GroupSpaces, the UK’s leading website for online management and administration of university clubs and societies, recently 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 in 2007 by David Langer and Andy Young whilst they were students at Oxford University, based on their own experiences running various clubs. Since then it has followed a Facebook-like expansion model, initially saturating clubs at Oxford and subsequently gaining adoption across the UK’s top universities.
GroupSpaces provides an all-in-one set of free tools designed to comprehensively meet the needs of university clubs and societies. This offering gives them a website, professional email templates, online membership database, Facebook integration and event management tools, making running a society much quicker and easier. Since 2007, GroupSpaces’ UK university membership has grown to over 200,000 members from 2,000 societies. GroupSpaces is also now working closely in partnership with several leading nationwide networks of student societies such as SIFE, Engineers Without Borders and NACUE.
GroupSpaces generates revenue by allowing graduate recruiters to advertise their campus activity and promote their opportunities to its highly employable community of students throughout the whole academic year. Campaigns can be targeted to the recruiter’s target universities and specific audiences can be reached such as Business & Careers, STEM or Sports & Games at each university.
Since 2007, GroupSpaces has worked with over 70 graduate recruiters including Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance, Slaughter & May, Freshfields, BCG, McKinsey, Accenture, Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, E&Y, Citi, JP Morgan, Barclays Capital, Morgan Stanley, Man Group, Bank of England, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, RBS, UBS, TFL, Lloyd's of London and the NHS. GroupSpaces also works with many of the leading recruitment agencies in the UK including Euro RSCG Riley, SAS Design, Thirty Three, TMPW, Stafford Long, Work Communications, Mediacom and City & Law.
The funding is being used to expand both the technical and marketing teams in the UK and to open a New York office, from where GroupSpaces is launching in the U.S. university market. Initial signs from the latter have been very strong, with over 500 groups signing up in the first month after launch across top schools such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT and Stanford.
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 to help us 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.”