Why We Invested: Groopit

By: Anthony Bontrager, Managing Director, WestRiver Group

Nobody has a monopoly on knowledge.

By its very nature, knowledge is contextual, and any one person’s or organization’s knowledge is limited to their level of involvement and interaction with other elements of their unique eco-system. Something intelligence agencies use to great effect. However, enterprise companies are not intelligence agencies and the need for sharing real time data and intelligence across the organization, whether it be sales, competitive or other information is critical to an organization’s long-term growth and viability.

As social media has permeated throughout today’s organizations (e.g. Slack, Teams, Zoom, Jira, etc.) intra-company borders have been softened and new knowledge centers have emerged. However, as these knowledge centers have grown, they remained walled off from one another with little to no connectivity between them, thereby rendering them somewhat impotent from becoming true “communities of value”. Begging the question, with so much capital being deployed into different point solutions, why do they not talk to one another, leverage the wisdom of crowds, and therefore provide more benefit to their respective customers?

Author James Surowiecki, in his aptly titled 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds, discusses this issue, and posits that “a diverse collection of independently thinking individuals is likely to make certain types of decisions and predictions better than individuals or even experts.” This is a pretty compelling argument based on the data he provides and supports our thesis that siloed information is ultimately bad for an organization’s long-term growth. We believe that a solution needs to be developed to help companies derive more value from the information that they developed and accumulated.

Groopit, a young Seattle-based startup seeks to address this growing problem by becoming the connective tissue between these various knowledge centers and enabling true communities of value to emerge across the organization, regardless of the many different applications that are in use. Presenting the aggregated, crowd-sourced knowledge either within an existing workflow such as Slack or through Groopit’s dashboard allows users and organizations to derive greater, more actionable insights than ever before.

The result: An exponential increase in knowledge value.

Co-Founder and CEO Tammy Savage and her team have worked hard to develop a product that has solved a significant unmet need for enterprises across N. America and delivered quantifiable ROI to an impressive roster of customers including Guidant Financial, Home Depot, Mosaic, and Hubspot in less than 30-days from implementation. 

Founders with the ability to see around a corner and address real problems for organizations looking to be more effective are exactly the kind we like to back. Getting in early, rolling up our sleeves and helping out while staying out of the way is how we operate and we couldn’t be more excited to have Tammy and the Groopit team as the newest addition to our portfolio of promising young companies.

#ONWARD