The Muse Career Site Raises $1.2M
The Muse, a site that tries to help people figure out what they want to do with their lives, has raised seed funding.
Joe Lin Daily Muse co-founders Alex Cavoulacos, Kathryn Minshew and Melissa McCreery
The Muse — formerly known as The Daily Muse — is a hybrid career advice and job search service focused on roles in marketing, sales and engineering. “It’s not just a job hunt, it’s a career hunt,” is how co-founder and CEO Kathryn Minshew puts it.
The site now has 700,000 monthly active users. And it’s making money. A wide range of companies, many of them from the tech industry, pay as much as $60,000 per year to be included on the platform.
The Muse was founded by a trio of young women, none of them technical, making them an extremely rare fit for the Y Combinator startup program in California, which has become a mecca for ambitious coders, who often tend to be dudes.
After finishing Y Combinator, Minshew and her co-founders, Alex Cavoulacos and Melissa McCreery, moved most of the nine-person company back to New York — another play that ran counter to Silicon Valley startup culture.
(Also, it’s not like being a “non-technical” person is a genetic decree; Cavoulacos and McCreery now code for the site.)
The Muse’s seed funding comes from investors including 500 Startups, Great Oaks Ventures, Eric Ries, Gordon Crawford, Cathie Black and Thomas Lehrman.
