Charlottetown drug manufacturer BioVectra Inc. said Tuesday it had received a $3 million funding from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency’s Atlantic Innovation Fund, which will help to finance a $5 million expansion project for the company.

The announcement was one of three AIF funding announcements that Prime Minister Stephen Harper made Tuesday during a visit to P.E.I. The others were $2.9 million for Delivra Inc. to support its research on topical creams to relieve pain and $1.9 million for Island Abbey Foods Ltd., the maker of the Honibe line of products, to expand a line of

Build Ventures, the new Atlantic Canadian venture capital fund, launched Tuesday with a new name, new headquarters, new co-manager and $48.5 million in committed capital.

And soon it will have its first investment in its portfolio.

“We’re in the process of closing our first investment,” co-manager Patrick Keefe said in an interview, without naming the company nor its home province or sector.

Build Ventures – which until now has been known simply as the regional fund – is operating out of the new Volta co-working space on Spring Garden Road in Halifax, where it can offer mentorship to

Brad Touesnard exemplifies a segment of the startup world that is too rarely celebrated — the folks who work on their own or in small groups and soldier on from one venture to another until something works out.

Three weeks ago, the Cape Breton native, who now lives in Halifax, launched WP Migrate DB Pro, one of several ventures he has started. And he was pleased to report that the new product is already producing revenue.

 “It took four months to build it, to get it ready for the launch,” said Touesnard, who returned to Nova Scotia after a stint in Melbourne, Australia, three years ago.

There’s been so much going on in East-Coast-Startup-Land recently that it would be difficult to pick out just one good news story of the year. But the folks at BioNova believe they have one. It began with a seeming disaster.

Last week, BioNova, the life sciences organization for Nova Scotia, celebrated its achievements of the past year with a great reception that had the oxymoronic title “Good News & Blues.” The idea: to discuss the wonderful things that have happened in the past year while listening to—and I’m not making this up—blues music played by members of the life sciences

There’s nothing uncommon about a crowdfunding campaign to raise a few thousand dollars for a good cause, but RTV Group of Saint John is raising the bar with its charitable crowdfunding campaign.

The company, which is trying to battle drunk driving with an innovative data analytics system, has set a target of $230,000 for its Indiegogo campaign.

I can’t say for sure that it’s the biggest crowdfunding campaign in the region, but it’s the biggest I’ve heard of.

The fundraising campaign offers no equity in the company (online equity raises have yet to be approved by regulators) nor any

After attending business dinners in Halifax and Fredericton last week, it’s becoming apparent that two themes are developing in the evolution of the regional start-up community.

First, the tech crowd is going to become a pillar of the overall business community. This is already the case in New Brunswick, but it will quickly become a developing trend in Nova Scotia and, I believe, in Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.

Second, the start-up community is eager to join the debate on improving the business climate in the region, and the topic it wants to focus on is Primary

Resson Technologies has an idea for fighting crop disease that is so simple that it makes you wonder why no one thought of it before.

I first heard about the company at the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s Breakthru Boot Camp in January, when someone told me that co-founder Rishin Behl was using unmanned aerial craft. Behl and I spoke briefly, and he quickly corrected my vision of drones buzzing around the skies over New Brunswick.

Behl, a nuclear research engineer at the University of New Brunswick, is focused instead on lighter-than-air vessels that hover above a farm field and

A bit of news: Entrevestor Editor Carol Moreira will release her second Young Adult novel this summer, and we’re inviting all our readers to check out her crowdfunding campaign to pre-order the book and contribute to the project.

Membrane is a fantasy book for teenagers about a bullied teen called Tanya who suddenly finds she can travel to an alternate universe and encounter another version

Halifax-based Cloud A, which offers a flexible infrastructure-as-a-service solution over the cloud for Canadian customers, is looking for groups to participate in its public beta test.

Cloud A was formed last year by Brandon Kolybaba, the Founder of Sheepdog Inc., and Dynamic Hosting Founder Jacob Godin , who collaborated with Dalhousie University in developing the product. They identified a need for an OpenStack-based elastic platform in which all the data is stored in Canada to take advantage of the country’s privacy laws.

“We identified the need for a true elastic compute platform in

TitanFile Inc., the developer of a secure collaboration and document-sharing system, has unveiled new features for its product, including the TitanFile Secure Deposit Box, which makes it even easier and safer for clients to receive communications.

Based in Halifax and Kitchener, TitanFile began two years ago as a secure document-sharing platform and launched a new version last autumn that stressed ease of use and flexibility so it could operate seamlessly with other products on any device. The company is now enhancing that most recent version by adding new features.

The big advance is