Team spirit

St John's College, Oxford, allowed him to postpone his course for one year to set up the company with fellow student David Langer, but he is unsure whether he will be allowed another year out.

However, he was buoyed up by an inspirational talk in Oxford earlier this year from Andrew McCollum, one of the founders of the social networking site Facebook, which has grown into a multi-million pound company.

Mr Langer, 22, who managed to complete his own degree last June, said: "Andrew McCollum took two years out of Harvard to set up Facebook, then went back to finish his degree."

These are exciting times for the company, which earlier this year raised a six-figure sum to develop its online tools for clubs and societies. The pair are the youngest Oxford University entrepreneurs to have received venture capital funding. Now they are aiming to raise up to £1m to take on more staff and develop a marketable product.

Already four salaries are being covered by advertising contracts with more than 50 blue-chip clients, including IBM, BP, McKinsey & Company, Bain Capital, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and JPMorgan.

Last month, the company was selected for Web Mission 2008 as one of the UK's 20 most promising web companies, with the founders travelling to Silicon Valley, where they presented their ideas to some of the biggest names in the industry.

Mr Langer said the idea for the company arose from frustration at the way in which clubs and societies at Oxford University were organising themselves online.

He believes that most clubs, whether run by students or not, have the same problems - one or two volunteers keep things ticking over, but if they leave, the whole thing faces collapse.

"Members leave or change their e-mail address and don't tell anyone, and running the club becomes a nightmare."

He added: "As a former president of two university societies, I became increasingly annoyed with the mash-up of disconnected tools groups were using to manage themselves online - mailing lists on Yahoo! Groups, spreadsheets in Excel, events on Facebook, ancient websites.

"People were spending a disproportionate amount of time organising their groups across multiple platforms."

Mr Young, an experienced web developer, said: We both thought there must be a better way for groups to communicate with and manage their members."

"GroupSpaces has created a free web-based service that solves all the problems of group managers with a combination of powerful, easy-to-use tools and an integrated portal."

The team, based at Oxford Innovation in Mill Street, Osney, took the Saïd Business School's Building a Business' course for science and technology entrepreneurship, and attended the annual Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford event.

At WebMission, as well as meeting some of the top Silicon Valley start-ups, the two met venture capitalists, including Oxford alumnus Michael Mortiz, of Sequoia Capital, who invested in and sat on the boards of Google and Yahoo!

A recent arrival at GroupSpaces is Rob Eyre who, for seven years, worked at Oxford Innovation before leaving to take an MBA at the Said Business School.

He said: "After spending many years working with innovative young technology companies, I was excited by what GroupSpaces is doing, because the communication and management challenges that the company is helping to meet are experienced by millions of groups around the world."

A fourth person, Dave Ingram, is to join from Imperial College, London.

So far, 25,000 university groups have used the pilot system, including members of the Oxford Union, many of the junior common rooms at Oxford colleges and Oxford University Careers Service. Former careers service director Terry Dray said: "They are bridging the gap between university societies and graduate recruiters in a revolutionary manner."

Adam O'Boyle, of The Oxford Hub, an umbrella organisation for student charities in Oxford, said: "GroupSpaces has created all, and more, that we could have wanted for us and our member charities. Our students can now get on with actually running their groups.

Now GroupSpaces is offering its services to local groups outside the student market, targeting Oxfordshire sports clubs and voluntary groups. Mr Langer said: "We are hoping to get a few tennis clubs using it, a few history societies, gardening clubs, and charities or volunteer groups. Once we are happy with how the product is performing, we can add up to 300 of each group, and so on."