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Many startups tell you that they want to “take things to the next level”.

But today’s startup wants brands to take their customers to TheNextLevel… because, well, that’s the company’s name.

And as you’ll see, one of the co-founders is someone I first wrote about a looooong time ago.

But first:

• The Royal Academy of Engineering has published its State of UK Deep Tech report 2024. It’s well worth a read, with insights like how AI and healthcare continue to dominate deep tech investment, with each sector having secured more than £1 billion in value in the first half of 2024. However, the UK faces a shortage of scientific expert investors (something we’ll explore in an upcoming edition of this newsletter!)

• HR tech startup Recfindr has announced a £300,000 pre-seed funding round led by SFC Capital alongside angel investors such as Ezequiel Canestrari, the European COO of Clearbank.

– Martin

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Can this startup take brand ecommerce revenue to TheNextLevel?

Ecommerce is a highly specialist area of tech, where founders with the right insights look to build seemingly simple ideas into products that can meaningfully move the needle for businesses. Get it right, and they can be onto a money-spinner.

One such founder is Paul Rawlings. I first came across him 15 years ago, when he was on the UK’s first startup accelerator programme. 

The Difference Engine took place in Middlesborough and the cohort also included Basti Lehmann (who later went on to build Postmates in the US, which was acquired by Uber for $2.65 billion), and noted futurist (and PreSeed Now subscriber!) Tom Cheesewright.

Rawlings eventually went on to forge a career in senior roles at ecommerce companies such as THG. It was here that he spotted the opportunity for what has become his new startup, TheNextLevel.

While online retailers have plenty of ways to create their own apps, TheNextLevel’s product is designed to make it easy to build not just a shopping app, but online communities around its customers’ retail brands.

The startup’s tech converts Shopify stores into native mobile apps that combine shopping with social features. 

“It’s about giving the brand the tools to create an engaged audience through the application, which then ultimately leads to the brand selling more stuff, by increasing the lifetime value of that customer,” Rawlings explains.

TheNextLevel’s tech can support a range of ecommerce platforms, but they’re starting by targeting direct-to-consumer brands that use Shopify; particularly those seeking sustainable growth. 

Sustainable growth is something Rawlings has seen first-hand is difficult for brands to achieve. Rising online ad prices and increased competition for the best placements, Apple’s anti-tracking privacy features, and increasingly easy unsubscribe features in email apps, have made life much more difficult in recent years. If you want to grow and keep growing, you’ve got a challenge on your hands.

And so Rawlings sees TheNextLevel’s mobile apps as a compelling solution.

“With brands, it's not just about a buying experience. Customers want to belong to a brand. They want to have more than just a shopping experience, they want a relationship with that brand. So we give brands tools to do that.”

And in a world where fragility of third-party social networks is becoming increasingly apparent, brands offering their own social experiences in their own digital spaces could be a compelling offer.

At the weekend we saw how TikTok was briefly taken offline in the US to comply with the law. Even though it’s now back, its future in the country is far from assured.

And then there’s the fleeting nature of user loyalty to social platforms. Twitter, now X, has seen users fleeing for months as owner Elon Musk has taken an increasingly blatant far-right turn in his public political views, for example.

With this in mind, an easy to create, native community could be a good fit for some brands.

To counter the problem of users being reluctant to download apps, TheNextLevel is taking advantage of Apple’s iOS App Clips and their equivalent Android features that allow users to take advantage of certain app features without downloading them. The startup calls these ‘TheNextLevel Instants’.

“The brand can launch their TheNextLevel app from a paid media link. And then when the customer gets to TheNextLevel Instant, they can be retargeted on TheNextLevel versus being retargeted on the ad network, hence lowering the ad cost for the brand,’ Rawlings explains.

The story so far

As mentioned above, The NextLevel has its roots in Rawlings’ time working in ecommerce, particularly his time at THG and Pangaea, which both run portfolios of direct-to-consumer brands.

Rawlings has teamed up with Ionut Vasiliu, who is based in Romania, to co-found the Manchester-based business. They got started in earnest in Autumn 2023 and spent last year building the product and refining it in partnership with merchants.

They’ve recently taken on a Head of Growth as they begin to start scaling up their customer base. Rawlings says the focus this year is to take on more customers while developing the product further.

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