Mobilize, a better alternative to Google Groups for community management, raises $1.2M

The days of creating clunky Google Groups to keep your organization’s members up-to-date might be over.

Mobilize, a startup that wants to help community managers better keep in touch with their members, announced today that it’s raised $1.2 million.

You can think of Mobilize like a work communications tool like Slack, Convo, or Yammer, but for an external network. Community managers can use it to send updates, calendar invites, and other communications to members without having to use email listserves, spreadsheets, and so on. They can also easily communicate with segments of their communities for more tailored communications.

Mobilize customer Uber, for example, uses it to keep in touch with its Driver Champions (elite Uber drivers), invite them to focus groups, send them polls, and so on, cofounder and chief executive Sharon Savariego told VentureBeat in an interview.

Another customer, Google, is currently using Mobilize to manage more than 500 members of its Google for Entrepreneurs network. The Thiel Fellowship has a community of 10,000 members on its Mobilize network, Savariego says, pointing to how the tool’s flexibility can make even large networks are manageable as small ones.

“It starts with 200 people and all of a sudden you have 1,000 people,” she said, which is also the average size of Mobilize’s current communities.

Right now, Mobilize is in a closed beta with about 50 communities helping the company test and refine its product. It also receives interest from five to 10 new communities every week without doing any marketing, Savariego said. It plans to make its product generally available next quarter, she said.

And when it does, it will be available at different price tiers, starting from a free version for very small communities (one or two admins, a few members), all the way up to custom prices for enterprise-sized customers.

For now, Mobilize is helping shared economy companies (for their supply-side communities), marketplaces, company developer relations teams, accelerators, and coworking spaces, among others. However, as it continues to add features, Savariego said, it will become appealing to even more kinds of communities that need specific capabilities.

The startup will use its new funding to continue growing its team and building out its product.

Hillsven Capital led this round, with participation from UpWest Labs and Eddy Shalev. Mobilize was founded by Savariego and Arthur Vainer and is headquartered in San Francisco with an additional office in Tel Aviv, Israel. The startup recently graduated from UpWest accelerator.