It’s been a busy few months for the Central Valley Angels — a group of accredited local investors whose $1 million-plus fund seeks investment opportunities with high-growth, early-stage companies in the region.

(Disclosure: Business Journal Publisher Gordon M. Webster is an investor with Central Valley Angels.)

Back in May, the Central Valley Angels made an undisclosed investment in Flume, Inc., which provides hardware and data collection software to give homeowners real time information about their water use. Based in San Luis Obispo, Flume CEO Eric Adler said the group’s investment would allow it to continue its market testing and prototyping.

And then this week, Central Valley Angels made another undisclosed investment in Pacific Grove-based Linqto, Inc., which is a branding platform that allows financial institutions to provide high-demand apps to customers at a deep discount. Linqto uses a patent-pending artificial intelligence platform to individually brand these apps and deploy them to the Apple and Google stores.

According to Linqto CEO Bill Sarris, the investment will further move the company into a lucrative niche that allows community banks and credit unions an edge in competing against the big banks.

For quite a while, Fresno was virtually barren of venture capital opportunities at all stages. But as the region’s tech scene expands, more people are seeing the value in investing in promising new ventures. That’s the sort of economic development that, along with the Amazons and Ultas of the world, Fresno and the Central Valley desperately needs more of.

For more information about the Central Valley Angels, visit centralvalleyangels.com.