Volta Labs in Halifax celebrated the grand opening of its new 60,000 square-foot facility on Wednesday night. Over 300 members of the city’s business and startup community came out to the unveiling of what is now the largest hub for entrepreneurship and innovation in Atlantic Canada.

Guests were invited to tour the new office spaces, which span the first three floors of the Maritime Centre on Barrington Street.

This expansion, which has been in the works since 2016, was completed with over $4 million in provincial and federal funding from the Province of Nova Scotia, Innovacorp and the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency.

“I was here not that long ago making the announcement on the sixth floor and I must tell you, the digs here are a whole lot better,” said Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil, during a speech at the event.

Volta now houses 32 technology startups, including high-growth companies such as Manifold and Swept. More than 50 early-stage companies have worked out of Volta Labs since its inception in 2013, more than two-thirds of which are still in business. Proposify, a now multi-million dollar company in Halifax, is also a Volta alum.

The new expansion allows Volta to better serve the region’s startup community by providing more space for its resident companies, its network members and by offering innovation outposts with spaces for large events or private meetings.

Within its new space, Volta is constructing an environment it calls an ‘innovation hub’, which essentially brings together people from all levels of business into one central working space. The hub will be located on the lobby level, along with an open co-working space and outpost offices for Grant Thornton and McInnes Cooper.

Having these two agencies on the ground floor at Volta is intended to help startups access markets faster, which is the main goal of the innovation hub.

“The fundamental thing about Volta is community as a framework,” said Jesse Rodgers, Volta’s CEO, to the crowd.

Chris Crowell, Volta’s VP of Corporate Innovation, later said in an interview: “It’s a place where not only startups but larger organizations can come to experiment, to prototype and to apply lean startup techniques to bring products and services to markets.

"In an innovation hub you have entrepreneurs, you have startups, scale-ups and organizations that are all at different stages of their growth journey. And it's better when you have corporate members and partners that are engaged directly with the startups,” he said.

Guest registration and musical performances for Wednesday’s celebration were organized by Volta resident company Side Door, a startup that is building a platform that connects performing artists with people looking to host shows or events of any kind in their space.

Side Door brought in local musicians Disco Stu, MAJE, and T. Thomason to perform to a crowd that was double the size originally expected. Not that it was an issue, Volta has plenty of room.