The big news about Qimple isn’t merely that it’s closing a $600,000 funding round when it’s barely a year old. It’s the dream team of investors and advisers that the online recruitment company has assembled.
Moncton’s Qimple, which graduated from the Launch36 accelerator in June, makes the hiring process easier for both recruiters and applicants due to its applicant tracking system and proprietary candidate-scoring tool. It spent the autumn beta-testing the system with more than 30 companies and 1,500 applicants, and has now launched the product to the public.
“Ever since we gained our momentum by going through Launch36, people have been getting what we’re doing and we’re just seizing every opportunity,” co-founder and CEO Yves Boudreau said in an interview.
Boudreau formed the company about a year ago with lead developer Benoit Bourque, with the goal of helping employers find the best candidate for open positions among the roughly 1,000 job boards in the market. They brought on product manager Aaron Lewis early this year and set out to launch the product and raise equity financing.
The company has landed funding commitments of $150,000 from BDC Capital, the venture capital arm of the Business Development Bank of Canada, and $100,000 from the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation. And there is an impressive roster of angel investors who have placed money into the funding round.
They include Dan Martell, founder of Clarity in Moncton and an internationally recognized expert in startup methodology; Patrick Hankinson, CEO of Compilr, a Halifax startup that exited last spring; and Sanjay Singhal, the CEO of Toronto’s audiobooks.com, the world’s second-largest provider of audio books.
As if that’s not enough expertise, Ben Yoskovitz, the vice-president of product at the Toronto startup VarageSale and co-author of the book Lean Analytics, has joined Qimple’s board of advisers.
“I’m really, really excited about the people we’ve brought in as investors because they’re really high calibre,” said Boudreau. “They’re not just bringing money.”
Qimple now has $400,000 in committed investors and may close its $600,000 round soon. Boudreau added that the company is in discussions with a leading Canadian venture capital company.
The Canadian technology publication Techvibes recently named Qimple one of the 20 most promising startups in the country, and Boudreau just spent two weeks in San Francisco to try to gauge how his company stacks up against the best tech companies in the world.
It was a tall order because there are a lot of tech startups targeting the recruitment market, and it’s hard to get noticed.
But some of the leaders in Silicon Valley took the time to meet Boudreau.
He said he learned two things: people are impressed with the simplicity of Qimple’s user interface, and his three-member team has developed a product that can compete with much larger operations.
“Every move has paid off for us for the most part,” said Boudreau, looking back at the last year.
“The fact that we’re in a space that is considered crowded, it’s just (motivating us to) continue to turn cynics into believers.”
Disclaimer: Entrevestor receives financial support from government agencies that support startup companies in Atlantic Canada. The sponsoring agencies play no role in determining which companies and individuals are featured in this column, nor do they review columns before they are published.
