The Volta Cohort, a new micro fund for Atlantic Canadian early-stage companies, got its start last night by awarding a total of $125,000 to five Halifax companies.

Volta Labs, in partnership with Innovacorp and BDC Capital, launched the fund to provide capital for early-stage companies. The startup house’s CEO Jesse Rodgers said there’s a gap in the ecosystem in funding early-stage companies in

Let’s start with the good news from the Deloitte Technology Fast 50: Solace Power of Mount Pearl, NL, was named to the competition’s Companies-to-Watch group for 2017.

And now the bad news: for the second year in a row, not a single Atlantic Canadian company made the Fast 50, a club of the fastest-growing tech companies in the country. And that shutout may highlight a big problem for Atlantic

Winter might be moving in, but Jeff Thompson is lacing up his sneakers and hitting the road. One of the region’s most successful serial entrepreneurs, Thompson has recently moved on from his executive role at Contact-Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) provider Serenova. Now, he’s intending to get back to another passion—running.

Serenova was formed after Thompson sold his second company, UserEvents, to

The leap from web design to robotics is a big one, but Mike Rizkalla and his company are making the transition and preparing to bring their first robotics product to the market.  

Rizkalla heads Brave New World, formerly known as Raised Media, a Halifax- and New York-based web design company that is adding robotics, artificial intelligence and augmented reality to its business channels. It is

If there’s one piece of data that stands out from our study of the Atlantic Canadian startup community in 2016, it’s the number of companies that are gaining meaningful traction.

Last week, at the Halifax luncheon we co-hosted with Charcoal Marketing, we presented our 2016 research on the East Coast startup community to a full house. The highlight of the presentation was our research into exits

Venture Grade, a student-run venture capital fund at St. Mary’s University, has announced its successful bid to host the international Venture Capital Investment Competition.

VCIC is a tri-continental organizationthat hosts competitions at universities around the globe. It has been going on for a decade and no Canadian university has stepped up to the plate to host the event – until now.

“It’s

The University of New Brunswick’s summer accelerator program—whose alumni include mental-health awareness clothing line Wear Your Label and energy storage solution Stash Energy – has opened applications for its fifth season.  

The Summer Institute is a three-month-long acceleration program that helps entrepreneurs launch their startup. The J. Herbert Smith Centre for Technology Management &

Volta Labs on Tuesday will host a pitching competition to select five startups that will receive a total of $125,000 in early stage investment in the Volta Cohort.

The Halifax startup house will hold the competition at the Discovery Centre beginning with networking at 5:30 pm. Volta already has a shortlist of 15 companies that will be pitching. You can get tickets for the event here.  

Last

As she packages orders for her latest Christmas tree ornament—a blended kidney and heart design—Kacy DeLong is simultaneously growing her business, raising funds for kidney research and celebrating her husband’s health-saving transplant.

This is the second year DeLong has been operating DeLong Designs, a New Germany, N.S.-based venture that makes Christmas ornaments cast in heirloom-quality

The group organizing Halifax’s bid for Amazon’s  second North American headquarters has launched its website, AmazonHFX.com, so anyone can see the rationale for the bid.

The bid pits Halifax against more than 200 other cities, including Canadian competitors like Toronto, Montreal and Calgary.

The site provides a snapshot of Halifax’s key business and quality of life advantages and requirements