TransparentCareer
Deal: $850,000
Investors: Hyde Park Angels led the round with participation from Pritzker Group, Origin Ventures, OCA Ventures, Hyde Park Venture Partners, General Catalyst’s Rough Draft Ventures, Rob Biederman of Catalant (formerly HourlyNerd), and other unnamed angel investors.
What they do: TransparentCareer (previously called TransparentC) helps students and job-seekers access reliable crowdsourced data on compensation and career trajectories. To join the platform, users must input data about their past jobs, salaries, and work satisfaction. Then they can search information on jobs, companies and industries, and view their likely compensation based on their background. The aim is to build up the data so people can do "longitudinal" searches that help someone craft a career path, rather than just find their next job.
Since launching their first platform for MBA students in March (called Transparent MBA), they've amassed 250,000 data points, representing over 3,000 employers and hundreds of universities. The startup currently has partnerships with 20 universities and on-boarded 25 percent of current MBA students. They offer schools "insight guidebooks" with compensation stats broken down by geography and industry, as well as guides for negotiating a startup job offer. Upcoming product features will allow users to see where their job offer lies on the compensation distribution.
"Most platforms have been generalist," said cofounder Mitch Kirby. "We’re trying fit the needs of individuals and make our platform a lot more personalized. As a result, I think a lot of people feel they can trust our data more than some other platforms."
As of NVC they had made about $14,000 in revenue from partnerships, but since have been primarily focused on growth and product, said cofounder Kevin Marvinac. Next up they're looking to expand to undergraduate students and business professionals, then eventually other disciplines such as law and engineering. They're also hiring engineers.
Other details: TransparentCareer was founded by University of Chicago Booth students Kirby and Marvinac, and they won UChicago's 2016 New Venture Challenge. They laid the groundwork for their seed round during their time in school, Kirby said.
"Throughout school I got to know a ton of the local VCs, by taking their classes and going to events," he said. "When we started this company we had already built a relationship with them, so it was easier to get meetings with them to tell them a bit about what we were working on."
