Groxis

About Groxis

Groxis was a San Francisco-based software company established in 2001 by co-founders R.J. Pittman, Jean-Michel Decombe, and Paul Hawken. The firm operated in the search technology market, ceasing operations in March 2009. The company's primary offering was Grokker, a visual search engine designed to organize information graphically.

R.J. Pittman, who served as CEO until 2006, brought extensive experience from leadership roles at major tech companies. His background includes serving as Chief Product Officer at eBay and holding positions at Apple and Google, focusing on e-commerce, product management, and consumer search. Pittman holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan and a Master of Science in Engineering-Economic Systems from Stanford University. Jean-Michel Decombe, the Chief Technology Officer until 2006, was the visionary behind Grokker, inventing the concepts for the product and securing several patents for its technology. Paul Hawken acted as Executive Chairman until 2003, where he was instrumental in securing the initial angel investment and assembling an advisory board.

Groxis developed and marketed Grokker, a web-based tool that provided federated content access and presented search results visually. Instead of a traditional list, Grokker sorted results into categories displayed as a map of nested, colored circles, allowing users to explore sub-categories and refine their search within a graphical interface. This product was positioned as the industry's first graphical information interface (GII). The company served a range of clients, including corporations and academic institutions. Its partners and customers included notable names like Sun Microsystems, Stanford University, Amgen, Yahoo!, Google, and Amazon. Grokker's name was inspired by a term from Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction novel "Stranger in a Strange Land," meaning to understand something deeply and completely.