Though it was a holiday, Pablo Asiron felt distinctly un-festive.

It was -40 Celsius outside.  He was in a land where he didn’t understand the language, or even the lettering on the street signs. And his dinner that night consisted of a Snickers bar he found in his suitcase.

For the sake of a sale, the CEO of Riverview, N.B.-based RtTech Software had come to a small mining town in Kazakhstan in December 2012 to view the facility. After spending more than a day just catching the train to the site, he arrived to learn all restaurants were closed and the only thing he could eat the first night was the chocolate bar he’d brought with him.

But there was a silver lining: he made the sale.

“Yes, I made the sale,” he said, laughing about the experience a few months later. “And it was the largest sale we had ever had to date.”

See Our Tapping the Global Market Report

As much as any company in the region, RtTech embodies the international nature of the Atlantic Canadian startup community. Today, we are releasing our fourth Entrevestor Intelligence supplement of 2014 -- an issue dedicated to the global ambitions of the region’s startup community. This report showcases and discusses how Atlantic Canadian startups are tapping the global market for three facets they can’t live without: talent, customers, and capital. It looks at a group of Memorial University students competing in Beijing, our links to Boston, and immigration. And we learn from one venture capitalist, Jeff Grammer of Rho Canada Ventures, what he likes about Atlantic Canada. We'd like to thank to our tremendous designer Roxanna Boers for the great work on the supplements' layout all year long.

For example, RtTech, which was spun out of ADM Systems Engineering, helps industrial companies reduce energy in major plants. Its main products are: RtEMIS, which can pinpoint when and where part of a system is using excess energy; and RtDUET, which allows companies to examine specific processes to find the cause of downtime and poor utilization issues.

The international sweep of RtTech begins with its CEO, for Asiron is a native of Pamplona, Spain, where his family runs a hotel next to the bull ring immortalized by Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises.

The company has worked closely with its major international partners: San Leandro, Calif.-based OSIsoft and Austin, Texas-based Emerson Process Management.

Its clients are global, and Asiron’s sales calls in the past year have included not only Kazakhstan but also such places as Australia, the Philippines, the Middle East and various parts of Europe. The company has clients on five continents.

By their nature, startups are global beasts. By definition, they have to develop a product for the global market. They compete with other enterprises for global finance. And given the aging or declining population in much of Atlantic Canada, they often have to attract talent from around the world.

Though RtTech exemplifies the global outlook of startups, it is by no means alone in its worldview. Consider these other companies excelling in these three categories:

Talent

TopLog of Halifax is the product of immigrants gathering at one of the region’s great universities. Tokunbo Makanju, a native of Nigeria, wrote a doctoral thesis for his PhD in Computer Science at Dalhousie University on a method of helping network administrators to detect and correct system downtime. He teamed up with two other PhD candidates – Turkish immigrant Ozge Yeloglu and Canadian Patrick LaRoche— to develop the idea into a company, topLog. It has just released its first product.

Customers

Discoverygarden of Charlottetown oversees Islandora, one of the world’s leading digital repositories for libraries, museums and archives around the world. Developed at the University of Prince Edward Island, Islandora is an open-source databank that protects and stores digital assets permanently. It includes such features as a powerful search function and flexible installation. The Islandora website now lists 86 installations on four continents and the number is growing.

Capital

The Atlantic Canadian funding story of 2014 will be dominated by a single deal: Spectrum Equity’s $60 million private equity financing of St. John’s-based Verafin. Previously backed by Killick Capital of St, John’s and RBC Venture Partners, Verafin is a global leader in software that helps financial institutions prevent money laundering and fraud. With more than 1,000 corporate customers, the company looked for refinancing in the past year or two and eventually selected one backer: Spectrum, a private equity investor based in Boston and Silicon Valley. Spectrum has raised $4.7 billion for investment in IT and media companies.

This is a narrow selection of the Atlantic Canadian startups whose tentacles are stretching around the world. The plain truth is that no startup in the region or elsewhere is taken seriously unless they’re playing in the global sandbox. To be frank, it you’re not developing a company that is targeting the global market place it’s difficult – no, impossible -- to compete for serious attention given what other companies in the region are doing.

“Every entrepreneur should have a vision to conquer the globe from the start because in doing that you figure out what you need to do to be a successful company,” said Calvin Milbury, the CEO of the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation. “In practice, of course, you have to start with bite-sized pieces, but you need that global vision.”

And companies are finding global customers. Leah Skerry, the CEO of Halifax-based EyeRead, traveled to the AdTech conference in Japan this year to present her technology, which follows young readers’ eyes as they read to discover where they are having difficulty. “By having customers around the world, we have been able to learn quickly and it’s opened our products up for new opportunities,” she said.

Atlantic Canada’s universities are also aiding this trend. First, they set an example because all the universities are looking overseas for customers given the demographic situation in their home market. And second, they bring in people from around the world who often become entrepreneurs. At the Dalhousie University Starting Lean course this semester, there are participants from at least seven countries. And of course the universities produce research and development that leads to products with an international appeal. It’s not a coincidence that topLog (Dalhousie), discoverygarden (UPEI) and Verafin (Memorial University of Newfoundland) all grew out of regional post-secondary institutions.

The excellence of Atlantic Canadian startups is leading to a surprising number of global awards. Just in the past month or two, Island Water Technologies of Montague, P.E.I., was named to the GEW 50, a list of 50 promising startups from around the world compiled by Global Entrepreneurship Week of Washington D.C. And Lamda Guard of Halifax was awarded the 2014 Product Leadership Award in the aerospace industry by Frost & Sullivan of San Antonio, Texas.

Finally, the global flavor of the startup community deepens each time an international company buys a local startup. San Francisco-based Salesforce, the world’s leader in cloud-based software, has an impressive presence in the region because of its purchases of Radian6 of Fredericton and GoInstant of Halifax.

And this year, the trend has continued. Another San Francisco company, LiveOps, has bought UserEvents of Fredericton, while Bedford-based NewPace Technology Development Inc. has been purchased by NewNet Communications Technologies of Arlington Heights, Ill.  Compilr, a Halifax startup that teaches people how to code, was acquired by lynda.com, a Carpinteria, Calif.-based online education company.

RtTech certainly ranks with the best of them. And Asiron said there are three key reasons why his company has gone global. First, the company has designed products that will meet demand in the global market place. Second, as RtTech developed a network of clients, those customers introduced the company to others so word spread about the company’s products. And third, RtTech has formed strong international partnerships, whose sales teams complement the efforts of the Moncton company’s own sales force.

Disclaimer: Entrevestor receives financial support from government agencies that support startup companies in Atlantic Canada. The sponsoring agencies play no role in determining which companies and individuals are featured in this column, nor do they review columns before they are published.