Beyond the Rack raises $12million

MontrealStartup is reporting that their portfolio company, Beyond the Rack, has secured a new round of financing with BDC Venture Capital and Highland Capital Partners.

I have been watching Beyond the Rack since Montreal Startup’s initial investment, but I had no idea they were getting so much traction. The company is just under two years old and is led by Yona Shtern, who was an employee at My Virtual Model, one of the bubble-era startups that swept through Montreal. More recently Yona was the Chief Marketing Officer at Ice.com.

The Montreal Startup team recently secured the first commitments for Founder Fuel, which will be a larger sister-fund to Montreal Startup. Their early stage investment in Beyond the Rack will hopefully make it easier to secure the remaining commitments for the new fund, and this puts the team squarely in the top-tier of early and seed stage investors in Canada along with Extreme Ventures and Scott Pelton at Growthworks.

This also represents one of the most significant follow-on rounds for a Canadian micro-fund. The fact that BDC Venture Capital was able to participate and keep some of that action in-country is nice.

StartupDrinks – YYZ, YUL, YYT, YQM, YYC, YHZ, YFC, YSJ

Friendly neighbourhood reminder that tomorrow, June 30, 2010, is StartupDrinks (well tonight in Saskatoon & Regina). On June 30, 2010 you can join entrepretreneurs in:

Jevon is going to be hanging out in Halifax. Ray is going to be in Montreal. Jonas, Bryan and I are planning on being at Grace O’Malleys (aka Granuaile), 14 Duncan St, Toronto, ON.

It’s a great opportunity to get out of the office. To be social. To connect with others that are struggling building companies like you. What will we be talking about? We’ll be talking about “How to grow your traffic from 1k to 35k on $0” and other things. What do you want to talk about?

Here’s

StandoutJobs acquired

A 2nd win in as many days for angel investor Austin Hill, StandoutJobs has been acquired. From Ben Yoskovitz’s blog:

Around 3 years ago I started Standout Jobs with two great guys – Fred Ngo and Austin Hill. We raised money, built a great product, hired an incredible team and worked to build a business. Today I’m very pleased to announce that we’ve sold Standout Jobs.

I can’t name the acquirer at this point in time. I can tell you that I’m very excited to see what they do with Standout Jobs, because I fundamentally believe what we built and the vision we pushed will be standards in the recruitment industry for years to come. Companies that ignore their employer brands and don’t create a quality, interactive, candidate-centric hub on the Web for recruitment will lose.

StandoutJobs has also previously raised capital from iNovia and Montreal Startup.