Anyone who has tried organising a holiday, dinner, community event or weekend away through a group chat will understand the problem Hamisi Rawlins is trying to solve. Someone suggests an idea, different dates begin appearing, another conversation starts about money, important details disappear beneath dozens of messages and eventually someone asks a question that was answered much earlier.
For Rawlins, that familiar frustration became the basis of a startup.
The Kenyan software engineer was among four founders who presented during the Kenya–Australia Start-Up Pitch Night on 29 September, introducing GrupChat to an audience of entrepreneurs, professionals and investors connecting Kenya and Australia. GrupChat is being developed as a social coordination platform designed to help groups move from talking about plans to actually organising them.
Rather than giving users another place to simply chat, the platform focuses on what happens after a group decides it wants to do something. Trips, gatherings, shared purchases and social activities can involve messaging apps, payment platforms, calendars and long chains of follow-up conversations. GrupChat aims to bring more of that coordination into one environment.
The idea grew partly from Rawlins’ own experience organising a trip with friends. The trip eventually happened, but the difficulty involved in coordinating everyone highlighted a problem he believed technology could address. What began as a frustrating experience later developed into an idea centred on helping people turn conversations into real-world experiences.
Rawlins’ interest in building technology around communities predates GrupChat. While studying at Kenyatta University, he developed experience in software development and technology projects before gaining wider attention through Culture Capture, a digital project created with Abdul Rahman Rehmtulla.
In 2020, Culture Capture won Kenya’s Red Bull Basement competition before progressing to the international stage. The project reached the global top ten and received the Community Award, with Rawlins and his team becoming the only African representatives among the competition’s global top-ten finalists.
Culture Capture focused on helping communities document and share culture through technology, while GrupChat focuses on social coordination. Although the products address different problems, both reflect Rawlins’ recurring interest in designing technology around groups, communities and shared experiences.
Rawlins has since continued building experience across software engineering, product development and technology mentorship. He has remained connected to Kenya’s growing technology ecosystem while developing GrupChat from an idea into an emerging product.
The company took another step forward in 2026 when it participated in the Hackhouse Africa Residency, where startup founders worked through customer conversations, product testing and commercial validation. GrupChat later joined other participating companies during the program’s Demo Day, providing another opportunity for Rawlins to test and communicate the company’s proposition.
His appearance at the Kenya–Australia Start-Up Pitch Night introduced GrupChat to another audience entirely. Australia’s Kenyan community could itself provide an interesting environment for a product focused on group coordination. Diaspora communities regularly organise cultural events, sporting activities, family gatherings, fundraisers, group travel and community initiatives across large geographical distances.
For a company built around helping people organise shared experiences, those networks could offer useful insights into how groups plan across cities and countries.
Like every consumer technology startup, GrupChat still faces the difficult task of changing established habits. Messaging platforms are already deeply embedded in people’s everyday lives, meaning the company must demonstrate why users should add another tool to the way they organise themselves. It must also determine which features create enough value to bring people back after one event or trip has finished.
Those questions will shape the company’s next stage. Rawlins’ appearance during Pitch Night, though, achieved something much simpler and equally necessary: it introduced a new audience to the founder, the problem and the product he is building.
GrupChat began with friends trying to organise a trip. Rawlins is now attempting to turn that frustration into a platform that helps groups spend less time discussing plans and more time making them happen.
