Garage Canada invests $2.5M into Lure Media (10)
Lure Media has raised $2.5 million from Garage Technology Ventures Canada yesterday.
Lure Media Group was until yesterday a company providing media, marketing and technical services to the design industry. With the new funds, they have acquired the intellectual property and assets of Impact IS, a company which provided business automation software for design firms and design manufacturers. In their new website, Lure Media Group rebrands now themselves as a provider of software. They also announced they will use the new funds to launch a new SCM software for the industry, name ETERIORS. Impact IS and Lure Media are both headquartered in Montreal, but had offices in New York City and in San Francisco.
Margit Léger, founder and head of Impact IS, will be charmain for Lure Media, while Gordon Haight, former president of the Red Herring Magazine, will be the new president and CEO for the company.
It’s curious to see in the same day the acquisition and the funding. I guess Impact IS had the product and technical expertise, while Lure Media had the right people to execute the business plan. You should also notice that Garage Canada previously invested in Standoutjobs and in Praized Media, both aiming consumers, while this will target businesses (or B2B like one my friend likes to call it).
Garage is out of Standoutjobs, no?…didn’t the founders back out and did not want to do business with Garage anymore??
Mathieu: that would really suprise me. where have you heard of this?
Rumor has it Garage has pulled the plug on this one.
Anyone know why?
Well did some digging, rumor is confirmed Garage had pulled the plug on Lure Media (website is down).
Yeah, Garage has closed LureMedia according to what I had heard.
Also it is correct that Standout Jobs did not complete the financing with Garage Canada (which has been covered previously on Ben Yoskovitz’s blog and with the announcement of new financing from iNovia capital)
Austin Hill,
thanks for the comment. It seemed there was some problems with the founder.
I am thinking though Garage Canada should have foreseen this through the due diligence process.
Well here are some details, about this mess:
Apparently the founder (Margit Leger, according to the press release) had many skeletons in her closet, she “lured” Garage into her trap and it looks like getting VC was her exit strategy, a way to get someone else to assume and pay for her bad deeds.
I looks like Garage took a real liking on this one, at least we can hope they learned a lesson and will hopefully make better decisions in the future. Indeed simple due diligence would have saved them 2.5M…
“better decisions” => I haven’t seen any other investment decision coming from Garage Canada since they opened shop in Canada, apart from standoutjobs (which was not completed) and apart from lure media (which was pulled out)… so it might be the time to ask question about their (in)activity
by the way, MTLtechdude, are you an investor? an analyst? a journalist?
Inactivity? Heri, you made me smile today.
HRALLOY
http://www.hralloy.com/pr03_2007.php
Praised
http://montrealtechwatch.com/2007/09/12/praized-gets-1m-funding-from-garage-canada/
Group IV Semiconductor
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-32533979_ITM
Just to name a few.. as far as I can tell they are quite active.
Why are you asking what I do? To be honest I have nothing to hide. I am what some people call a serial entrepreneur and have been in the biz since you were is diapers.
I rather not say what I am doing now lets just say I am in stealth mode to use the current jargon. My connection to this is that have close ties to some of the people involved and wanted to make sure that this was not swept under the rug.
It is not all rose water and sunshine, there are scoundrels out there and people who are honest. VC’s WILL make mistakes and hopefully they will get better at what they do, they are not saints. They have their agenda and it is quite simple they are only driven by greed there is nothing philanthropical in what they do.
(:
MT
HI guys,
I am sure that you guys have been following this more than I do. Can someone please direct me to somewhere where I can find the full story on this.
Thank you.
RN
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