The pillars of a startup ecosystem – working spaces, university, funding agency, support organizations, network of mentors – have been in place for well over a year. A recent visit to the P.E.I. capital showed how these components are now maturing.

The funding body Island Capital Partners has backed six companies, and has a pipeline of others. Startup Zone, the downtown entrepreneurship hub, has worked with 60 companies and is emphasizing mentorship like never before. And the granddaddy of Island support organizations, the PEI BioAlliance, is reporting success at attracting companies, including startups, to Charlottetown.

If there is one item that troubles some stakeholders it is the challenge of finding tech talent, especially developers. It’s a problem I’ve heard before from P.E.I. companies. There is a global demand for tech development talent and the need is especially strong in Charlottetown.

The P.E.I. startup community, concentrated in Charlottetown, is surprisingly diverse for a province with a population of 152,000, and it is benefitting from a strong underlying economy. The Island’s population has increased 12 percent this century, and GDP increased about 2.2 percent last year, building on 3.2 percent growth the year before.  

With this backdrop, Island Capital Partners has been approached by 82 companies in 18 months, including some willing to move operations to the province to gain ICP funding and mentorship.

Martin Yuill Heads to Cleantech Commons in Peterborough, Ont.

“We’ve been surprised by the number of companies that have approached us and by the number of off-Island companies that have come to us knowing our mandate is to invest in P.E.I. companies,” Stefanie Corbett, the group’s Director of Operations, said in an interview at the Kettle Black coffee shop.

Added Managing Director Alex MacBeath: “I’m impressed with the quality of companies we’ve seen.”

Three doors away, Startup Zone CEO Patrick Farrar is working to improve the quality further, with a focus on boosting sales. Though it’s known mainly as a work space, Farrar emphasizes that Startup Zone is ramping up its mentorship of companies, broadening its network of coaches in such fields as sales, marketing and product development. The overall goal is to drive sales for its young companies.

In another working space for tech companies, LaunchPadPEI, three-year-old Forestry.io is showing signs of growth. The ICP portfolio company, which has developed a content management system for static site generators, has moved into a larger office, is taking on more clients and is increasing its staff.

“We’re at 11 [employees] now and will grow to 20 by the end of the year,” said CEO Scott Gallant. “We’re going to hire as many as we can locally, but we don’t know what that’s going to look like.”

Gallant has a range of well-paid openings for senior people, including developers, but said finding the talent in P.E.I. is difficult.

The labour market is kinder to life sciences companies, which are buoyed by the bioscience programs at University of PEI and other local research institutes. What’s more, the BioAlliance has a human resources specialist to help biotech companies find and nurture the experts they need.

Martin Yuill, the outgoing Director of the Emergence life science incubator, said in an interview that the bio sector is seeing “a very strong attraction of companies into the province”, many of them early stage companies. In some cases, he said, companies are setting up R&D teams in Charlottetown, and in others the founders themselves are moving to the Island.