GROU.PS is a social groupware platform that allows people to come together and form interactive communities around a shared interest or affiliation. The functionality of any online group is limited only by the members' collective imagination and ambition. The GROU.PS platform is used to create a wide variety of community sites, including online gaming forums, e-learning classrooms, fan clubs, charity fundraising campaigns, college alumni societies, and event planning portals. In short, any organization seeking to aggregate and organize people online can greatly improve its effectiveness, engagement and appeal by migrating to the GROU.PS platform. By giving any user the ability to create an easy-to-use, yet powerful, social network, GROU.PS is propelling online collaboration, communication and content sharing in a new socially aware direction.
Vision
Democratize online community-building and enable everyone to monetize their content and groups.
Management
Emre Sokullu, Founder & CEO
Mustafa Şapçılı, VP of Engineering
Sean X. Yu, CFO
Financials
GROU.PS Inc. is privately held, with 50% of revenues outside of the US; 30% of its revenue is non-gaming related.
Apps
People, Blogs, Forum, Chat, Photos, Videos, Wiki, Events, Funds, Groups, Files, Links, Music...
Headquarters
Palo Alto, CA, with offices in Istanbul, Turkey
Sample Groups
ShareWIK: www.sharewik.com
LAGbook: www.lagbook.net
The Peru Initiative: peruproject.grou.ps
Business Model
GROU.PS is free to a large proportion of group founders and affordable for the rest, with subscription revenues strong enough to keep GROU.PS growing rapidly.
Users
9 million registered members registered across the 200,000 groups created since 2006; 20,000 of them are active.
Main Group Themes
Education
Fantasy Role Playing
Entertainment
NGO
Member Growth
Key Milestones
2005
Nov: GROU.PS development began in Palo Alto, during Emre’s visit to the USA.
2006
Feb: GROU.PS launched. Featured on Digg on its first day of launch; 1,200 members signed up in a single day.
2008
Jun: GROU.PS landed $1.1 million in Seed funding.
2009
Jun: GROU.PS landed $1 million in Series A funding.
Jun: Reached our 1 millionth user.
2010
Nov: Made our first acquisition: Social Project LLC.
Oct: Launched subscription plans.
May: Reached the 100k groups mark.
2011
Aug: GROU.PS landed $4.9 million in Series B funding.
Jul: Launch of TheBook template.
Jul: Availability for iPhone.
Jul: Launch of mobile app generator for Blackberry and Android devices.
May: .
Mar: Formation of a professional customer support department.
Feb: Transfer of TagWorld and Social Project groups initiated.
