GroupSpaces raises $1.3 million from Oxford investors and Silicon Valley heavyweights

Jul 2, 2010 at 7:05:05 PM by Simon Joyce - Tags: - Comments (0)

GroupSpaces, the go-to site for simple online management and administration of real-world groups founded by Oxford University students, today announced it has secured a $1.3 million investment round from Index Ventures and a leading angel investor consortium including Dave McClure, Chris Sacca, Simon Levene, Meagan Marks, Ariel Poler and Quincy Smith of CODE Advisors. Index Ventures partner, Mike Volpi, will take a board seat.

GroupSpaces was founded by David Langer and Andy Young while they were Oxford University students and secured its initial funding in 2008 through Oxford Early Investments (OEI), a leading business angel network that helps innovative early stage companies to raise funding. Existing investors and members of the OEI Network, Stephen Bullock and Simon and Michael Blakey of Avonmore Developments, also participated in this round.

Since then, GroupSpaces has followed a Facebook-like expansion model and all the student clubs within Oxford University and the Said Business School, Oxford, are now users. The site has also been adopted by most large clubs across the UK’s other top universities and is currently used to manage over 500,000 group memberships.

GroupSpaces provides an all-in-one set of tools designed to meet the needs of groups such as sports clubs, hobby groups, associations and student societies. This integrated offering makes administration of groups more effective, improves member communications and saves group organisers and officers lots of time compared to the common patterns of having a Yahoo! Group for mailing list, member records in Excel and collecting payments through various offline means.

GroupSpaces differentiates itself by only requiring group leaders to sign up, making it fast to adopt and get started for secretaries, treasurers and other officers of existing real-world groups. Group members can be imported from Excel and then receive emails, register for events and pay their membership dues, all without having to create a user account and password.

GroupSpaces is free for groups with less than 250 members and for student groups of any size. Above 250 members, pricing starts at £5 per month. The company generates revenue via a combination of premium accounts, targeted advertising and transaction commissions for payments made through the site.

GroupSpaces founder, David Langer, said “We’re delighted we were able to attract such high profile investors to this funding round and we look forward to leveraging their expertise in helping us to move forward with our growth strategy and expansion into new geographies, attracting top talent to our team and rapidly rolling out our product roadmap.”

Eileen Modral, investment manager at Oxford Early Investments, said: “We congratulate David and the rest of the GroupSpaces team on securing this major investment. We were pleased to assist the company to raise crucial funding in 2008 to progress the initial development of their innovative software. Since then, GroupSpaces has made phenomenal progress and is poised for further success.”

Mike Volpi, board member and partner at Index Ventures, said: “GroupSpaces is a terrific start to the Index Seed Fund. We are very impressed with this entrepreneurial team and see great potential for GroupSpaces as a one-stop-shop for groups worldwide.”

To watch a video about GroupSpaces please click here

 Andy Young (left) and David Langer (right), Founders of GroupSpaces