Sandpiper Ventures, Atlantic Canada's female-focused venture capital firm, has closed its flagship SVF fund, having raised over $20 million.

The SVF fund is the second-largest female-focused VC fund in Canada, Sandpiper said in a statement, after Toronto’s Stand Up Ventures, which previously raised $35 million.

Sandpiper invests mostly in seed-stage companies, and has backed such East Coast

The Halifax-based Canadian Blk Women in Excellence Society is launching a pitch competition for black female entrepreneurs with the help of a $52,920 grant from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency.

Founded in 2020, the Blk Women in Excellence Society engages in political advocacy, but also offers support and training programs for entrepreneurs, including its 16-week flagship startup

Recimply, which is developing “smart receipt” software, has won the $2,000 first prize at St. John’s-based startup hub Genesis’s Pitch & Pick competition — the culmination of its eight-week Evolution accelerator.

The company was founded by Tyler Pike, an economics student at Memorial University, and his boss at HSBC, Private Client Market Lead for the Atlantic Provinces Manoj Khandavelli. The

Halifax cybersecurity company NewAE Technology, which manufactures products to study "hardware hacking", has been acquired by Britain's lowRISC C.I.C., with the aim of accelerating growth. 

LowRISC, which was founded at the University of Cambridge in 2018, is a not-for-profit organization that encourages collaboration in open-source chip designs. It issued a press release announcing the

The Federation of African Canadian Economics, or FACE, recently celebrated the first anniversary of its founding, capping off a year in which it provided financial backing to businesses, including some on the East Coast. 

Montreal-based FACE offers training and networking events for black entrepreneurs, as well as running a loan program that has so-far given out about $19 million to black-owned

Saint John-based ProcedureFlow has raised $11.8 million in a funding round that includes its existing investors and some employees, as well as newcomers Sandpiper Ventures of Halifax and the Canadian Business Growth Fund.

ProcedureFlow raised the money on the back of 600 percent user growth over four years. In an interview, CEO Daniella DeGrace said the money will go towards product development,

Crown corporations Nova Scotia Business Inc. and Innovacorp are being amalgamated into a single agency called Invest Nova Scotia, as Tim Houston’s Progressive Conservative government looks to streamline operations, the province announced Tuesday.

Both legacy organizations offer programs that support startups. NSBI is the provincial economic development agency, whose services include the Export

BioNova Executive Director Scott Moffitt has resigned from the Nova Scotia life sciences industry group, with Director of Operations Kerri Manette stepping in as interim director.

Moffitt started at BioNova as managing director in 2013 and became executive director in 2018. Before that, he was the senior investment officer for bioscience at provincial economic development agency Innovation PEI.

Early-stage investors invested $29.4 million in Atlantic Canadian startups last year, according to a forthcoming report by the National Angel Capital Organization, or NACO, accounting for about 5 percent of angel funding nationally.

The 2022 Report on Angel Investing in Canada is slated for release in September and will show almost an order of magnitude increase in angel deals in the Atlantic

The Prince Edward Island-based Canadian Alliance for Skills and Training in Life Sciences, or CASTL has hired pharma industry veteran Paul-Xavier Etter as its director of technical training.

Etter’s recent experience includes working as a vice-president at Seattle-based vaccine company Inventprise, which manages intellectual property for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as serving