When Spectrum Equity managing director Chris Mitchell flew into St. John’s to meet Verafin  two-and-a-half years ago, both parties noticed something in the other that they liked.

Mitchell and his team from the Boston and Menlo Park, Calif., private equity firm found a company with a remarkably open and innovative culture. And the execs from Verafin, which develops software that battles money laundering and fraud, learned that Spectrum understood their market like few other investors.

The relationship grew and culminated Thursday when Spectrum announced a $60-million investment in

Rory Francis’s voice crackled with enthusiasm as he spoke by phone from Charlottetown. “We’re defying gravity here,” said the executive director of the Prince Edward Island BioAlliance as he revealed that, after a decade of careful nurturing, the life sciences sector on the Island is becoming an increasingly significant contributor to the economy.

The BioAlliance has recently completed its

One of the true champions of the startup community was recognized in Fredericton last night when Nicole LeBlanc, CFO of the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, received the Special Recognition award at the Knowledge Industry Recognition and Achievement Awards.

The Kira Awards each year bring together a broad range of people in the New Brunswick knowledge industries, and startups as you’d expect play a huge role in the celebration.

In selecting LeBlanc for the special recognition, the Kira judges chose someone who defies every cliché about accountants. Certainly LeBlanc uses her

Cisco on Thursday unveiled the Cisco Chair in Big Data at the University of New Brunswick. The following is a blog from Mike Anstey, Vice President, Sales for Business Markets at Cisco Canada, announcing the new post:

A few years ago we announced a $2 million endowment to establish a Cisco Chair in Advanced Learning Technologies at the University of New Brunswick (UNB). One of the first of our many announcements with Canadian universities over the last three years, our agreement with UNB has always reflected its commitment to being one of the country’s premier institutions for innovation

Verafin, the St. John’s company that develops software for battling money laundering and fraud, has attracted a $60 million buy-in from American private equity firm Spectrum Equity, which will finance the company’s next phase of growth.

Spectrum is buying a stake of just under 50 percent of the company. It may be the largest institutional investment ever in an Atlantic Canadian startup, exceeding Northwater Capital’s $30 million funding of Unique Solutions in the summer of 2011.

Based in Boston and Silicon Valley, Spectrum has raised $4.7 billion for investment in IT and media

If you can drive a golf ball 10 miles by Canada Day, Foursum and Puma have a hat — and a mobile phone app — for you.

Foursum is a Moncton startup that has developed an app for golfers. On Tuesday, it launched its partnership with Puma, the German sports equipment maker whose Cobra Golf unit, based in Carlsbad, Calif., makes one of the world’s most popular drivers.

In celebration of the partnership, Foursum and Puma have announced their Go Looooong challenge, which is seeing how many golfers can drive the ball a total of 10 miles from the tee (and log the distances into their Foursum

When McRock Capital hosts its annual Industrial Internet of Things symposium in Montreal in June, three of the presenting startups will be from Atlantic Canada.

As of March, the Toronto-based venture capital group had selected 10 startups to appear at its event – one of the world’s leading conferences for this new technological sector. And they included Eigen Innovations of Fredericton, RtTech Software of Moncton, and Streamlyne Technologies of Dartmouth.

The fact that 30 percent of the companies (as of press time) presenting at the event hail from this region demonstrates quite clearly

Last night, we gathered in Fredericton with almost 50 members of the startup community for the first Entrevestor dinner – an event that marks a beginning on many levels.

Most important, it was the beginning of two discussions that Entrevestor will perpetuate in the coming months. First, how can we build up a more effective mentorship network for the region’s entrepreneurs? And second, can we

Bluedrop Performance Learning, the St. John’s-based training software company, has been ramping up revenues at its new learning networks division, while reducing administrative costs following a major acquisition last year.

Now CEO Emad Rizkalla is hoping investors notice an improvement when the company releases its financial statements for the second fiscal quarter, which ended March 31.

“This will be the first quarter where you can look at the numbers and say this should be a public company,” said Rizkalla in an interview last week. He had a relaxed air, sitting in a meeting room in

When former Olympian Julia Rivard, the CEO of Halifax web design company Norex, wanted to help elite athletes raise money, she and her business partner Leah Skerry developed and launched Pursu.it, a crowdfunding site for athletes.

That was the autumn of 2012. Less than a year later, Norex incubated a second product, Hashpi.pe, which allows a unified display of hashtags across a range of social media channels. By this time, Pursu.it had become a not-for-profit, but there was a business opportunity to launch the crowdfunding engine as a separate business, which they did, calling it Swell.