The latest incubation centre and program for Atlantic Canadian entrepreneurs were launched in Fredericton on Thursday with the aspirations of being a national or international enterprise by the spring.

Knowledge Park, a development for knowledge industry companies in the New Brunswick capital, officially opened the Planet Hatch Centre (formerly called the Commercialization Environment for Advanced Learning Technologies, or CEALT), which will be home to the new ACcelR8 program. About 180 people registered to attend the launch.

The facility and program are starting off with a first cohort of six Fredericton companies, each of which is committed to remaining in the space for the three-month program, and could occupy it for up to a year. Like all incubators, the goal is to help these companies grow to the point that they want to leave the co-working space and move to their own offices.

The second cohort is due to begin in March and Executive Director Sally Ng plans to attract companies from other parts of New Brunswick and Atlantic Canada. The centre is even open to applicants from other parts of the country or outside Canada.

“It’s no different from GrowLab and Communitech,” she said, referring to the incubator/accelerators in Vancouver and Kitchener respectively. “The accelerator is based in that city but they’re there to serve the region.”

Like Volta in Halifax and Common Ground in St. John’s, Planet Hatch provides working space for startups and organizes events and peer-to-peer support activities to help the young companies along the path to profitability. Planet Hatch will be complemented by the soon-to-open mLab Canada, an incubator for mobile technologies, in downtown Fredericton.

These incubators and co-working places are now opening up around the region to help young companies with good ideas reach a point of self-sufficiency. As well as adding to the capacity to mentor young companies, they are quickly establishing themselves as hubs for events and meetings. Some companies in Halifax, for example, are seeking office space in the Spring Garden Road district mainly so they can be close to Volta.

The first cohort in ACcelr8 comprises six companies from a range of industries. Two companies are in the information technology sector, two in cleantech or biotech and the others are in aerospace and advanced manufacturing.  Ng declined to name the companies because some need more work before they’re exposed to the public. 

Ng said there were about nine applications for the first cohort that merited serious consideration and the organizers had the tough task of whittling the list down to six. What the organizers are looking for is companies that understand they have to do the work and the mentors in the program are there mainly to coach them, said Ng. The Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency has contributed  $495,000 to Planet Hatch during its first three years, while the Province of New Brunswick will provide seed funding of $25,000 per entrepreneur up to 10 entrepreneurs in the first year of the program.

The facilities will host a series of events that will be open to the broader public, such as the first Ladies Learning Code event in New Brunswick, to be held all day on Sept. 21. The others include Hello, Ruby with Angus Fletcher on Tuesday, Sept. 17, and the ACcelR8 Program Launch with Startup Kitchen on Wednesday, Sept. 18.