad puts it, “Emerging markets offer the greatest opportunity for growth in the shortest period of time.”

With teams in both Los Angeles and San Francisco, ventureLab hopes to capitalize on this trend by investing in small defined “clusters” of startups and being hands­-on, day­-to-­day with each individual startup. Each cluster centers around an opportunity area that ventureLab has identified as valuable in different geographic markets where they have strong business relationships. They work to set up revenue­-generating commercial partnerships for each prospective startup early in the company’s lifecycle. Being hands-­on means they provide each startup investment with foundational resources that compliment each founding team. This includes the basics such as legal, financial, and operations, and extends into engineering, UI/UX, customer acquisition, and revenue development.

“While early­-stage startup founders are focused on building their product, we focus on building their business.” said Mike Prasad, “This revenue­ first approach rapidly accelerates growth for the startup while minimizing risk for investors.”

This approach seemingly goes against the popular “shotgun method” used by many VC’s, and definitely shatters the disturbingly popular myth that startups can live off of VC money for long periods of time without profitability.

It will be interesting to see the results of the emerging pattern of investment across markets. As far as incubation models go, putting equal value in product, engineering, business fundamentals and revenue opportunities should help temper risk in a traditionally high-risk investment scenario.

As technology continues to drive down startups’ costs and physical requirements, there may be a corresponding rise in the importance of relationships and access to more potential markets as competition increases.

No matter what, a change to startup fundamentals may be due and ventureLab is might just have the right angle.  As I say on @theCUBE “Go Global or Go Home”.