Fifty Atlantic Canadian startup community members travelled to the Startupfest Montreal conference last week in a bid to entice outside investors, entrepreneurs and talent to consider doing business east of the St. Lawrence.

Kathryn Lockhart, CEO of remote startup incubator Propel ICT and one of the delegation’s organizers, said in an interview that the team blew through their internal goal for overall visitors to their booth within just the first day of the three-day gathering. And this Tuesday alone, she took three calls with investors contemplating moves into the region, prompted by what they saw at Startupfest.

The group included representatives from organizations across the Atlantic provinces, such as Halifax startup hub Volta, Fredericton incubator Planet Hatch and venture capital firm Sandpiper Ventures. Some organizations, like Newfoundland’s Genesis and the Tribe Network for BIPOC founders also backed the effort without attending in person.

“We really got to see our true potential at Startupfest — what happens when we all come together,” said Lockhart. “And that was pretty magical. It was significant.”

Businesspeople from Atlantic Canada have attended Startupfest previous years — Propel’s chief coaching officer, Charlotte Murray, has made the journey on six or seven different occasions — but last week marked the first time the region mounted a single, unified effort at self-promotion.

Lockhart said the Montreal trip marks the beginning of an attempt by startup support organizations to create a national and international brand for Atlantic Canada under the name “Startup Atlantic” — complete with branded swag, like t-shirts and metal pins.

She said the new initiative is the brainchild of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, which organized virtual brainstorming sessions with senior figures from the startup world, like Lockhart.

The messaging push is aimed at attracting investment to the region, but is also in response to the ongoing technology sector labour shortage, which Lockhart said in a prior interview has forced startups to look further afield for staff and compete for skilled employees with larger urban centres.

To entice entrepreneurs and workers away from higher-profile cities like Toronto, Lockhart said the Startup Atlantic contingent emphasized the high quality of life that many Atlantic Canadians say they experience in the region.

The Atlantic provinces have also fared better during the pandemic than many other regions, and even in the contentious domains of housing costs and healthcare, Atlantic Canada is still largely either more attractive than urban centres west of the St. Lawrence, or at least not less attractive.

For example, rental rates in Halifax — one of the most expensive places to live in Atlantic Canada — are still only the 17th highest in the country, according to a report from Bullpen Research and Consulting and online marketplace Rentals.ca.

And further sweetening the deal for prospective newcomers to the region, Lockhart said, is the significant amount of non-dilutive funding available from both government and private sector groups.

“The ecosystem is maturing,” she said. “And it's because we've had a lot of the right ingredients at the earlier stage.

“We see founders really leveraging NRC-IRAP credits and things like that to help fund (their businesses) and match funding throughout their early stage growth, which is really, really helpful.”

The Startup Atlantic branding also comes as Halifax, in particular, is receiving more attention than usual on the international stage thanks to The Economist magazine’s World Ocean Tech and Innovation Summit, which will draw global leaders in the space to the Halifax Convention Centre this October.

Next on the Startup Atlantic agenda will be finding other opportunities to continue promoting the brand and its core narratives.

“It's probably identifying where are those next events, and meetings, and places for us to leverage the brand to have that single, single powerful voice on those larger stages,” said Lockhart. “And then how do we leverage this momentum internally?

“So we'll be doing a lot of post-event analysis to further measure our impact.”