StandoutJobs raises $2m from iNovia Capital

The news is finally public that StandoutJobs, a Montreal, Quebec company who we mentioned in our earlier post about DEMO08, has raised $2million from iNovia Capital.

With this announcement and their launch at DEMO, StandoutJobs is taking back the veil on their business model. When we first saw them almost a year ago, StandoutJobs looked like a recruiting company that did videos, and we didn’t find it very compelling. I got to hear more a few months ago however over supper with Ben Yoskovitz, and it started to make a lot more sense. StandoutJobs will be providing a SaaS solution to companies that essentially lets them build a complete hiring page that is much more rich and user-focused than the normal “email jobs@company.com”. The pages are fully customizable and seem to be focused on helping the company display much more current and directly useful information to the potential hires. For a more detailed overview, check out this post on Mashable.

iNovia Capital bills itself as a “seed and early-stage venture capital fund” with offices in Alberta (Edmonton and Calgary) as well as Montreal. They seem to be increasingly active with their investments and I am impressed that they took the entire $2million round to themselves, which likely speaks to the solid team that StandoutJobs has in place as well as iNovia’s willingness to get out there and shoulder some risk.

In case you think you are being hit with a case of Deja Vu, you are right: StandoutJobs did previously announce that they had raised funding from Garage Ventures Canada, but this seems to have fallen apart. On the StandoutJobs blog:

“As well, it?s time to announce a bit of news with respect to our financing. Although we announced some time ago that we raised money with Garage Technology Ventures Canada, that did not in fact come to pass. As we got deeper into the process with Garage, it was clear that it was not the best fit for us. We wish Garage the best of luck.”

It seems that whatever came to pass with Garage did not take away from the credibility of StandoutJobs or the team there, as iNovia seems to have quickly seen the opportunity.

Congratulations to everyone at iNovia and StandoutJobs.