Groxis was a tech company based in

San Francisco, California San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

that developed and marketed the web-based

federated content Content management (CM) are a set of processes and technologies that support the collection, managing, and publishing of information in any form or medium. When stored and accessed via computers, this information may be more specifically referre ...

access and visual

search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

called Grokker.

History

Groxis was founded by Jean-Michel Decombe,

Paul Hawken Paul Gerard Hawken (born February 8, 1946) is an American environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, economist, and activist. Biography Hawken was born in San Mateo, California, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where his father worked at ...

, and R.J. Pittman in 2001, and ceased operations in March 2009. Jean-Michel Decombe was Chief Technology Officer until 2006. He conceived the vision and invented the concepts underlying Groxis' flagship product, Grokker, for which he obtained several patents, including 6,879,332, 6,888,554, 7,036,093, and 7,290,223. Paul Hawken was Executive Chairman until 2003. He raised the initial round of capital from

angel investors An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital to a business or businesses, including startups, usually in exchange for convertible debt ...

. He assembled a team of advisors including Paul Saffo and John Seely Brown. R.J. Pittman was Chief Executive Officer until 2006. He raised capital from top-tier venture capitalists. He was responsible for all pathfinder customer wins and key partnerships. He also set overall product direction, leading the company and moving Grokker.com into the top 5000 most visited websites on the Internet. Groxis partners and customers included

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

Fast Search & Transfer Microsoft Development Center Norway (known as FAST (Fast Search & Transfer ASA) before 2010) is a Norway, Norwegian company, founded in 1997 and based in Oslo, with offices located in Germany, Italy, Sri Lanka, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, ...

, EBSCO Information Services, the

Internet Public Library The Virtual library (IPL, ipl2) was a non-profit, largely student-run website managed by a consortium, headed by Drexel University. Visitors could ask reference questions, and volunteer librarians and graduate students in library and information ...

, and

Amgen Amgen Inc. (formerly Applied Molecular Genetics Inc.) is an American multinational biopharmaceutical Corporation, company headquartered in Thousand Oaks, California. As one of the world's largest independent biotechnology companies, Amgen has a ...

, as well as

Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

, and

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...

. The company won several industry awards including DEMOgod 2003, Always On Top 100, and Wired 100. The name Grokker is inspired by the 1961

Robert A. Heinlein Robert Anson Heinlein ( ; July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988) was an American science fiction author, aeronautical engineer, and naval officer. Sometimes called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was among the first to emphasize scientific acc ...

science fiction classic '' Stranger in a Strange Land'', in which

Grok ''Grok'' () is a neologism coined by the American writer Robert A. Heinlein for his 1961 science fiction novel '' Stranger in a Strange Land''. While the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' summarizes the meaning of ''grok'' as "to understand intuit ...

is a Martian word meaning literally ‘to drink’ and metaphorically ‘to be one with.’ To grok something is to understand something so well that it is fully absorbed into oneself. It is to look at every problem, opportunity, action, and point of view from any and all perspectives.

References

Software companies based in California Companies based in San Francisco Internet search engines Defunct software companies of the United States {{US-internet-company-stub