Urgent Career Secures Series A Funding From iNovia Capital
Builds on disruptive technology for assessing sales, account management, and business development professionals.
NEW YORK, NY – August 20, 2009. iNovia Capital, a Montreal-based manager of seed and early stage venture capital funds, today announced its investment 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," said 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 analyze 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 behavior. The company's data-driven assessments bring measured analytics to real-world applications in screening, hiring, and management of sales, account management, and business development professionals.
"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,” said 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."
About iNovia Capital
iNovia provides venture capital to entrepreneurs who transform innovations into successful companies. The team is comprised of sector experts in information technology, life sciences, and clean tech. In addition, iNovia’s extensive network of industry and academic partners provides portfolio companies with unique access to intellectual property. iNovia has $160M under management across two seed and early stage funds. For more information, visit www.inoviacapital.com or follow iNovia on Twitter at http://twitter.com/iNovia
About Urgent Career
Urgent Career is a pioneer in the use of computational linguistics and algorithms for the assessment of sales professionals. The company’s patent pending ALPE™ technology digitally deconstructs conversations into thousands of data points that are algorithmically measured on 32 key dimensions of sales compatibility. The Urgent Career service is free to sales, business development and account management professionals; sales organizations engage Urgent Career via a performance based hiring model or a licensing subscription. For more information, visit www.urgentcareer.com or follow Urgent Career on Twitter at http://twitter.com/UrgentCareer
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CONTACT:
For Urgent Career:
Lauren Gilchrist
Lauren@urgentgroup.com
646.237.3402
For iNovia:
Angela Hibbs
Ahibbs@inoviacapital.com
514.982.2251 x300
