Joel Weinshank told potential investors Wednesday that his software company employs the same formula that has propelled the mercurial growth of sportswear merchandiser Under Armour Inc. of Baltimore.

Weinshank, a marketer with BoxTone Corp. of Columbia, and representatives of about 40 other companies were at the Mid-Atlantic Venture Association’s 2007 Capital Connection Fair in Baltimore, trying to pry venture capital from some of the 400-plus investors in attendance.

Kevin A. Plank, the founder and CEO of Under Armour, was an unlikely keynote speaker for the fair, which highlighted mostly information technology companies.

But Weinshank connected with Plank’s rah-rah message while listening intently through a barrage of Under Armour video promotions featuring fit athletes, from high school to the professional ranks, wearing Under Armour sports apparel. As a University of Maryland football player, Plank ‘‘cursed” cotton jerseys that got too heavy, soaking up ‘‘bodily fluids,” as President Bush says in one of Plank’s videos. Plank created a lighter, synthetic athletic shirt that wicks away moisture.

With his ‘‘first-in-market” product, Plank’s company grew in just 10 years from a cottage industry in his grandmother’s Washington, D.C., row house to an industry leader with revenues of $430 million last year.

Last month, BoxTone unveiled its latest software product for BlackBerry management and monitoring, a first-in-market product that Weinshank compared to Plank’s jerseys.

Kevin J. Burns, managing principal with Lazard Technology Partners LLC, said BoxTone’s product is right in the bull’s eye of the hottest investing target for venture capitalists this spring: mobile device technology. ‘‘Mobile anything is hot right now.”

Also hot, Burns said, are on-demand software and IT security products. He said he does not agree with a prevailing perception that security is over-invested.

Weinshank and BoxTone CEO Alan Snyder asked venture capitalists and angel investors for $5 million to manage the company’s product distribution after growing from zero to 70 customers in 15 months. Those 70 customers have a total of 160,000 Blackberry users under BoxTone Software Management, he said. BoxTone’s revenues have increased from $600,000 in 2005 to $2 million in the past 12 months, with $3.5 million projected for 2007 and $8 million projected for 2008.

‘The technology neededto catch up’

Burns said that mobile telecommunications devices such as BlackBerry reached a performance bottleneck.

‘‘Wireless was a big notion seven or eight years ago, but the technology needed to catch up,” Burns said. ‘‘Now it is real because of the new software and the maturing of the Internet.”

Weinshank, BoxTone’s marketing director, said the company is growing rapidly by hitting a technology that’s now ready.

‘‘Any technology wave is initially, well, ‘this is nice to have ... I’ve never had this before. I am so excited to have it.’ But over time, what was a nice technology becomes a ‘this-has-to-work’ technology,” he said. ‘‘It becomes mission critical.”

BlackBerry and other personal digital assistants started out as slick tools to help executives be more productive outside of the office, he said. Over time, dependency on the devices led users to expect the same experience outside the office that they get at their desktop.

‘‘But it is extremely difficult to have a technology platform or infrastructure outside of the firewall, the security system beyond the reach of an IT organization,” Weinshank said.

The BlackBerry slump was an example of ‘‘The Dip,” a new book by business author Seth Godin, the luncheon speaker at the fair. Every new product or company starts out exciting and fun, then gets difficult and less fun and runs into a low point. He discussed ways to climb out of that trough.

Many companies at the fair are still in the exciting stage, however, hoping investors would help them avoid the dip.

Michael P. Binko, the new CEO of Kaulkin Information Systems, an on-demand software company in Bethesda, said telecommunications IT is strong again.

Kaulkin Information’s 2005 revenues of $77,000 grew to nearly $1.7 million in 2006.

‘‘The VCs went away for a while and did some triage,” Binko said. ‘‘And now they are back.”

Lazard’s Burns agreed.

‘‘On-demand software is now hot. You don’t install software any more; it all runs online,” Burns said. In today’s private equity market, ‘‘it is not all about building wealth into a company. It’s now more focused on products.”