When Trevor MacAusland participates in the prestigious Grow conference in Vancouver this month, it will provide a break from the task of building PropelICT into an organization whose influence spreads well beyond New Brunswick.

The Executive Director of PropelICT is the only Atlantic Canadian speaking at the event and will participate in a panel session on accelerators. It’s something he’s well versed in given the roaring success of the first cohort of launch36, the accelerator he launched early this year.  In fact, it was so successful that the program is expanding into other provinces, as MacAusland explained when I caught up with him at a Halifax coffee house last week.

“The businesses have brought us here,” said MacAusland, explaining that demand from startups in Nova Scotia to enter the accelerator have lured the group outside of New Brunswick. “While we’re geographically agnostic, we didn’t think we’d be growing this fast so early in our project.”

Propel ICT’s mission is to promote entrepreneurship in digital technology, and it began Launch36 as a five-month accelerator program to prepare tech companies for investment and the marketplace. MacAusland originally aimed to stage two cohorts a year, with six companies in each, so a total of 36 companies would go through the program in three years.

But the companies that showed up for Cohort 1 were so strong they took on 11, including two from Halifax, so Launch36 has grown into a regional accelerator. Ten of the companies presented their products and asked for investment at Demo Day before a crowd that included investors from Atlantic Canada and elsewhere. (One company decided it was not yet ready for the Demo.)

Eventually, MacAusland said, he hopes the organization will be known as the “East Coast accelerator”, with its work extending into New England and Central Canada.

Now he is planning for the second cohort, and it will be radically different from the first. He and his board have decided there will only be about six companies in this cohort so each can get the attention it deserves.

The program will still be based in New Brunswick, but he understands there will be more work to do in Halifax. The Nova Scotia capital is key for the organization right now because it has had so many applications from Halifax-based startups, and the turf is rich in mentors for the company.

MacAusland and PropelICT Chairman David Baxter have both been in the city, reaching out to various organizations, and are already developing some budding partnerships. Propel will host a reception after DemoCamp Halifax on Sept. 23, with the aim of meeting both mentors and entrepreneurs who may participate in the coming accelerator cohort.

They’ve also touched base with Dalhousie entrepreneurship professors Mary Kilfoil and Ed Leach, whose “Starting Lean” course will teach sales-based business development to students and could dovetail brilliantly with the Launch36 activities. MacAusland is also pondering how his group could work with Dalhousie on its Startup Weekend, in which teams of entrepreneurs spend a full weekend in November starting a business.