Globetrotting investor Permjot Valia will host MentorCamp for half a dozen Nova Scotian tech startups on Oct. 11. He will accept applications until Friday Oct. 7 from young companies that want to learn about developing businesses from seasoned experts.

The idea behind the camp is to bring together six companies with about a dozen mentors for an intense session, to help them refine their operations and improve their prospects. They will even be taught how to make the most of mentoring sessions. Valia is accepting applications and will narrow the group of young companies down to six so the ratio of mentors to companies is two to one.

The camp, which is in Halifax, will include an address by Patrick Hankinson, the CEO of Compilr, who will share his experience in world class mentoring sessions in New York and London this year. The camp is being sponsored by Acoa, National Research Council, Innovacorp and Nova Scotia Business Inc.

Anyone interested should email Valia at pvalia@helpwithsales.co.uk, telling him in no more than five sentences about the business, what its biggest challenges are and why he or she wants to attend MentorCamp.

Though he lives in London, Valia has been a familiar face in entrepreneurial circles in the region for about three years and has invested in several Nova Scotia firms. He recently moderated the keynote address at Invest Atlantic, spoke at DemoCamp 2011 at Dalhousie University and coached the finalists in the BioInnovation Challenge at BioPort 2011.