London-based GroupSpaces Raises Investment From New Index Seed Fund and Silicon Valley Heavyweights

London, England – 1 July 2010. GroupSpaces, the go-to site for simple online management and administration of real-world groups, 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.

Existing investors Stephen Bullock and Simon and Michael Blakey of Avonmore Developments also participated in the round. Index Ventures partner, Mike Volpi, will take a board seat.

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.

The company was founded in 2007 by David Langer and Andy Young whilst they were students at Oxford University, based on their own experiences running clubs. Since then it has followed a Facebook-like expansion model, initially saturating clubs at Oxford and subsequently gaining adoption from most large clubs across the UK’s top universities. The site is currently used to manage over 500,000 group memberships.

GroupSpaces 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 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.”

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.”