Capital Injection, Facilitated by B2B SaaS Accelerator L-SPARK, will Enable CareerJSM to Expand Across North America
Ottawa and Toronto, ON, June 7, 2016 – Job search management start-up CareerJSM has plans to revolutionize the way students transition from education to employment after closing their seed funding round with Terry Matthews’ private investment fund, Wesley Clover, MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund and Hello Ventures. This injection of capital, facilitated by B2B SaaS Accelerator L-SPARK, will enable CareerJSM to develop their Job Search Platform with the goal of reducing post-graduate unemployment.
“CareerJSM’s platform to assist the job seeker represents a tremendous opportunity. Their initial focus on graduating students helps to solve the pressing issue of youth unemployment, and, in doing so, increases the ROI for post-secondary education”, stated Lance Laking, Investment Director with MaRS IAF. “We are excited to be part of their financing round.”
The average job search for a post-graduate spans six months. Much like a sales cycle, the job search process involves opportunity prospecting, market research, establishing relationships, and securing the opportunity. CareerJSM is the first platform focused on helping job seekers manage the entire workflow of a job search across all hiring platforms. The platform offers customized alerts and notifications about jobs to apply to while keeping track of next steps during the job search. Users will also receive automated research to aid in interview preparation.
Recently, co-founders Jeffrey Doucet and Tristan Toye launched the software across Ontario, exposing the tool to more than 70,000 registered users at twenty partner institutions. Over the next few months CareerJSM will begin their roll out the product to additional post-secondary institutions across North America.
“Ever since we launched CareerJSM on our platform, we have seen usage growth averaging over 20% week over week and are now starting to collect compelling user data about job search outcomes.” – Mark Patterson, Executive Director, Magnet
The company expects to use the funds to continue to build out the team and the Job Search Management platform. In sequence with this funding round, the company is excited to announce the appointment of Peter Becke (General Partner, Hello Ventures) and Paul Chiarelli (President, Wesley Clover) to the Board of Directors of CareerJSM.
“Since we launched L-SPARK about 18 months ago, their focus on mentoring, connecting and accelerating the most viable enterprise SaaS companies possible has not wavered,” stated Terry Matthews, Chairman of Wesley Clover. “CareerJSM is the latest positive example of this. The market focus and solution offering the company has embraced are solid. We are pleased to be participating in this next round of funding to enable their continued growth.”
For further information checkout www.careerjsm.com.
About CareerJSM
CareerJSM is the first job search management platform, built by two young entrepreneurs in Toronto, Canada, who were frustrated with the challenges their peers faced transitioning from education to employment. The product allows the job seeker to track every job that they are applying to on any platform, and then delivers customized notifications to the job seeker based on their activity engaging them in a structured and productive job search. Currently, the product is sold to universities and colleges to help their students find gainful employment upon graduation. Visit us at www.careerjsm.com.
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About Hello Ventures
Founded by Scott Lake, Hello Ventures invests in exceptional, coachable and capable entrepreneurs who have an extraordinary determination to lead and succeed. Hello Ventures comes in early and invests in long term trusted relationships with entrepreneurs and likeminded investors.
About IAF
The Investment Accelerator Fund (@MaRSIAF) provides seed funding to qualified emerging companies in Ontario. As a critical component of the Ontario Network of Entrepreneurs (ONE), the IAF supports the launch and development of innovative companies in Ontario’s priority sectors of advanced materials and manufacturing, information technology, cleantech and life sciences.
About L-SPARK
L-SPARK is the only Canadian Incubator and Accelerator that focuses exclusively on Enterprise SaaS and cloud start-ups. With established relationships with key venture capital firms, angel investors, and the investment community at large, the goal is to support a deal flow of fundable Enterprise SaaS startup companies in Canada. Visit us at www.l-spark.com, connect with us on linkedin.com/l-spark or follow us on Twitter @LSPARKGlobal.
About Wesley Clover
With more than 100 firms to date being founded or funded, either exclusively or in partnership with other investors, by our Chairman Terry Matthews, the current Wesley Clover portfolio consists of private and public firms focused on next-generation Cloud and SaaS applications, hardware and services for fixed/mobile communications, video collaboration, customer engagement, analytics and more.