One night a few months ago, a flurry of tweets flew out of New Brunswick congratulating Xiplinx, one of the companies going through the Launch36 accelerator, in landing a really impressive client as an early adopter.

I hadn’t heard of Xiplinx at the time, but over the next few months I heard more and more, and expect I’ll hear more still in the coming months.

Founded in November by Brent MacDonald of Saint John and Derek Roche of Dartmouth, Xiplinx helps companies with large facilities monitor what is happening on their production lines in real time. Such companies have a major problem:  their plant managers monitor operations with paper-based data, which is cumbersome, lacks meaningful analytics and is not cost-effective.

Xiplinx, which is based in Moncton, provides cost-effective technology that allows workers on the factory floor to input information using mobile devices, then tabulates and analyses the information to make sure everything is operating as it should. Then it shares the data throughout the organization, optimizing the efficiency of the plant.

Speaking at the Launch36 Demo Day Tuesday night, MacDonald said Xiplinx (pronounced Zip-links) has already had some success in the food and beverage industry and has found two global beverage companies to be early adopters. (MacDonald is unable to publicly name the companies, one of which was the cause of the storm of tweets in the spring.)

The beverage industry alone is worth $135 billion a year and has undergone a lot of consolidation recently, which means large companies are now operating plants with systems devised outside their organization. That in itself is causing big companies to look for efficiencies in their plants.

MacDonald said the company is now looking for $500,000, and is “about one-fifth of the way through the round”, meaning it already has commitments of $100,000 in funding. A half-million-dollar raise would fund the company for one year and allow it to scale up its operations with the early adopters with which it’s now working.

Editor's Note: This is the first of several articles on the companies that presented the Launch36 Demo Day hosted by Propel ICT in Moncton on June 26.