Patrick Hankinson, a Halifax entrepreneur and investor who specializes in information technology companies, will manage the new $17-million-plus pre-seed fund set up by the Nova Scotian government.

The government announced Thursday that Hankinson won the competition to manage the fund, which will make investments of $250,000 to $750,000 mainly in IT companies. At least half the money must be invested in Nova Scotia, with the remainder available for companies in the other Atlantic Provinces.

Hankinson – who has yet to name his fund – was one of the founders of Tether, an early tech success in Nova Scotia about seven years ago, and then launched a company called Compilr, which he sold to Lynda.com for more than $20 million four years ago. For the past few years, he has been active mainly as an investor, putting his own money into such companies as Proposify and Dash Hudson, and working with the regional venture capital fund Build Ventures. This background gives him confidence in investing in pre-seed companies – those that have developed technology but may not yet have paying customers.

“I’ve now made 15 angel investments and I often invested in companies when they had no revenues,” said Hankinson in an interview Thursday. “But man, once some of these companies start going, you can see their revenues growing and that’s pretty exciting to watch.”

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The announcement Thursday is the culmination of a four-year process by the Nova Scotia government to increase access to capital for Nova Scotia startups. The government set aside $25 million in 2014 to launch a new early-stage startup fund. Then earlier this year, it said $15 million of the money would be allocated to Build Ventures, which is raising capital for its second venture capital fund. The remaining money was to go to a pre-seed fund, and the government ended up increasing the total to $15 million from $10 million and naming Hankinson as the manager.

“I’d like to get things moving within the next six month and hopefully it will be before that,” said Hankinson when asked when his fund will begin investing. He added Build Venture partners Patrick Keefe and Rob Barbara “have done a lot of the hard work” in negotiating a limited partner agreement with the province, which produced a framework for Hankinson’s contract.

In addition to the $15 million contributed by the provincial government, the agreement requires Hankinson to contribute at least $200,000 of his own money – a level he will handily exceed. It also requires him to raise at least $2 million from other investors, and he is confident he can reach this level. He intends to end up with a fund worth about $17.5 million to $20 million.

Hankinson’s goal is to bring in successful Atlantic Canadian tech entrepreneurs as investors, so that they will be able to work with and mentor the companies his fund backs.

He will mainly invest in IT companies as that’s where he has the most experience and he won’t be overlapping much with Innovacorp, Nova Scotia’s government-owned venture capital agency. Innovacorp said in its last accountability statement it will increasingly focus on OceanTech, CleanTech and life sciences companies.

Hankinson said half his fund will be devoted to follow-on funding and that he will likely be a feeder for Build Ventures and other funds, as they invest in the more successful members of his portfolio once they begin to gain revenues.