Vancouver software startup Jostle has followed up successful financing rounds by landing WestJet co-founder Don Bell as its chairman.
Bell has been an investor and director in Jostle since the company was founded in 2009.
Jostle landed $3.1 million in equity investment from private investors in January and has raised a total of $4.6 million to date.
Jostle CEO Brad Palmer told Business in Vancouver April 15 that his core product is a "new kind of intranet."
Palmer said that many people think of intranets as archaic intra-company communication systems that fell by the wayside as the Internet rose in prominence – but most large companies have some platform for employee communication that is not accessible to the general public.
"First-generation intranets didn't work," he said. "It was inherent in the platform because the intranets were focused on content. It's the place where documents go to die. When you're looking for help, you really want a person."
Jostle's platform enables clients' employees to perform searches to find out who in the company has specific knowledge or skills.
The intranets are hosted either on the Jostle website or, if the client requests, it can be linked to another URL.
The 16-employee company's annual revenue is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and sales have doubled in each of the past two quarters, Palmer said.
Some of its clients are:
Omicron;
the City of Port Coquitlam; and
the Share Society.
"We're hiring," Palmer said. "Coders, coders, coders. We're always looking for coders. But, we're building at a steady pace and in a balanced way so always on the technical front but we're also building out the marketing team and the sales team and the operations team in parallel as we grow."
