The first Atlantic Venture Forum takes place Wednesday and Thursday this week at the Westin Nova Scotian in Halifax, offering a rare opportunity for meetings between local founders and come-from-away funders.

Critical Path Group, which organizes other conferences such as the Banff Venture Forum and the Canadian Financing Forum in Vancouver, has selected 22 Atlantic Canadian startups to present at the event. I’ve spoken to a few impressive companies that didn’t make the cut, and several plan to attend the conference regardless.

Launched with the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency as a founding sponsor, the conference is designed to bring outside investors to the region to witness what all the buzz is about in the Atlantic Canadian startup world.

In addition to local investors, the funders speaking at the AVF include: Scott MacDonald, McRock Capital; Antoine Michaud, Tandem Expansion Fund; Mark Hatfield, Fairhaven Capital; Gaurav Jain, Founder Collective; Henry Kay, Boston Harbor Angels; Ron Warburton, BDC Venture Capital; Gerard Buckley, Jaguar Capital; Scott Pelton, Round13 Capital; Chris Legg, Progress Ventures; Paul Singh, 500 Startups; Charley Lax, GrandBanks Capital; and Brian Underdown, Lumira Capital.

Ben Yoskovitz, the Co-Author of Lean Analytics and VP of Product at Halifax-based GoInstant, will deliver the final keynote address.

One added feature of the conference is that it will host the official launch of Canadian Entrepreneurs in New England – a mentoring and introduction group that will serve the same function in the Boston region that C100 does in Silicon Valley.

The Atlantic Canadian companies presenting at the AVF are: 

Early Stage -- ABK Biomedical, Halifax; Analyze Re, Halifax; Ara Labs, Fredericton; Densitas, Halifax; Mindful Scientific, Halifax; OneLobby, Fredericton; Performance Genomics, Truro, NS; RUMAnalytics, Quispamsis, NB; Shopulse, Moncton; Spinzo, Saint John; The Rounds, Halifax.

Growth Stage – BlueLight Analytics, Halifax;  CarbonCure Technologies, Halifax; Celtx, St. John’s; Chelation Partners, Halifax;  InNetwork, Halifax; Measurely, Moncton; Novawise, Halifax; Oris4, Halifax; Scene Sharp, Halifax;  UserEvents, Fredericton; and Zaptap, Fredericton.

For details on all these companies -- except Ara Labs, BlueLight and Chelation, which sadly we haven’t reported on yet – please use the search function to the right of this blog.