iNovia Capital, a Montreal-based manager of seed and early stage venture capital funds, has invested in New-York-based Urgent Career as part of the company’s series A funding round.
iNovia Capital, a Montreal-based manager of seed and early stage venture capital funds, has invested in New-York-based Urgent Career as part of the company’s series A funding round.
Urgent Career seeks to revolutionize the process of finding, screening, and assessing sales talent, in order to fill the void of top-performing sales professionals at companies around the globe.
"Not only as an investor, but also as a business, we appreciate the importance of having great sales talent. Unfortunately, all too often, resources are wasted on ineffective hiring and staffing practices," says John Elton, partner with iNovia. "We back exceptional entrepreneurs who are building game changing technologies. Urgent Career’s founder, Jeff Stewart, has started over a half-dozen companies, which combined employ over 600 people. We’re excited to be involved as an investor and also as a customer via our portfolio companies.’
iNovia’s investment will be instrumental in advancing Urgent Career’s ALPE (Algorithmic Linguistic Profiling Engine) technology, which serves as the driving agent behind the company’s assessments.
Urgent Career’s patent-pending technology uses algorithms to digitally analyse transcribed human speech in order to create a rich candidate profile measuring 32 dimensions of sales compatibility. By deconstructing the language candidates use to describe themselves, Urgent Career is able to quantify elements crucial to employee hiring and management that have traditionally been very difficult to measure, including sales style, experience, workflow preferences and behaviour.
"We are thrilled to have iNovia as a capital partner so that we can continue to revolutionize the way sales talent is assessed, screened and managed,’ says Jeff Stewart, chairman of Urgent Career. ‘Their investment not only will allow us to accelerate the development of our technology but also underscores both the strength of our vision, our business, and the staying power of our offerings. We look forward to the continued collaboration with the iNovia team."
