GroupSpaces secures $1.3 million and brings Valley players on board
This is the first investment announced from the new Index Seed Fund and as such Index partner, Mike Volpi, will take a board seat. Existing investors Stephen Bullock and Simon and Michael Blakey of Avonmore Developments also participated in the round. That line-up attests to the interest this startup is creating – it’s extremely rare for this many high-profile Silicon Valley angel investors to invest in a UK startup. The cash will be used to expand their engineering and marketing teams in both the UK and US.
Having said that, the all-in-one set of tools works very well for sports clubs, hobby groups, associations and student societies. The integrated offering makes administration of groups easy, and is designed to be way more easy to use than a Yahoo! group for mailing list, member records in Excel and collecting payments through various clunky offline means.
GroupSpaces only requires group leaders to sign up, making it faster to adopt than, say, a Ning group. Group members can be imported from Excel and get emails, register for events and pay their membership dues, all without having to create a user account and password.
The site is free for groups with less than 250 members and for student groups of any size. Above 250 members, pricing starts at £5/month. The company generates revenue via a combination of premium accounts, targeted advertising and transaction commission from payments made through the site.