Porpoise: Doing Well and Doing Good

During the holiday season, it’s fitting to celebrate Porpoise – a Moncton startup that helps companies work with their employees to discover and promote how they are giving back together.

The startup has gone through a couple of pivots and permutations to arrive at its current form, but always kept the goal of helping people to do good in their communities. In its current form, Porpoise probes

Continue Reading

Appili Raises $2.2M in Equity Funding

Halifax-based Appili Therapeutics Inc., whose ultimate goal is to produce a drug that treats superbugs, has closed a $2.15-million equity funding round to help fund clinical trials for its first product.

The company said in a press release the funding came from existing and new investors, including a contribution from Innovacorp, which participated in its last funding round. The company in 2015

Continue Reading

Pond’s Two-Pronged Growth Strategy

I have spent a lifetime pursuing business growth in the region. It is often an elusive target in all sectors of our economy.

In researching economic development plans in other parts of the world, I was stuck by the sheer number of them and perhaps more importantly the fact that cities or regions that are at the very top of the performance measures are engaging their communities to do better.

Continue Reading

Trenn Plots Future of MasterControl

A true pioneer of the computer era has developed a product in Fredericton that simplifies media production and is now preparing to use it to help manufacturers and companies demo their products.

Dhomas Trenn is the head of OneSimpler, a Fredericton company that is marketing MasterControl — a single platform that lets the user control a range of devices on a single tablet or panel, even if the

Continue Reading

Probing Founders’ Mental Health Issues

A study into how entrepreneurship affects mental health has revealed high rates of anxiety and depression, partly because of entrepreneurs’ tendency to invest too much of their own identities in the success of their companies.

The Mindset Project is the work of Halifax-based Michael DeVenney, a chartered financial analyst, entrepreneur and consultant, and a long-time sufferer of depression.

Continue Reading

The Focus for 2017: Big Companies

As we into toward 2017, I think there is one thing the Atlantic Canadian startup community needs to focus on in the New Year to maintain the momentum that’s been building.

It should focus on bigness.

There are now big and growing venture-capital-backed companies in the region, and there will be more of them a year from now. The expansion of large startups has far greater economic impact than

Continue Reading

Developing Halifax’s Innovation District

At Volta Labs we believe that Atlantic Canada has performed above the Canadian average when it comes to technology-driven companies finding success. However, the success of technology companies in the region has not yet inspired a broader sense that success in technology-driven business happens here. There is now an opportunity to change that perception of Atlantic Canada and lead the development

Continue Reading

SMU Launching Student VC Fund

St. Mary’s University is adding a new dimension to the student entrepreneurship craze by having a group of students oversee their own venture capital fund.

The university’s Sobey School of Business is in the process of launching Venture Grade, which will be an investment fund to invest alongside existing investment vehicles. As of last weekend, the students had raised $47,000 aimed to end up

Continue Reading

Swan in New Venture with Charged

As if running his own lab at Dalhousie University doesn’t keep him busy enough, Lukas Swan is now working on his second business.

Swan and Chris White, a former researcher at his laboratory, are in the early stages of Charged Engineering Inc., which has developed patented technology that has improved the efficiency of lead-acid battery manufacturers.

The company has signed a contract with one

Continue Reading