Atlantic Innovation Week kicked off last night with a range presentations by entrepreneurs, and continues today with MentorCamp Halifax.
DemoCamp was an open forum for entrepreneurs to demonstrate their products to the community. There were no pitches, no powerpoints. The developers had to stand before their peers and competitors (and potential funders) and demo their product – a nerve-wracking experience because you pray the thing works.
The highlights included Darren Piercey of CyberPsyc Technologies showing to everyone the anxiety his product addresses by drowning the hall with the sound of a dentist drill. And Sandy Walsh of SafeCell showed the effectiveness of his temporary phone number service by having cell phone users in one half of the room take temporary numbers and receive calls from people ion the other half.
MentorCamp today is an invitation-only meeting place for nine young companies and 37 mentors from all over the world. Invest Atlantic is the region’s premier conference for entrepreneurs and investors, and BioPort is the leading forum of the life sciences industry.
For these four events together, we’ve got 32 different companies presenting their wares and/or pitching for investment, broken down as: 25 tech, five biotech and two cleantech; and 24 Nova Scotian, four New Brunswick and one each from Newfoundland and Labrador, P.E.I., Quebec and South Africa. They range from lone app developers to an established firm like NewPace, which has 35 employees. Only one is more than four years old.
So far, I’ve interviewed 25 of these companies and just these companies are now employing123 people in Atlantic Canada. Some of this is part-time employment but most is full time. Lately, the employment numbers have been growing noticeably in the small group of companies represented from New Brunswick. I estimate they’ve raised just under $2 million in equity financing from angels or venture capital firms.
Between them, the 25 companies in the next two years intend to seek equity investment of up to $24 million, and that leads me to one of the things that makes Innovation Week valuable.
As well as these pitches-slash-presentations by predominantly younger companies, Innovation Week will feature appearances by entrepreneurial or investment veterans with capital, experience and wisdom. It’s a given they’ll impart their wisdom to the younger confreres. It’s hoped they impart some capital as well.
The mentors run the gamut from fund managers (Damien Steel of OMERS Venture Capital in Toronto and Dominique Bélanger of BDC Venture Capital in Montreal) to tech gurus like Jeff Amerine of the University of Arkansas. It includes such regional titans as Gerry Pond of East Valley Ventures to John Risley, chairman of Clearwater Fine Foods.
By staging the four events so close together, the organizers have been able to enrich the talent pool of each function, because the mentors are able to participate in more than one. It also means the mentors/funders will have a bit more time to meet with companies (including some that are not pitching in the official programs), discuss their prospects, maybe propose an investment. The Tuesday between MentorCamp and Invest Atlantic looks to be prime mating season.
The vast array of talent is rare in an economy the size of Atlantic Canada. Frank Lessard, the
“We’re going to treat everyone with the attitude that everyone is a mentor,” said Lessard, whose company’s software helps people share internet links. “We may not ever see them again, but we still want to have a relationship with them.”
