GroupMe

Jared Hecht recalled that his fiancée complained that an email chain her friends were using to coordinate a trip broke down when it was time to act, which led him to think of real-time group communication over SMS, and he called his friend Steve Martocci to discuss it. At the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon in New York in May 2010, the two used Twilio’s API to build a working prototype in about 18 hours; Hecht was then working at Tumblr and Martocci at Gilt Groupe. They did not win anything at the hackathon but quickly drew attention in New York’s tech scene; the product was originally called Grouply.⁠[1][1][2][1][1][2][1][3]

On July 1, 2010, the two quit their jobs to work on GroupMe full-time, initially relying on a loan from Hecht’s parents. On August 25, GroupMe officially launched: users entered their phone number on the website to get a dedicated group number, any text sent by a member went to all members, and members could call the group number to start a conference call. The company also announced an $850,000 seed round from investors including Betaworks, SV AngelSV AngelSV Angel is a San Francisco venture capital firm cofounded in 2009 by angel investor Ron Conway and former Google executive David Lee. It typically writes small follow-on checks in seed rounds and has invested in companies such as Airbnb, Pinterest, and Dropbox; in 2018 it said it would no longer raise new funds from outside investors, and from 2022 it set up growth funds.Open the full entry, First Round Capital, and Lerer Ventures, and the product was renamed GroupMe.⁠[3][3][2][2][2][2][3]

On September 29, 2010, GroupMe launched its beta at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, when it was sending 30,000 messages a day and had just sent its one-millionth text; it then released an iPhone app and, on November 15, an Android app. The founders said people were using it for Bible study groups, neighborhood watch groups, and rallying around hospital patients; by December it was sending 450,000 messages a day.⁠[3][3][3][3][3]

About eight months after its founding, GroupMe closed a $10.6 million second round led by Khosla VenturesKhosla VenturesKhosla Ventures (KV) is an American venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It made heavy early bets on clean technology, became OpenAI’s first venture capital investor in 2019, and its portfolio also includes companies such as DoorDash, Block (formerly Square), Impossible Foods, and Rocket Lab.Open the full entry, whose partner David Wieden joined the board; new investor General Catalyst Partners participated, along with First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures, Betaworks, and SV Angel. The company then had 10 employees, and millions of texts were being sent through GroupMe each week.⁠[4][4][4][4]

In March 2011, GroupMe released version 2.0 and was widely used at the SXSW conference in Austin, where more than 2 million messages were sent to groups during the festival and GroupMe won the Breakout Digital Trend Award; a week later it announced partnerships with brands including the Bonnaroo festival, Bon Jovi, MTV, and Oxygen.⁠[3][3][3]

In June 2011, GroupMe sent more than 100 million messages in a month, and that same month the company was sued over allegations that it had spammed users. At the same time Apple announced iMessage, a similar messaging service, and Google+, launched by Google in July, also became a competitor. Hecht said that about six months in they had anticipated being attacked by large companies such as Facebook, Apple, and Google, and saw it as validation of what GroupMe was building.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3]

Shortly after its first anniversary, GroupMe announced that Skype was acquiring it for $85 million and that it would continue to operate independently in New York. Microsoft had announced its acquisition of Skype three months earlier, so GroupMe became a Microsoft product.⁠[3][5]

In July 2012, GroupMe sued the New York startup Groupie in a trademark dispute; in its filing, GroupMe stated that as of June 27, 2012 it had amassed 4.6 million users since its founding in May 2010, with users sending an average of 550 million messages a month; the company had previously raised $11.5 million.⁠[6][6][6]

GroupMe added Microsoft’s AI assistant Copilot to the app, letting users long-press any message to ask Copilot to help draft a reply, answer homework questions, or plan events. Microsoft AI chief executive Mustafa Suleyman said GroupMe had millions of users at more than 70% of U.S. colleges. Skype was shut down that May, while GroupMe continued to operate.⁠[7][7][5][5]

GroupMe: Official website: https://groupme.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[8]

X: Public account: https://x.com/GroupMe (opens in a new window)⁠[9][8]