With its customer list growing, Karma Gaming of Halifax has announced the $4 million first closing of its Series A round of venture capital in what is believed to be Atlantic Canada’s biggest VC financing from outside the region in almost two years.

The developer of video games for regulated lotteries has received $2.5 million from Rho Canada Ventures, the Canadian arm of Rho Capital Partners, which has offices in Palo Alto, Calif., New York and Montreal, and $1.5 million from Innovacorp, the Nova Scotia innovation agency. Paul LeBlanc, co-founder and CEO of Karma Gaming, said there is a

Virtual Marine Technology, the St. John’s, N.L., developer of simulated training systems for maritime industries, has quintupled its revenues in the last two years with its drive into export markets.

And president Anthony Patterson says that move into foreign markets will only continue in the future.

Since emerging from Memorial University of Newfoundland nine years ago, the company has become a cornerstone of the St. John’s oceans industry cluster. But like so many startups, the challenge has been to grow revenues in a meaningful way.

It had been targeting two market segments — oil

But there were two interesting standouts that played supporting roles at the conference, which was held in Halifax on May 30: the region’s start-ups and its universities.

The final conference in the 4Front series wrapped up with the 250 delegates taking pledges on what they would do to improve the region’s economic morass. These included such promises as hiring students and immigrants and exporting more.

The discussion was framed against Barton’s keynote address, which delved into revolutionary changes in Asia, where he lived for more than a decade. Led by emerging markets in Asia and

[Editor’s Note: Perry B. Newman is a consultant in Portland, Maine. We were discussing how Entrevestor could write more about startups in Maine when he proposed a guest column on what we in this region could learn from Israel. Here's the result.]

There’s much to be said for collaboration and coordination in both entrepreneurial and economic development efforts. We get ideas from each other. We share resources, and we create critical mass that enhances the potential for our success. We build virtual teams and virtual companies, and we construct paradigms that allow us to punch above our

With a $1.9-million loan from the Atlantic Innovation Fund, Island Abbey Foods of Charlottetown is tripling its research staff and pioneering the delivery of health supplements and pharmaceuticals through its honey-based products.

The company is famous for its honey-based candies and lozenges, and for walking away from a $600,000 funding agreement with four dragons from CBC’s Dragons’ Den. The collapse of that deal was the dragons’ loss because Island Abbey now appears to be in the midst of its second straight year of 100 per cent revenue growth, and is not only cash-flow positive but

Answer this quickly: What’s the one thing that private enterprise in Atlantic Canada wants governments to do to improve our competitiveness?

Did you answer, “Lower taxes”? It would have been my guess.

But we’d both be wrong.

The top business leaders in Atlantic Canada have spent more than two years studying the weak economic performance on Canada’s East Coast as part of the 4Front Atlantic series of conferences. Ahead of the third and final 4Front gathering on Thursday, the heads of the five working groups that wrote the 4Front report assembled Friday to brief the media on their

Halifax Pop Explosion, the autumn event that started 21 years ago as a forum for local music, plans to expand its digital component this year so it will become a marketplace and mentorship lab for East Coast technology.

HPX last year added HPX Digital to highlight the technology that goes hand in hand with the pop phenomenon, focusing mainly on such segments as the Internet, gaming, mobile and startups.

The reaction has been positive, and the organizers have decided to expand the tech side of the festival, said executive director Jonny Stevens in an interview.

The festival this year

The Wallace McCain Institute at the University of New Brunswick has named the 16 participants in the sixth cohort of its Entrepreneurial Leaders Program.

After an intense two-day process it calls "The Choosing", the institute selected a range of entrepreneurs from the three Maritime Provinces who Executive Director Nancy Mathis described as representing “the regions highest growth potential entrepreneurs.”

The 16 people who will participate in the program over the next year are:  

 

1. Monica Adair, ACRE Architects Inc., Saint John;

2. Sarah Albert, PGYIN Holding Inc., Moncton ;

At least nine startups or organizations working in the area of animal health will attend a MentorCamp affiliated with the VetHealth Global conference in Charlottetown on June 10.

The participants in the one-day mentoring session include two groups operating in Atlantic Canada — the Moncton-based Atlantic Cancer Research Institute and Delivra Inc., a Burlington, Ont., biotech that has a research and development facility in Charlottetown.

This is the first year of collaboration between VetHealth Global, one of the leading conferences in North America for animal medicine, and MentorCamp, a

Volta, the co-working space for startups in downtown Halifax, has yet to complete its first month of operation, but it is already fleshing out its programs and partnerships, which will benefit young companies in the region.

The “startup house”, as its founders have dubbed it, has struck partnerships with MentorCamp and with St. Mary’s University’s new Masters of Technology, Entrepreneurship and Innovation program. Executive Director Milan Vrekic has also unveiled the list of programs for the startup community.

About 13 tech startups now occupy the shared office space on Spring Garden