To understand what to watch in the Atlantic Canadian startup community in 2015, take a look at Avigilon Corp.

It’s not an Atlantic Canadian company. It’s a maker of high-resolution surveillance systems based in Vancouver. But Avigilon is the type of company that the startup cognoscenti are trying to develop on the East Coast, which makes it an interesting starting point for our outlook for 2015.

Basically, the regional startup community will grow in 2015 as it has in recent years – with startup weekends, competitions, conferences, new student entrepreneurs and seed funding. There will be more funding rounds in the $1 million to $5 million range than we’ve seen before, but essentially there will be a continued evolution. 

What will really differentiate 2015, I believe, is that a select few companies will start looking, thinking and acting more like Avigilon. Gerry Pond, the guiding force behind the Launch36 tech accelerator, has publicly stated his group is committed to developing billion-dollar tech companies (note the plural) in Atlantic Canada. He expects the first to reach that mark in 2019.

To understand what it means to develop a billion-dollar Canadian tech company, I set out to find one, look under the hood and see how it runs. The closest I could find was Avigilon. Listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (AVO:TSX), the company has a market capitalization (the total value of its shares) of about $800 million. The shares sagged in 2014, so Avigilon recently was in the billion-dollar camp.

Founded in 2004, Avigilon launched its first commercial project in 2007. Since then, it has on average more than doubled revenue each year and now has clients in 113 countries. It posted revenue of $191.9 million in the first nine months of 2014, which easily topped the full-year revenue of $178.3 million in 2013. Its most dramatic growth was in 2005 to 2009 when revenues increased a total of 33,664 percent. It now employs about 550 people, and last year earned a profit of $34.5 million.

The company has had problems in 2014, mainly in management and its relations with investors, but its history of growth shows how billion-dollar companies perform. If the Atlantic Canadian startup grouping is going to really change the economic plight of the region, it will have to produce a few companies like Avigilon. And they’ll need to start acting like Avigilon soon.

Naturally, they will have to set and meet astronomical sales targets, but some will also have to begin planning to list on a stock exchange.

Why? Because if we’re serious about growing a group of billion-dollar tech companies in the region, we’ll need the capital that can only be provided by public markets. Avigilon, for example, raised $100 million in an issue of stock in March.

So this year I’ll be looking for signs of companies that want to join the likes of such publicly listed companies as St. John’s-based Bluedrop Performance Learning and Halifax-based Immunovaccine Inc. They should be preparing for quarterly financial statements and strengthening their governance. They’ll have to start looking beyond venture capital investors to court investors and analysts in public tech and small-capitalization stocks. This should be the most notable trend of the regional tech community in 2015.

Entrevestor receives financial support from government agencies that support start-up companies in Atlantic Canada. The sponsoring agencies play no role in determining which companies are featured in this column nor do they have the right to review columns before they are published.