Today I’m happy to announce that we’ve closed our first round of funding, raising 1 million (CAD) in investment from a group of local entrepreneurs and angel investors.
Grant Jurgeneit and I started Checkfront back in 2010. We had a simple idea to provide a modern option for businesses to accept bookings online and manage their operations from anywhere. It grew initially from our own personal frustrations with trying to book vacations and activities for our young families. E-mail forms, clunky reservations pages, and endless phone calls for a weekend trip seemed crazy. We knew that operators were equally as frustrated with expensive, poorly supported and legacy booking systems. We took our experience with e-commerce and travel tourism and set out to build Checkfront. Wow, did we have a lot of work ahead of us!
Today we are a team of 20 and process over $350 million USD in online bookings annually. We have over 2000 paying businesses accepting bookings online in 80 countries. We’ve grown our revenue 100% year over year since we launched.
This round of funding will be used to further our product, grow our team and build strategic partnerships.
Of course, none of this would be possible without the backing of our customers. Thanks for your continued support and we look forward to another great year.
Onwards and upwards,
-Jason
Co-founder, CEO
Checkfront Customers March 2015
Checkfront Raises $1 Million in Funding to Accelerate its Multi-Channel Booking System
(VICTORIA, BC) March 10th 2015 — Checkfront Inc, a leading provider of online cloud booking solutions, announced today that it has closed its first round of funding and raised $1 million in investments. Checkfront plans to use the funds to accelerate its rapid growth, pursue strategic partnerships, and grow the team.
“Checkfront’s goal is to take the hassle out of managing bookings and reservations online” says Jason Morehouse, Co-founder. “Customers who come to us have usually reached the point where using outdated software or pen and paper bookings is hurting their business. Overbookings, high administration and lost sales is a big pain point for operators — that means they can’t focus on running their business. What gets us up in the morning is knowing we have a solution to help them.”
The financing was lead by Rasool Rayani (Metalogix) and includes a local group of angel investors and successful entrepreneurs.
“We have an all-star group of investors and there was exceptional interest in this deal.” said Rayani. “Checkfront has made great progress establishing their leadership in an underserved market. We’re excited to work closely with them in this next stage of growth”.
“To date we’ve been funded by our customers.” said Grant Jurgeneit, Co-founder. “It’s forced us to pay extraordinary attention to their needs while staying profitable. We have no plans on changing that, and this round of funding will be used to further our customer-centric approach to building and selling our online booking solution”.
The group of investors includes Geordie Henderson (Hootsuite), Hannes Blum (AbeBooks/Amazon), Andrew Wilkinson (MetaLab), Bruce Livingstone (Stocksy), David Arnsdorf (Neverblue), Matt Harris & Brad Van Vugt (SendWithUs), Rajiv Khaneja (Sparklit), Todd Dunlop (RingPartner), Tobyn Sowden (Redbrick Media), Shaun Jamieson (SilkStart), Ben Fox (TapStream), Julien Sellgren (Metalogix), Ed Low (Western Foods), Steven Myhill-Jones & David Stevenson (Latitude Geographics), Randy Greencorn (Chatterblock), and Brandon Ellis (Checkfront).
Checkfront has processed over $350,000,000 (USD) in online bookings in the last twelve months, and has seen a 100% revenue growth year-over-year since launching in 2010. It provides a highly flexible booking and reservation system that can operate on almost any website, and offers over fifty free integrations into complementary services including Xero, WordPress, Mailchimp, TripAdvisor, Quickbooks and Stripe.
About Checkfront: Checkfront Inc is the provider of innovative cloud-based online booking software used by businesses in more than 80 countries around the world. With a team of 20 operating out of Vancouver and Victoria BC, Checkfront is used by a wide variety of tour providers, accommodation managers, and rental businesses.
For more information or to try a free demo of Checkfront, please contact Stephanie Brachat at stephanie@checkfront.com or visit www.checkfront.com.
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