Gisborne entrepreneur Candice Pardy is thrilled with the funding support she has received for her app linking seasonal horticulture workers with employers.

Pardy, the founder of the Maori tech business Jobloads, has received about $700,000 in commitments to funding from angel investors in the past couple of months to start to build the online marketplace for seasonal workers and growers of horticultural produce like kiwifruit and pipfruit.

The catalyst for funding was the support she received from SheEO, a community of “radically generous women” supporting entrepreneurial women.

It is a global community started in Canada in 2015 and now in other countries including New Zealand where it was launched in 2017 by former Telecom New Zealand chief executive and My Food Bay co-founder Theresa Gattung.

In October five ventures were selected for the SheEO 2020 venture round, providing the support of interest-free loans for five-years, business mentoring and the expertise of a global network of women.

Jobloads was one of the five.

Pardy said it was a “hard slog” trying to raise funding for her business idea, and she questioned whether it was the colour of her skin. Then SheEO came on board. She received an interest-free $60,000 loan from the organisation.

“The loan was great but it was more than the loan for me. It was getting connected in with a lot of these wahine who believed in what I was doing as well.”

Gattung also suggested a follow-on round of funding through SheEO. So activators were invited to invest and that raised $300,000. Pardy then connected with Ice Angels director Kirsty Reynolds leading to Ice Angels investing, too.

“It snowballed from there”.

Startmate Accelerator, a group of Australian investors, put in $75,000 for a small equity stake. Following her speaking at The Angel Summit 2020 Jobloads received $100,000 funding from Robbie Tindall of K1W1, an investment company owned by his father Sir Stephen Tindall, founder of The Warehouse.

And Jobloads also received early stage funding from American investor Rob Vickery. Vickery and his family have moved to New Zealand.

“I pitched to him while he was in isolation.” Most of the investors she had not met face-to-face, but via Zoom video meetings.

All up, she is looking to raise up to $1.2 million. In February, she will be speaking to the ArcAngels and Ice Angels investor networks in New Zealand to raise more funding to keep building the business which has five staff members.

Jobloads was focussed on labour shortages in the Bay of Plenty and Hawke’s Bay where the labour problems were greatest. It was offering corporate growers “Jobloads Light” for six months, a free service to get as many people using the service as possible. It would allow then to load up all their jobs on to the Jobloads platform.

Later it would launch the paid services on Jobloads.

The difference between their service and job bulletin boards was that Jobloads prescreened the workforce, Pardy said.

Workers filled in a form online providing basic information and then Jobloads called the workers to gather more information like their right to work, their visa, IRD and bank account numbers and their experience.

Jobloads could streamline the matching of jobs and workers and make it transparent. Through a ride-share service it would also bring workers to the growers.

And it would help workers and growers by-pass the “cowboy” contractors who hired the workforce and contracted the workers to growers, Pardy said.

February and March were the busiest months when the demand for labour was greatest as apples and kiwifruit were being harvested at the same time. Some corporate growers would be looking for 3000 workers and all were fighting for the same workers, she said.

Pardy said the link with SheEo had been fantastic. “It’s this radical generosity they talk about. In Maori we have it as Manaakitanga. It’s the same thing. I really resonated with that.”

It was hugely advantageous for entrepreneurs to find the right investors, and she was “truly grateful” for the investment she had received.

She had come from “generations of poverty” and could empathise with the workforce she was trying to help. She is from a family of eight children where making ends meet was a struggle. She is the first in her family to go to university, fly on a plane and do many other things.

“I just know that more people in the community need to see people that look like them, particularly Maori or young Maori, that are doing it, and think they can do it too.”

Through her personal background she had built resilience. She had worked for Woolworths New Zealand for several years and had risen to lead a $400m national sales division at Countdown.

And she and her husband had bought a persimmon orchard in Gisborne and had struggled to find workers. So during the Covid-19 lockdown she started to develop the Jobloads idea.

She wanted her business to be one for both business and social good. It had huge potential globally to help tackle massive labour shortages and worker exploitation, she said.

‘We believe there is dignity in every job and that people can find mana at work.”