Victoria’s Checkfront has closed a $9.3 million Series A round led by Framework Venture Partners that included PenderFund Capital, Conconi Growth Partners and Royal Bank of Canada.
Checkfront was initially conceived by co-founders Jason Morehouse and Grant Jurgeneit to help frustrated tour service operators better manage their bookings online.
While large companies had systems for centralizing reservations and taking payments, many tourism and rental companies were still struggling to manage bookings with e-mail forms, spreadsheets, and clunky software.
Checkfront’s booking management platform solved those problems.
Morehouse announced the funding round on Checkfront’s blog today, “First and foremost, I want to say how proud I am of our team. Against all the odds, we have reached a new milestone together. We truly have something unique here, and I am so grateful to work with such an incredible bunch of people every day”.
“When we started Checkfront — before we had a mission statement and core values — our only goal was to create something meaningful that could help other entrepreneurs. All we knew is that we wanted to build a company we’d want to work at, in an industry we were passionate about”.
Bootstrapped until today, Checkfront now employs 83 in British Columbia’s capital.
Their booking management platform is used by over 5,000 operators in 128 countries, accounting for over $5.5 billion in online bookings.
Andrew Lugsdin from Framework will be joining the Checkfront board along with Framework’s Byron Thom and PenderFund’s Kendall McArdle as observers.
Victoria’s Rasool Rayani and Andrew Wilkinson were early angel investors in Checkfront.