Toronto-based Diversio, which aims to help companies eliminate barriers to diversity and inclusion, has acquired CCDI Consulting (CCDIC) from the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion (CCDI) for an undisclosed amount.
“CCDIC has a comprehensive set of trainings and service offerings for almost all of the pain points we’ve identified in our customer’s cultures,”
– Diversio CEO Laura McGee
Diversio said the acquisition will “broaden its ability to turn ‘insights into action’” and strengthen its position as a full-service platform in the workplace inclusion space. The startup says its integrated platform now includes a survey- and data-analysis dashboard, consulting services, goal tracking, and hundreds of training courses.
In a statement, co-founder and CEO Laura McGee said she is thrilled to bring the CCDIC team and its suite of training and educational content into Diversio and operate as one company going forward.
“CCDIC has a comprehensive set of trainings and service offerings for almost all of the pain points we’ve identified in our customer’s cultures,” McGee told BetaKit in an email statement. “We can now both recommend and execute specific interventions for almost any problem our clients encounter, from things like unconscious bias and harassment to areas like mentorship, feedback and development.”
Diversio was founded in 2018 by McGee and COO Anya Klimbovskaia to help make workplaces inclusive by tracking, analyzing, and providing suggestions to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. The platform creates an “inclusion score” that reflects employee experience within organizations through data collected from employee surveys. Diversio then creates an organizational action plan, tracking progress and impact over time.
RELATED: Report: Diversity gap persists in senior ranks of Canadian VC firms
In 2020, Diversio was one of four tech and venture capital organizations partnering to improve the deployment of venture capital to diverse fund managers and founders. The partners used Diversio to assess the diversity within venture capital firms and their investments and provided benefits like event passes to those that surpassed a certain benchmark.
The startup had survived on $60,000 USD in angel investment until late 2021, when it secured $8.13 million CAD ($6.5 million USD) in Series A funding from First Round Capital, Golden Ventures, and Chandaria Family Holdings.
CCDIC was incorporated as a for-profit subsidiary of national charity CCDI in 2015 to provide consulting and training services to its employer partners. CCDI said divesting from CCDIC is a strategic move to focus on its core charitable mandate and its mission to help build a more inclusive Canada.
A recent report from BDC Capital found that diversity at the senior levels of the private asset industry remains low, with almost half of venture firms being entirely male-owned. Meanwhile, eight percent are entirely owned by a visible minority and two percent are entirely owned by a woman or Indigenous person. Only 31 percent of venture firms reported having gender parity among their staff.
Feature image courtesy Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash.