Founders | Founders’ Journey

“Where do I begin?” For deep tech founders with innovative ideas, it can be challenging to develop a roadmap to entrepreneurship when there are so many things to consider outside of their technical expertise. As the deep tech incubator for early-stage innovation, we focus on enabling founders who need to expand their business skillset, network, and teams, while having state-of-the-art technical support and resources available in-house, and at their disposal.

We do this by dedicating our core team to providing deep tech expertise through the Faculty of Engineering and through private sector industry partnerships. Alongside this, we partner with accelerators across Atlantic Canada and the world, to ensure we’re connecting founders with non-technical expertise and resources that efficiently and effectively help them achieve product-market-fit.

Founders who join the Emera ideaHUB start by developing a clear, actionable roadmap by working with our Venture Coaches who are experienced deep tech entrepreneurs themselves. They know the unique challenges deep tech founders face, with specialized knowledge including biomedical engineering/med tech, advanced materials & manufacturing, and more. They also know first-hand what it takes to build strong co-founder dynamics between technical and non-technical leaders.

The Emera ideaHUB journey maps across 3 phases

We offer product design sprints and access to our workspaces for idea-stage founders with foundational entrepreneurship knowledge in ideaDESIGN. We help founders take their concepts to operational prototype in our 10-month, immersive ideaBUILD program, with a dedicated Venture Manager to enable your progress. And we incubate founders for two-year terms in our ideaBRIDGE Residency. Residents work with a HUB Venture Coach: a single point of contact to help you navigate the road to commercialization as well as the many resources available in our region, and in tech ecosystems around the world.



The HUB is unique in Atlantic Canada’s innovation ecosystem

We provide start-ups the SPACE to create, the RESOURCES to build, and the EXPERTISE to fuel your growth.

If you are a deep tech early-stage entrepreneur, contact us to start your journey. If you are an experienced entrepreneur or industry expert who wants to collaborate with our founders or meet technical co-founders for your next venture, we would love to explore working together. 

We are a proud collaborator in the Atlantic Canada startup ecosystem. Together we offer resources and connections through Startup Atlantic.

Reach the HUB

For early-stage deep tech innovators, this is the space to create.

Contact us today – we’re excited to hear your story.