BDC Venture Capital said today it is investing $150,000 each in RUMAnalytics of New Brunswick and Analyze Re of Nova Scotia as part of an agreement with the Launch36 accelerator program.

The venture capital arm of Business Development Bank of Canada said it is extending convertible notes of $150,000 each to 10 recent graduates of Canadian accelerators, including the two from Moncton-based Launch36.

The accelerator, which has prepared 18 companies for investment and the market in 15 months, said that it will work with BDC in the future to assess “venture ready” graduates from the program, which will be eligible for the notes from BDC.

The notes act initially as a loan, giving the target company a bit of capital to help grow its business. It is also a stamp-of-approval, telling other investors that one of Canada’s most active VC funds has judged the company to be worthy of investment. Once the company closes its first full funding round of funding, the convertible notes covert to an equity investment.

BDC Venture Capital has made such investments through accelerator programs across the country, but this is the first time Launch36 was included.

“Making first-time investments in such promising startups is part of our strategy to build a healthy Canadian ecosystem,” Senia Rapisarda, Vice-President at BDC Venture Capital, said in the statement. “We’ll also be looking at connecting these entrepreneurs with angel and venture capital as well as providing them other forms of non-financial support.”

PropelICT, the technology development organization that oversees the Launch36 accelerator, said the agreement means Atlantic Canadian startups will be eligible to receive a total of almost $3 million in funding. In a statement, Propel Executive Director Trevor MacAusland said the BDC Venture Capital program is “further proof that the East Coast is the right coast to connect with Canada’s most disruptive entrepreneurs.”

Steve Mallett, the CEO of Quispamsis-based RUMAnalytics, said the $150,000 investment is the first part of a $500,000 seed round of funding. It will be used to help to develop the company’s software-as-a-service product, which is a web-performance boosting tool for ecommerce sites.

“The pilot program clients have been bigger than we dared hope for as a startup (so) our main challenge has been handling the amounts of data we’re collecting on their behalf,” said Mallett. “A great problem to have, for sure.”

The product is now in invitation-only beta test with some of the world's highest-traffic sites. The next version will be released early in the fourth quarter and will be open to sites of all sizes, said Mallett.

Analyze Re of Halifax had initially hoped to raise $750,000, but it’s increased that target to $1.25 million, which it will use to accelerate the rollout of its SaaS product that helps reinsurers to assess risk. Co-Founder Shivam Rajdev said the eight-employee company has developed a prototype and hopes to have its minimum viable product on the market by September or October.

Analyze Re has signed non-disclosure agreements with two prospective clients (one in New York and one in Bermuda) and with a potential channel partner, which represents 400 possible end-users.

MacAusland hopes to graduate two cohorts in the next year, and to graduate its first companies from Newfoundland during that time. The organization began as a New Brunswick group, then extended to other Maritime Provinces, and now hopes to cover Newfoundland and Labrador as well.

Launch36 graduates now employ more than 70 people and have raised more than $7 million in equity financing. The companies in the course have come from all three Maritime Provinces.