Tanya Collier MacDonald in many ways exemplifies what was happening in the Atlantic Canadian startup community in 2015.

She entered (and did well in) a competition. She worked with an accelerator outside the region. And she gained traction with her product. But above all, she launched a tech company. That’s worth noting because strong company formation was one of the hallmarks of the East Coast startup community in 2015.

Collier MacDonald is the Founder and CEO of Orenda Software Solutions, the one-year-old Sydney startup that won the Cape Breton region in Nova Scotia’s I-3 competition, and is now working with the IBM Innovation Centre in Toronto.

“Orenda is developing its platform and heading into the commercialization phase,” said Collier MacDonald of the company, which produces social media analysis technology that analyzes in real-time the overall reputation of an organization, usually a medium to large enterprise. “And we’ve formed one partnership with a national company.”

Orenda was part of a wave of company launches across Atlantic Canada in 2015.  In our preliminary tally, Entrevestor has counted a total of 355 startups in Atlantic Canada as of Dec. 31 2015 – an increase of 24 percent over a year earlier. The big reason for the increase is that we’ve counted 93 companies that formed last year, with the heaviest concentration in the IT sector.

In compiling the Entrevestor Databank for 2015, we really strove to make sure we cast a wide net (with a fine mesh) over the region to capture as many startups as possible. We refused to compromise on our definition of a startup: each has to be a locally owned company that is developing a product for the global market from proprietary technology. It can’t be a service company. At least one founder has to be in Atlantic Canada.

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We’re now in the process of surveying these companies, and next quarter we’ll give more data on such areas as revenue, funding and employment. For now, we’re presenting our initial findings on the composition of the startup community, and the big news of 2015 was company formation.

“This isn’t surprising, if you look at what the universities are doing, if you look at what Propel is doing, and what’s happening in other programs,” said Dhirendra Shukla, the Dr. J. Herbert Smith ACOA Chair in the Engineering faculty at University of New Brunswick. “If you talk to investors, they say the capital these days is restricted, but they’re really excited about the deal flow.”

Calculating company formation is always tricky. Consider this: In the autumn of 2014, the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation received 62 entries for its Breakthru competition, which targets the hottest new startups in the province. A year later, Innovacorp in Nova Scotia received 188 applications for its I-3 Technology Startup Competition. And the regional accelerator Propel ICT took 33 companies through its 2015 cohort, and then received 162 applications for its first cohort of 2016.

So how do we end up with only 93 new startups in 2015?

The answer is that there is high attrition in startup teams. Within the selection process, these organizations weed out people who are thinking about starting a business, but decide against it for various reasons. And as the accepted teams go through the programs, several drop by the wayside. Last year there was considerable attrition within the Propel Launch program.

So our 93 startups are those that were “active” as of Dec. 31 – which means the teams are working diligently on moving their companies forward. They include some – but not all -- of the regional finalists from the I-3 event. They also include all of the first 2016 Propel cohort, because those teams were all active enough to pass the Propel selection camp early in the year.

Our list of companies launched in 2015 ranges from teams working on an idea part-time to those in accelerators to those incubating at universities to a company like Saint John-based Gemba Software Solutions, which launched with a $1.5 million investment in September. Gemba was spun out of Saint John-based Innovatia.  The new company’s ProcedureFlow software provides visual process maps that offer new employees and others the ability to quickly navigate their way through the company’s operations. At its launch, it received $1.5 million in funding from NBIF and Innovatia.

“The money is helping us to actually develop the market,” said Gemba's CEO Daniella Degrace. “We are using the money to help us expand the sales capability and to continue to develop our product.”

Most of the 93 rookie startups – including Orenda and Gemba – are in the IT space. A full 73 new tech startups entered the databank -- or 78 percent of the total startups founded in 2015. That’s an even larger weighting in IT than you’d expect, as IT accounts for just two-thirds of the broader Atlantic Canadian startup community.

The creation of 93 new startups marks a dramatic increase over the two previous years, when we counted about 60 companies launching each year. We also witnessed a decrease in companies that failed – there were 33 of them in 2015, about half the number a year earlier. (There was also a handful of companies that exited, left the region or became service companies, thus leaving our databank.)

There are a few interesting notes about our tally on new companies throughout the region. There is stronger company formation in both Newfoundland and Labrador (12 new companies) and Prince Edward Island (seven new companies) than we witnessed previously.

And the buzzing startup community in Cape Breton continued to launch new companies without losing many to attrition. Even though a high proportion of its companies are pre-revenue and have not received equity investments, there have been relatively few teams that left the arena. Some 10 new companies have formed, all in IT.

Meanwhile, the IT sector is undergoing slower growth in Halifax.

With 128 in total, Halifax is home to more than one-third of the total startups in the region, and it accounted for about one-third of the startups that launched in 2015. But the 18 new IT companies that sprouted up in Halifax last year amounted to just 54 percent of the new companies in the city.  That confirms the impression held by several observers that there has been a deceleration in the formation of tech startups recently in Halifax.

On the other hand there were 10 new life science companies formed in Halifax. They were companies like Covina BioMedical, founded by Dalhousie University researchers Caitlin Pierlot and Brett Dickey. The company (formerly known as Biofix) won the 2015 BioInnovation Challenge, which searches for the top new life sciences company in the region.

Covina is developing a new bone cement to be used in the treatment of orthopedic patients. The new product is a non-toxic glass ionomer cement that would simplify the procedure for treating broken bones in such patients.

The formation of new companies is good news for the startup community. It brings new life to the grouping of startups in the region and shows that Atlantic Canada has the intellectual capacity to develop new marketable ideas. But it also strains capacity. One question that UNB’s Shukla asks is: how will all these new companies be funded in the future?

“Unless we see some exits, we might not see fresh money coming in,” he said. “The next few years will have to result in something more exciting in terms of exits. If not, [the result will be] pressure for companies to go looking for capital elsewhere.”