Workforce optimization cloud platform Voilà! has raised $13.75 million CAD this month in a Series A round.

This funding was led by first-time investor Walter Ventures, with follow-on participation from Voila!’s seed round investors, Desjardin Capital and Investissement Québec. All of the $13.75 million CAD was equity financing, bringing Voila!’s total funding to $16.75 million CAD across two rounds.

The funding will bolster the company’s growth as it plans to combat labour shortages and expand across Canada and into the United States. Voilà expects to hire for more than 50 additional jobs in software and business development within the next two years.

The company told BetaKit that it is looking to fill at least 20 of the 50 positions as of this month. According to Martin Ouellet, founder and CEO of Voilà!, it has made great progress filling many of these positions, but some remain vacant.

Voilà! was launched in 2018 by the same team who created Taleo in 1996, a human resources (HR) software bought by Oracle in 2012 for $1.9 billion USD. Taleo remains one of the world’s largest applicant tracking systems, with over 5,000 customers in 180 countries after its humble beginnings in Québec.

Voilà! closed its seed funding round in late 2019 of nearly $3 million CAD. Since then, it claims to have maintained an annual growth rate of more than 300 percent.

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The company did this by offering a platform for scheduling, centralizing communications, and driving engagement and profit for users to clients such as Cook It, SPAR Inc., and various players in the Québec health network. The company claims its service can decrease absenteeism by 35 percent.

Voilà!’s expansion comes at a time when more than one in two Canadian small businesses are affected by labour shortages, hampering their ability to drive production and sales growth according to a report from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB). Quebec is home to Canada’s highest labour shortage at 64 percent, as well as the headquarters for Voilà! and the bulk of its investors.

“Regular approaches to the labour shortage tend to look at a headcount level for a set of tasks,” said Ouellet in an email to Betakit. “Voilà! provides users and managers alike the power to democratize work shifts, attendances, and payroll to maximize the overall workforce to a granular level often overseen by the headcount approach,” he said. “Sometimes we don’t need more workers, we just need to allow them to work more easily and efficiently.”

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