Heimdall Networks of Sydney on Wednesday captured $225,000 in prizes by winning the I-3 Technology Start-up Competition, Innovacorp’s event that aims to find the best new startups in Nova Scotia.
Founded by Jim DeLeskie, Heimdall Networks is developing software that protects corporations and governments against distributed denial-of-service attacks. The company won a $100,000 seed investment as the overall winner, on top of the $100,000 in cash and services it won for placing first in the Cape Breton region. It also won $25,000 in cash as the contest’s top information technology company.
The I-3 competition names winners from five regions across the province and is designed to offer mentorship to all the 228 companies that entered.
“The quality and quantity of entries to the I-3 competition this year has far eclipsed past competitions,” said Stephen Duff, chief executive officer of Innovacorp, the province’s innovation agency.
“We are seeing a progressive sophistication of the entrepreneurial community in Nova Scotia, and I believe this is an important trend that will make an increasing contribution to the economic prosperity of our province.”
Heimdall impressed the judges with its ability to prevent distributed denial-of-service attacks that swamp an organization’s website and/or network with unwanted traffic, disabling all its online functions. The attacks have become more frequent because of the development and distribution of relatively simple tools needed to make them.
The company’s technology is designed to identify the legitimate and the non-legitimate traffic on a network, and to filter out the bad while letting the good through.
Having previously worked on security for a major carrier, DeLeskie said he appreciates the need for a product that can be scaled up to handle the needs of multinational corporations or large governments.
The other regional winners in the competition are:
•Zone 1 (Cumberland, Colchester, Pictou, Antigonish and Guysborough counties): Extrify, New Glasgow, founded by Jim Fitt and Peter Bennett. Extrify lets companies create message, files and threads of comment and share documents across the whole company or within specific departments.
•Zone 2 (Lunenburg, Queens, Shelburne and Yarmouth counties): CelluFuel Inc. in Brooklyn; Chris Hooper, Tor Suther, Ed McKay and Veselin Milosevic. Cellufuel is working on a demonstration biofuel facility in the former Bowater Mersey paper mill that will create fuel from wood.
•Zone 3 (Digby, Annapolis, Kings and Hants counties): Fenol Farm Inc., Mount Uniacke; Sherri McFarland. Fenol Farm is developing a plant-based product that kills oral bacteria, which leads to tooth damage.
•Zone 4 (Halifax region): Spring Loaded Technology, Halifax; Chris Cowper-Smith, Bob Garrish and Shea Kewin. The company is developing a knee brace that strengthens and stabilizes the joint.
While Heimdall won the $25,000 sector award in information technology, Spring Loaded won the award for the life sciences sector.
In the oceans technology sector, the winner was Natural Ocean Products of North Sydney. Founders Tim Cranston and Jim Kennedy are creating all-natural food, cosmetics and other products from marine plants and other materials. Atlantic Motor Labs Inc. of Halifax, won the clean-tech award. Founded by Braden Murphy, it is developing a compact flow-driven motor, called the TurboPiston, for the oil and gas industry.
