This “A-Round” financing is unusual, in that it was completed without any involvement from Venture Capital firms or other financial institutions. The funds are being used to accelerate the market entry with Jostle’s unique enterprise software offering.
“All our investors are private individuals that believe in what we are doing. Most are strong business leaders that recognize the power of teamwork, culture and clarity,” commented Jostle CEO Brad Palmer. “Our People Engagement® platform presents an entirely new approach, appealing to leaders with operational experience, who immediately see the huge potential to our simple approach to fostering teamwork and connecting employees.”
Jostle’s cloud-based platform helps organizations around the globe enable their employees and drive their culture, in simple and engaging ways. It competes with conventional intranets (internal website portals) and emerging enterprise social platforms like Yammer and Jive. Unlike its competitors, Jostle’s People Engagement® platform is work relevant, people-centric and employee engaging.
Jostle has raised 4.6 M$ to date, all from private individuals. It has 52 shareholders, including most employees and all Directors. “The success of this investment round was due to the targeting of qualified investors who understood risk,” said Gary Yurkovich, Managing Partner of Espresso Capital. 84% of Jostle’s investors come from a risk profession, such as property development, medicine or oil and gas.
“Surprisingly, conventional ‘angel’ investors are also missing from this large financing round,” commented Mr. Yurkovich. “It foreshadows the growing importance of crowd-sourced funding—create something truly innovative and directly target individuals that will resonate with the unique value it provides.”
Mr. Yurkovich and Mr. Palmer are part of a panel discussing, “Not The Usual Suspects' - A Look At Conventional and Non-conventional Angel Investment” at the Vancouver Enterprise Forum (VEF) meeting on January 20th. VEF will look at the latest trends in Angel Investment, as well as reviewing the latest in conventional angel activity. The panel will discuss some of the new Angel funds recently announced in Vancouver and some non-conventional angel investment. Visit www.vef.org/events for further details and registration.
About Jostle Corporation
Jostle’s cloud-based People Engagement® platform is the next-generation intranet that helps organizations around the globe enable their employees and drive their culture, in simple and engaging ways. Jostle’s innovative approach results from an experienced team that brings three essential ingredients together – enterprise leadership, user experience design, and web-enabled software architecture. To share in our magic please visit us online atwww.jostle.me. Based in Vancouver, Canada, Jostle’s enterprise platform does what intranets always dreamed of doing, but never could.
