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CircleUp, Inc.

Product Name

CircleUp

Market Segment

Consumer

Funding

Seed funded by private investors and founders; Series A closing planned concurrent with DEMO.

Competitors

No direct competitors. Secondary competitors are email without CircleUp, instant messaging without CircleUp, Yahoo! Groups, Q&A sites, Yahoo Answers and Microsoft.

Product Description

CircleUp allows consumers to send a question to groups of any size—5, 50 or 500 people—and get back a single, organized result instead of a blizzard of emails and instant messages. By enhancing existing email or instant messaging accounts, CircleUp enables consumers and employees to communicate efficiently with any online or offline group, such as youth groups, sports teams, volunteer organizations, schools, clubs, churches, social networks, political, alumni and professional organizations—even ad hoc teams at work or groups of customers.

Market Opportunity

IDC estimates that 82 billion emails are sent worldwide every day. AOL estimates that 70% of Internet users also use instant messaging, and 38% of those users send as many instant messages as they do emails each day. Much of that traffic involves collaboration and information gathering in groups, CircleUp’s primary target.

Demo Says

If you’ve ever tried to organize a car pool, recruit volunteers or just get information from a group of colleagues, you’ll appreciate the value of CircleUp. This seemingly simple platform aggregates email, instant messaging and SMS to manage communications among established or ad hoc groups, collecting responses and streamlining decision making. CircleUp will spread among the soccer mom set, most certainly, yet prove its strongest value in business decision making.