Levellr raises funds for tools to manage Discord communities

Levellr has raised $1.75 million for its community management and insights tools used by companies to manage Discord communities.

The money comes from from a group of video games and media industry investors including Mitch Lasky, Fuel Ventures, Colopl Next and LFG Holdings (headed by SuperAwesome founder Dylan Collins) as well as senior executives from Krafton, Riot Games, Amazon, EA and SuperAwesome. 

Levellr also announced that Collins, the serial entrepreneur behind companies including SuperAwesome, Jolt and Demonware, is joining the company as chairman. In an email to GamesBeat, Collins said the Discord tools are already used by more than 60 game studios and tech companies including Scopely, Hutch, Pathea, the NFL, Google and YouTube.

Discord has become one of the largest messaging platforms in the world, with over 200 million monthly active users. It has become one of the most popular new digital engagement spaces for Gen Z and Gen Alpha players.

The value of Discord communities is increasingly being realized across gaming organizations, with multiple teams tapping into the value provided by Levellr’s software, including  professional community managers, marketing, partnerships and licensing, customer support, engineering and commercial teams.

Levellr’s Discord tools are used across hundreds of communities by major gaming and consumer brands to provide detailed analytics, sentiment tracking, in-community engagement, content scheduling, monetization features and key enterprise functionality.  

Tom Gayner, CEO of Levellr, said in a statement, “As community and superfan engagement has become increasingly important for revenue growth, we’re incredibly pleased to raise capital from angel investors who see and deal with some of these challenges daily. Rising UA costs and the excess of opportunity for players and consumers is creating astonishing bottlenecks around customer acquisition, which has woken the industry up to the importance of community platforms. Discord is an incredible space for community engagement and we’re excited to be contributing towards that ecosystem”

Founded by Tom Gayner and Ben Barbersmith in 2021, Levellr’s team is distributed across North America and Europe with customers globally. The company has 22 people, starting in London and New York. They have remote employees as well.

The founders have been building communities for the last decade, Gayner in gaming, consumer and entertainment brands from his time at Interpublic Group agencies, and Barbersmith from his time at YouTube.

“When we launched Levellr over three years ago, we noticed a growing shift with traditional social media platforms moving from spaces where we engage in the conversation, to becoming broadcast media platforms at their core, with the platforms encouraging short-form algorithmic content,” the founders said in an email to GamesBeat. “This shift was pushing community driven businesses in gaming, consumer and entertainment to move conversations onto platforms like Discord and Reddit, where they could bring together their players and users into one space to give engaged users a microphone and make them part of the conversation in a way that traditional social was no longer providing.”

They added, “But what publishers, developers and brands couldn’t articulate, was what the value of a community on Discord was providing. How much game time are you driving from those users? Are you re-engaging lapsed users? What is the dollar value of a user on Discord? How do you increase that dollar value? How do you sift through the thousands of messages sent by your players on a daily basis and turn that into nuggets of insights that can drive decision making across the business?”

And they said, “We took those challenges & learnings from our early customers to build our software solutions to ultimately help them power unmatched insights, drive meaningful engagement & turn communities into revenue generating platforms. Today our tools plug into Discord and Telegram, but Reddit is on the roadmap for 2025 and we’ll continue to be layering on additional community platforms to give our customers a one source of truth for what is a fragmented community landscape.

Prior to this round, Levellr has been largely bootstrapped, raising just over $1 million. Although breakeven in Q2 this year, the company felt it was time to respond to customer demand and raise some capital to move faster.

“We wanted money which was experienced and connected in the gaming industry, so we’re pleased that the majority of investors are experienced founders and operators from the industry,” the founders said.

As for what the company does, they said they are seeing community and superfan engagement become increasingly important for revenue growth, driven by rising user-acquisition costs and the excess of opportunity for players and consumers creating astonishing bottlenecks around customer acquisition, which has woken the industry up to the importance of community platforms.

But community building comes with challenges, they said.

“None of our customers could concretely explain internally or externally what the value of their community was before working with us. It was evident they had highly engaged communities based on the number of users and daily messages sent, but how do they actually turn that engagement into business insights and value?” they said.

“Our software, which plugs into our customers communities, provides them with access to unparalleled insights via our AI driven social listening tools which they can access through our dashboards and API’s, whilst driving engagement within communities via our unique gamification tools which we can connect directly to gameplay across multiple platforms to turn communities from a separate island for conversation into a truly connected ecosystem with our customers products and games,” they said.

They added, “In September alone, we crunched over three billion data points for customers who are receiving millions of messages in communities per month. This provides a literal goldmine of information to publishers, studios and brands who are using the insights we are driving to fuel change across developer, data and analytics, publishing, player insights, marketing, licensing and community teams.”

And customers are seeing the value, they said. Levellr’s software has been able to prove with existing customers that on average, a Discord user is six times more valuable than a non-Discord user through spend on and off platform, which the company can surface via integrations into e-commerce platforms and customer CRM’s.