Groxis was a tech company based in

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

that developed and marketed the web-based federated content access and visual

search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

called Grokker.

History

Groxis was founded by Jean-Michel Decombe, Paul Hawken, 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 for a business or businesses start-up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or owners ...

. 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. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

Fast Search & Transfer Microsoft Development Center Norway (known as Fast Search & Transfer ASA (FAST) before 2010) is a Norwegian company, founded in 1997 and based in Oslo. FAST focused on data search technologies. It had offices located in Germany, Italy, Sri Lanka ...

, EBSCO Information Services, the Internet Public Library, and Amgen, as well as

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...

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

, and

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

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

Grok ''Grok'' is a neologism coined by 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 intuitively or ...

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