Montreal's Chronogolf closes $1.5 million funding round

Montreal’s Chronogolf, developers of a golf management platform that facilitates reservation booking and communication between golf courses and players, has picked up a new $1.5 million round of funding, led by iNovia Capital, with an assist from Telegraph Hill Capital, Anges Québec and BDC.
This new funding, which Chronogolf will use to accelerate its expansion, brings Chronogolf’s fundraising total to $2.9 million, with $1.2 million previously invested by iNovia and $300,000 by Anges Québec in 2014.
Founded in 2012 Guillaume Jacquet and Jean-David Saint-Martin, initially only 10 golf courses adopted Chronogolf’s online reservation platform, a number which has grown to 200 today.
Those initial 10, however, were sold on the product before the company’s founders had even written a line of code.
“We went to Expo Golf in Laval with a few sheets of paper and a well-prepared pitch and managed to sign up three golf courses,” Jacquet told Les Affaires. “After that, we had no choice but to develop the product.”
Full-time investors themselves at Teralys Capital, the founders started working with a programmer so that they could hold on to their day jobs, which they eventually quit in December 2013 to work full-time on Chronogolf.
In developing Chronogolf, the co-founders realized that golf course management was a bit like point-of-sale systems 10 years ago, managed primarily on Excel spreadsheets and ripe for innovation, a fact confirmed by Jacquet’s brother, who is a golf instructor.
Today headquartered in Montreal, with offices in San Francisco and Paris, Chronogolf has eight employees, 220,000 active users and has been used to book 2.5 million rounds of golf.
While Chronogolf has one large competitor, GolfNow from the U.S. which is now used on 6,000 golf courses, the American app is largely absent from international markets, where Chronogolf has made inroads, particularly in France and Morroco.