Portfolium Raises $1.2M to Help College Students Land That First Job

Portfolium, a Web-based social network for students preparing to start their careers, said it has closed on $1.2 million in new venture funding, bringing its total funding to $2.1 million since 2013, when the San Diego-based startup was founded.

The investors are New York’s University Ventures, an investment firm focused exclusively on global higher education (and not to be confused with student-managed University Ventures in Salt Lake City, UT); the new angel group Seed San Diego; and Vertical Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley fund that oversees the UC San Diego-centric Triton Technology Fund.

As I reported earlier this year, founding CEO Adam Markowitz started Portfolium mostly to help students create an online profile that would showcase their academic skills, projects, experience, and community service for prospective employers. The startup has expanded since then, at least conceptually, to become more of a career readiness network—connecting students from over 2,000 universities with prospective employers.

The startup intends to use the new funding at least partly to re-imagine the near-graduation process of campus recruiting. Referring to an estimated $19 billion that companies spend each year on campus recruiting programs, Portfolium says it’s working to accelerate that recruiting effort by helping companies quickly come up with a short list of qualified student job candidates.

As part of that effort, Portfolium said it has partnered with eQuest, a San Francisco-based job-posting service, to help students connect directly with employers. This is a busy field in edtech that has gone through some consolidation; see companies like Collegefeed (acquired by AfterCollege), MyEdu (bought by Blackboard), and Smarterer (bought by Pluralsight).

“We believe Portfolium has a massive opportunity to establish the first competency marketplace for higher education, allowing students and employers to find one another on the basis of student work, and the competencies that can be derived from that work,” said University Ventures’ Ryan Craig in the statement from the company.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.