When LaunchDal holds its annual summer Demo Day on Wednesday, it will be the latest chapter of Mary Kilfoil’s seven-year mission to launch more startups from Dalhousie University.

LaunchDal is the organization within Dalhousie that mentors early-stage companies, usually with students from the university and often with technology they’ve developed in their time at the Halifax institution. For the last few years, the group has offered a summer program called LaunchPad, in which 10 teams receive $10,000 each to develop their company.

The Demo Day for the 2019 cohort will be held July 31 at 6:30 pm at the Rebecca Cohn auditorium at Dal. You can register here.

“What you’re going to see is 10 new startups, many of them launched from within the university, ranging from social and environmental entrepreneurship to artificial intelligence ventures,” said Kilfoil in an interview last Tuesday. “Many of them have traction in sales, and are looking at international clients.”

Kilfoil is now wrapping up her seventh year of teaching entrepreneurial courses at Dal. Back in 2012, she started the Starting Lean course along with her husband, Professor Ed Leach. The course taught lean methodology at a time when a lean canvas was still a revolutionary entrepreneurial tool.

Since then, she has continued to grow the suite of programs operating out of the Collider, the space LaunchDal runs in the second floor of the Killam Library at Dal. She emphasizes that LaunchDal is not just a place where companies come for training, but a place where individuals can come with ideas and leave with a company. Such established companies as Spring Loaded Technology and Site2020 really came together as they progressed through LaunchDal programs.

“We feed the ecosystem,” said Kilfoil. “We are the critical early-phase start of the pipeline. The teams that emerge from LaunchDal are on their way to enter other programs and accelerators, both locally and internationally.”

She noted that the teams that have gone through the Dalhousie program have gone on to attend programs across Canada, in the U.S. even as far afield as the Hax accelerator in southern China.

“It’s been amazing to witness the potential that we perhaps never knew we had, and to witness the companies that are now competing on the world stage,” said Kilfoil. “I’m humbled by what has transpired … and to realize that we’re all part of something much bigger than ourselves.”