As Canada’s venture capitalists gathered in Atlantic Canada last week, one eastern province garnered more attention than the others: Newfoundland and Labrador.

The country’s most easterly province has been going through a tech boom the likes of which has never been seen in the region. It has produced a multi-billion-dollar exit in Verafin, a publicly listed oceantech company in Kraken Robotics with a billion-dollar-plus valuation, and two AI companies (CoLab AI and Spellbook) that raised more than $50 million each last year.

Can the NL innovation community keep it going? Various jurisdictions in the past have had a period of innovation success only to see it slip away. So we posed this question to some of the delegates from The Rock who attended last week’s Invest Canada 2026 conference: How can Newfoundland and Labrador perpetuate its success with innovation-driven companies?

“Get organized and seize the opportunities when you see them, especially in the defence space,” said Seamus O’Regan, the former journalist and federal cabinet minister, who is now a Senior Business Advisor with Stewart McKelvey and the Chair of St. John’s-based Co. Innovation Centre.

In particular, he said the province has to remember its wealth in mineral resources and how important such resources are in the modern economy and in the development of defence industries.

Kolin Kennedy, a partner with McInnes Cooper in St. John’s, said the city’s tech community must strive to maintain the culture that’s developed in the past few years, including the entrepreneurship programs at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

There’s a spirit of mutual support in St. John’s, he said, that he witnessed on a recent Saturday when he stopped by a coffee shop and found CoLab CEO Adam Keating mentoring a younger founder. That sort of supportive network has to be maintained, said Kennedy.

Cathy Bennett, a Founding Partner at Sandpiper Ventures, agreed that culture is key. She said the Co. Innovation Centre is playing a central role in ensuring that each generation of entrepreneurs helps the next. The Co. Innovation Centre, which Bennett is on the board of, is providing workspace for deep-tech companies and creating that ethos of experienced founders supporting those who are new to the industry.

“We are very used in Newfoundland and Labrador, within our resource extraction industries, to seeing a boom and a bust,” she said. “So the real trick is just to keep things going.”

The Newfoundland tech community is not immune to the problems that hound every startup community. Earlier this month, Deanne McCarthy, Founder and CEO of one of the more promising startups in the province, SwiftSure Innovation, announced that the company was closing down after it was unable to raise a Series A round of funding. McCarthy has since announced that she has accepted a position at Spellbook.

And yet, there are reasons to be optimistic about the island’s prospects, mainly because of access to capital. Newfoundland’s community of investors has been recapitalized twice in the past five years – first in 2021 when Verafin was sold to Nasdaq for US$2.75 million, and more recently when Pelorus Venture Capital returned $21 million to investors in its first Venture NL fund. Pelorus is now on the cusp of closing its third fund, which is said be worth about $50 million.

Spellbook has strengthened its management team by adding Jean-Michel Lemieux, the former CTO of Shopify. The Globe and Mail reported on the hire on the first day of Invest Canada, bringing more attention to the Newfoundland tech community.

“The connective tissue is getting stronger and stronger,” said Bennett. “We have to make sure the pipeline is robust and that is the job of the ecosystem. . . . The bulbs are starting to burst with the seeds that have been planted in the past few years.”