UK-startup GroupSpaces, which last year secured a $1.3m Seed round from a star-studded roster of investors including Index Ventures, Dave McClure, Chris Sacca and Simon Levene, has become a ‘Silicon Roundabout’ stalwart. Cofounders David Langer and Andy Young met at Oxford university and quickly realised they could build a better way for University groups to interact, so post-graduation they packed their belongings into a van and headed to London to join the Moo Studios crew on “The Roundabout” a couple of years ago.
They are now on well over 1.6 million group memberships with their simple online management and administration tool for real-world groups. Simpler than Yahoo! groups for mailing lists or member records in Excel, the site has a payments collection system built in and is free for groups with less than 250 members. Revenues come from a combination of premium accounts, targeted advertising and transaction commission from payments made through the site.
As part of our series on Silicon Roundabout startups, (The Roundabout Tapes) we spoke to David and Andy about their journey from university to fundraising to scaling GroupSpaces into a startup which now dominates the UK university market and which is aiming to take over the world internationally.
In the video they make some interesting points about building a startup outside Silicon Valley, being part of the London startup scene and their high points to date.