Levellr Secures $1.75 Million to Revolutionize Discord Community Management
2024-11-01
Author: Li
In a significant move for community management in the gaming industry, Levellr has successfully raised $1.75 million to enhance its innovative tools designed for managing Discord communities. This funding round attracted an impressive lineup of investors from the gaming and media sectors, including notable names such as Mitch Lasky, Fuel Ventures, Colopl Next, and LFG Holdings—the latter spearheaded by the distinguished entrepreneur Dylan Collins, founder of SuperAwesome.
Collins, who joins Levellr as chairman, brings a wealth of experience and a proven track record in the tech and gaming landscapes. He noted in a statement to GamesBeat that Levellr's Discord tools are already effectively utilized by over 60 game development studios and tech companies, including prominent brands like Scopely, Hutch, Pathea, the NFL, Google, and YouTube.
Discord has established itself as a leading messaging platform with over 200 million monthly active users, particularly resonating with Gen Z and Gen Alpha gamers. The platform's influence has become impossible to ignore, as gaming organizations increasingly recognize the importance of community-building for ongoing engagement and revenue growth.
Levellr equips various teams—ranging from community managers to customer support—with invaluable insights and features that enhance user interaction and engagement. The company’s software offers detailed analytics, sentiment tracking, content scheduling, and monetization capabilities, further streamlining the management process for brands and gaming studios.
Tom Gayner, CEO of Levellr, emphasized how vital community and superfan engagement is for maximizing revenue amidst rising user acquisition costs and market competition. The company aims to empower organizations to fully capitalize on the potential of their Discord communities to drive customer retention and acquisition.
Founded by Tom Gayner and Ben Barbersmith in 2021, Levellr operates with a dedicated team spread across North America and Europe, serving global clients. Both founders boast extensive backgrounds in community building, with Gayner's experience in gaming and entertainment through his tenure at Interpublic Group, and Barbersmith's insights gained from working at YouTube.
Reflecting on industry shifts, the founders expressed that many traditional social media platforms have transformed into broadcast media, prioritizing short-form content at the expense of genuine community engagement. This has led businesses to abandon conventional platforms in favor of Discord and Reddit—both spaces that foster authentic conversations and interactions among users.
However, the challenge remains for publishers and developers to quantify the value of their communities on Discord. How do they measure user engagement? What is the economic value of these interactions? Levellr’s software aims to address these critical questions, utilizing AI-driven insights to transform raw engagement data into actionable business intelligence.
Previously operating largely on bootstrapped funding, Levellr reached its breakeven point in the second quarter of this year and now looks to accelerate growth in response to heightened customer demand.
The founders have expressed optimism about leveraging the expertise of their investors—many being seasoned professionals in the gaming sector. With plans to expand support to additional community platforms like Reddit by 2025, Levellr is committed to evolving alongside the fragmented landscape of community engagement.
In a recent analysis, Levellr discovered that a Discord user tends to be six times more valuable than a non-Discord user, shedding light on the substantial return on investment in cultivating active communities. As the industry pivots towards community-driven strategies, Levellr stands at the forefront, ready to empower brands to innovate and thrive in a fast-evolving market.
Stay tuned as Levellr continues to enhance the ways communities are managed, making sense of the digital conversation landscape one Discord server at a time!