To assess the superb quality of the companies on display in Halifax this week, we should start with Charlottetown drug discovery company Neurodyn, which captured the best growth stage company at the Atlantic Venture Forum.

It’s difficult to highlight just this company.  You could choose DeCell Technologies of Halifax, which won the award for the best early-stage company.  Or any of the five companies that pitched Monday night at the Launch36 DemoDay. Or the other 24 startups that presented at the AVF. You could even focus on topLog of Halifax, which missed these events but was at metabridge 2014 in Kelowna, B.C. as one of the Top 15 startups in Canada.

Suffice it to say the quality of these young companies was exceptional. It can be seen in the comments from visiting venture capital fund managers, who validated the feeling in Atlantic Canada that our startups can compete anywhere.

“At Launch36 last night, the teams were incredible,” Jeff Grammer, a Boston-based Partner with Rho Canada Ventures, said Tuesday. “They were equal to or better than the teams we see at accelerators across Canada. The energy and camaraderie were incredible.”

Let’s focus on Neurodyn, which specializes in treating diseases of the brain such as Parkinson’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease. Last year, it bought a drug candidate called Memogain, an updated compound that had already been developed and commercialized in Germany. Neurodyn bought the drug because it displayed stronger treatment powers than existing drugs for Alzheimer’s, with none of the awful side effects such as diarrhea.

Neurodyn Executive Director Bob Cervelli said the company decided to test the drug not on old people with dementia problems, but on young, healthy people. They gave some college students a battery of cognition tests, gave them Memogain (some received a placebo) and then had them take more tests. The cognitive powers of those who’d taken Memogain increased dramatically.

“We saw not side effects – we expected that,” said Cervelli. “But we noticed improved memory performance, and this is in healthy adults.”

He added the drug could have an accelerated regulatory process for two reasons: first, there has not been a new Alzheimer’s medication in 11 years so the Food and Drug Administration has lowered the bar somewhat for such drugs; and second, Memogain is a derivative of a previously approved drug and can build on previous tests.

The company, which is also developing other drugs, is now looking for $10 million in equity funding to finance the development of Memogain.

Neurodyn is a graphic illustration of the great stories being told by Atlantic Canadian startups, and I don’t have the space here to tell the others.  But the written AVF program shows how a broad range of our startups are performing, because it reveals the revenue data for 22 of the 26 startups that presented at the forum.

In 2013, these companies reported total revenue of $4.0 million. Ours is a young startup community and only seven of these companies had sales of more than $20,000 last year.

We’re now half-way through 2014 and these companies have a pretty good idea of their sales for this year. They estimate a total of $13.8 million – an increase of almost 250 percent. Eight of the companies are expecting to book revenue of $1 million or more.

As for their forecasts for 2014, you would expect startup founders to be optimistic about their prospects. So we could take this with a sizeable grain of salt. But for what it’s worth, these 22 companies are forecasting $56.9 million in revenue in 2015 – a gain of 13 times over 2013.

If these projections miss the mark by 50 percent, these companies will still report better than 600 percent revenue growth over two years. It speaks to the quality – not to mention the breadth of markets – on display this week.