If you believe in the law of averages, there is now a startup somewhere in Atlantic Canada that didn’t exist this time last week. And by next Wednesday, there will have been another launch.  Or maybe two.

One thing that has struck to me as I’ve gone through the results of our recent survey is the speed with which Atlantic Canada is now producing startups. The region launched more than one company a week last year, and the pace hasn’t slowed down in 2014.

We’re now reaching the end of the first quarter, so we should have seen 13 new companies if we’re to reach our new-startup-each-week metric that I’ve outlined here.

Well, check this out: The Spark Cape Breton Competition on Monday awarded a total of $200,000 to six companies, none of which had previously appeared on my radar. At least three new Atlantic Canadian companies entered Canada’s Business Model Competition held at Dalhousie University earlier this month. BioMer Innovations from St. Mary’s University issued a press release this week. I’ve heard from two other tech companies through Volta, an experienced developer starting a new company in Bedford and another biotech company.

That’s 14 new companies this quarter.

Then you might consider that Planet Hatch is putting together the next cohort of its Accelr8 program, which will no doubt include some companies that have been silent until now.

Of course not all of these newbies will develop into full-fledged companies. Some will disband before the end of the year. But there are now six companies in the burgeoning tech community in Sydney that have seed funding – two of them with $50,000 each. There will be support for the Accelr8 companies.

And no doubt some of them will begin generating revenues before too long.  Almost one-fifth of the companies that launched in 2013 reported some level of revenue last year, and another fifth of these companies expect to book revenue in 2014.

This baby boom among startups has various ramifications, both for the community as a whole and for Entrevestor. The more companies that are launched, the more people gain startup experience and the greater the odds that a few of the companies will become something big. That’s the upside. The downside is that there is a growing number companies scrapping for limited resources in terms of incubator space, government programs, mentorship, and local capital.

For Entrevestor, it means we’ve had to change our criteria slightly. We used to say no company was at too early a stage for us to cover. That’s no longer the case. We can’t cover a new company each week. So we now require that rookie companies have some form of validation – revenues, acceptance in an accelerator, winning a contest -- before we write about them. It’s a good sign that the bar is creeping higher on many fronts.