It was only a few years ago that I met Kathryn Minshew, Alexandra Cavoulacos, and Melissa McCreery through Y Combinator. They were three women who set out to make a career site for other young women like them with rich, photo-intensive profiles of employers featuring interviews with their teams.
Today that site, The Muse, sees more than 3 million active users per month and Minshew says the company feels poised to compete against destinations like Glassdoor, Monster.com, and LinkedIn for their youngest users. So they’ve raised $10 million in Series A funding from Aspect Ventures, the firm that Accel’s lone female general partner Theresia Gouw left to create with Jennifer Fonstad, DBL Partners and QED.
The company’s other seed investors include YC, 500 Startups, Tyra Banks, Great Oaks Ventures, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Anjula Acharia-Bath, Chris Herrmannsen, the former CEO of Monster.com Europe, former Toys R Us CEO Mike Goldstein, and the former chairman of Hearst Magazines Cathie Black.
With that funding, Minshew says the company expects to hire 25 people by year-end. They’ll also want to add personalization to the site and new products that help with skills development. (That’s an area that LinkedIn recently got into with the $1.5 billion deal to buy Lynda.)
While the site does lean toward female users, it’s still about 65-to-35 percent women to men. They also have a younger demographic with an average age of 29 to LinkedIn’s 47 and more than half of The Muse’s user base is non-white. The site handles career advice, how-to guides and the original employer video and photo profiles.
The revenue model is still largely the same with employers paying monthly subscription fees to access The Muse’s audience. Their video office tours try to give potential employees an insider’s view of what it looks like to work for companies like Facebook and Uber or Adidas and The Gap.
