Remember Graduateland? You should, they’re the People’s Choice winner at 2011’s Arctic15. We haven’t covered them in too long, but they’re still killing their niche of a job platform for recent college graduates.
The economic crisis in Europe has only strengthened their proposition. Currently 23% of recent college graduates are unemployed, and employers still have difficulty connecting to the best candidates. Today they announce they have raised a round of funding from Accelerace Invest.
The exact details of the round have not been announced, but CEO Patrick Lund tells us that the round runs “in the millions in Danish Kroner, but in the thousands in Euros”. Since being founded in 2010 Graduateland has relied on organic growth, which has resulted in 30 employees, 140,000 users, and 5,000 customers including names like Google, Apple, Novo Nordisk.
With the funding, they plan to boost up sales within and outside Scandinavia, where they hold the majority of their university partnerships. And on the product side, they plan to finally go through their portal with new time and recourses to properly test how users can best interact with the product. “The way that we built it initially is we had a lot of things we want to do, but now we have the time to go through every feature and test that we’ve optimized everything.”
”Graduateland is probably the company in Accelerace’s history that has come the furthest without
external funding. This is solely due to their ability to incorporate sales into the business at a very
early stage. Something a lot of other startups could learn from. With such a starting point they won’t
have to convince investors, that they can make money on their services, but rather how much” Jesper
Knudsen from Accelerace explains.
