RtTech Software of Moncton and 17-year-old Alex Gillis, the CEO of Halifax-based Bitness.io, have won national 2015 Startup Canada Awards.

The Ottawa-based organization announced Tuesday that RtTech, an Industrial Internet of Things company, had won in the Innovation category, while Gillis had captured the top award as a Young Entrepreneur.

Atlantic Canadians have captured two of the nine categories in this year’s awards. Startup Canada has drawn the national awards from a group of regional winners, who were honoured at ceremonies across the country. The national winners will be presented their awards at a reception at the CN Tower in Toronto on Tuesday evening.

Read Our Coverage of the Atlantic Canadian Awards

The award to Gillis is especially noteworthy given his age. He began dabbling in entrepreneurship as a 15 year old and last year launched Bitness, which helps retailers understand the traffic in their establishment.

”As a high school student, I used to hate missing school,” he told Startup Canada. “This was true until I read a quote by Mark Twain, ‘I’ve never let my school interfere with my education’. This quote made me look at the bigger picture and realize the true intangibles and success that I am building supplementary to my schooling. Despite this, it’s all about finding a balance.”

Started with co-founder Aristides Milios, Bitness uses devices called beacons to track where, when and how long customers are in a store. This allows the store owner to understand the store’s peak hours, allowing for better staffing decisions. Bitness also times how long a customer is at a certain place, such as the cash register, suggesting a sale has taken place. Store owners can place a beacon outside the store to see the times and locations of peak traffic.

RtTech is certainly further along the entrepreneurial path. The company, headed by CEO Pablo Asiron, this year has won the BCD Award for Innovation and been named to the Canadian Innovation Exchange Top 20.

RtTech’s main products are RtEMIS, which can pinpoint when and where part of a system is using excess energy, and RtDUET, which allows companies to examine specific processes to find the cause of downtime and poor utilization issues. The company has released a cloud-based product that will allow smaller manufacturers to access its technology.

The other winners of the Startup Canada Awards are:

The Adam Chowaniec Lifetime Achievement Award -- The Rt. Hon. Paul Martin, founder of the Martin Aboriginal Education Initiative (MAEI) and the Capital for Aboriginal Prosperity and Entrepreneurship (CAPE) Fund;

Entrepreneur of the Year Award -- Natalie Dakers, the President and CEO of Accel-Rx of Vancouver, a health sciences accelerator;

Entrepreneur Promotion Award -- Iain Klugman, CEO of Communitech, an accelerator complex based in Kitchener;

Entrepreneurship Support -- Victory Square Labs, a Vancouver-based venture builder that supports start-ups in the web, mobile, gaming and film spaces;

Award for International Trade -- Medicine Hat-based Weddingstar, a designer, manufacturer, distributor and e-commerce seller of wedding related products;

Senior Entrepreneur Award -- Tom Fath, the President of The Fath Group of Edmonton, which has six operating companies under its umbrella, including O’Hanlon Paving.

Award for Sustainable Development -- Entomo Farms of Campbellford, Ont., a pioneer in the production and processing of insect and insect powder for human consumption.