The group producing some of the largest tech-venture conferences in Canada is coming to the Atlantic Provinces.

Spurred by the growing national interest in the region’s start-ups, the Critical Path Group announced late last week that it will host the Atlantic Venture Forum in June at the Westin Nova Scotian in Halifax. The idea behind the event is to provide a meeting place for venture capital funds to get together with local companies, dozens of which are searching for follow-on funding.

 “We work closely with the vast majority of active VC firms in Canada, and many in the U.S.,” says Marc Elrick, the executive director of the Atlantic Venture Forum. He also works closely with many of the Canadian fund of funds, such as the BC Renaissance Capital Fund, Alberta Enterprise Corp., and the Business Development Bank of Canada.

The region has done a good job of providing young companies with seed funding—with the initial rounds of up to about $1 million. But so many companies have received seed funding that there is now a wave of start-ups that need to attract multi-million-dollar funding rounds in order to ensure growth.

What’s especially interesting is that Critical Path is working on bringing angels and venture capitalists from the Boston area to the forum that builds on the longstanding cultural relationships between New England and Atlantic Canada.

Critical Path has a strong track record in hosting some of the pre-eminent venture capital conferences in the country including the Banff Venture Forum, the Canadian Financing Forum in Vancouver, the Agri Investment Forum in Toronto, the Agri Innovation Forum in Calgary, and other projects in the tech space. The sponsors, led by the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, hope that the group’s connections with so many VC funds will attract leading funders to the event, which in turn will expose more funders to more young Atlantic Canadian companies.

The sponsors include such funding bodies as Espresso Capital of Vancouver, Extreme Startups of Toronto, Grand Bank Capital of Boston, GrowthWorks, and Sustainable Development Technology Canada. GrowthWorks is headquartered is in Vancouver but its GrowthWorks Atlantic office is the most active private VC funds in the region.

Critical Path also works closely with such funders and accelerators as Communitech’s Hyperdrive, GrowLab, FounderFuel, Launch Academy, and Plug n Play Accelerator. “They are all involved in one or more of the national venture forums that my team manages,” says Elrick.

The organizers plan to identify, screen, and presents high-growth-potential IT, cleantech, and life sciences companies in the greater Atlantic Canada area to the region’s rapidly evolving investment and commercialization ecosystem. It hopes to focus on opportunities in funding, partnering, trials, and licensing.

As well as creating awareness among VC funds of the region’s startups, Elrick says the conference hopes to provide emerging companies with a platform for moving on to the radar of Fortune 500 companies, which constitute the most vibrant market for exits by these companies.

Elrick also says the timing of the conference in June is meant to “complement, support, and build upon the other tech commercialization initiatives and events taking plance in Atlantic Canada.” Already the region has the East Startup Week in Fredericton next Month, and the Halifax Pop Explosion, and InvestAtlantic in Halifax this fall.

To screen the applications and advise on content, Critical Path has assembled an advisory board that includes such experts from outside the region as Charles Lax, the managing general partner of Grand Banks Capital; Henry Kay of the Boston Harbor Angels; and Sunil Sharma, the managing director of Extreme Startups. Local organizations on the advisory panel include the Region Venture Capital Fund, GrowthWorks Atlantic, East Valley Ventures, Atlantic Venture Capital, and BDC Venture Capital.