Gemba Software Solutions, a Saint John IT startup that helps big business employees navigate their company’s operations, has received $1.5 million in funding to help it spin out from parent company Innovatia.

The New Brunswick Innovation Foundation provided half the funding, highlighting a recent emphasis in the innovation agency’s work – helping established New Brunswick companies launch startups. The remaining $750,000 in equity funding came from Innovatia itself.

Gemba Software has created a Software-as-a-Service product that addresses the problem of multinational corporations being so big that employees can’t find their way through all the divisions or understand what they do.

The company’s ProcedureFlow software provides visual process maps that offer new employees and others the ability to quickly navigate their way through the company’s operations. The product, which features small hyperlinked flowcharts, reduces training time, delivers a consistent message to employees, and lets team members update the content.

"Gemba's customers have been able to decrease cross training time by over 75 percent and reduce the time it takes for new employees to become competent by 50 percent," said Gemba's CEO Daniella Degrace in a statement. "Every industry struggles with documentation and maintenance of standard operations procedures. We help centralize procedures, make them easy to follow, and engage the entire organization in keeping them up-to-date."

In an interview this morning, she added that the money, which should last about 18 months, will help the company increase staff from its current five employees to about 10.

“The money is helping us to actually develop the market,” said Degrace. “We are using the money to help us expand the sales capability and to continue to develop our product.”

Added NBIF Chief Executive Calvin Milbury in the statement: “As more companies move to mobile and stay-at-home work environments, Gemba's solution has already attracted a number of multinational corporations." He said the clients include New Jersey-based hotel chain Wyndham Worldwide, Fredericton IT company Bulletproof, Saint John-based Mariner Partners, Enbridge Gas New Brunswick and Moncton healthcare company HealthConnect.

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Milbury has been saying in conversation lately that a recent priority for NBIF is to work with established companies to spin out startups that can scale technology developed by the larger group. The thinking is that companies not only have the expertise to innovate but they also understand their markets and have the contacts that can lead to sales.

There some history in this process as one of the recent successes in the NBIF portfolio, RtTech Software of Moncton, was spun out of ADM Systems Engineering of Saint John.

Now it is tapping another tech-minded Saint John company in Innovatia, which is one of North America’s largest documentation and training outsourcers. The company has been around for more than a decade and has a staff of more than 300 people in offices in Canada, the United States and India.

"As NBIF continues its expansion, this is exactly the kind of investments we are looking for to add to our already well-established startup investment activities," says Milbury. "If an existing New Brunswick company develops an innovation that can benefit other industries, putting the intellectual property into a new company and growing that company is something we want to encourage and support."