Video games legends have joined a £1.8 million seed round into Levellr.
Founded by Tom Gayner and Ben Barbersmith in 2021, Levellr reflects the founders’ experience at YouTube, Octagon and MyCujoo, addressing the community and audience challenges they saw first-hand.
CTO Barbersmith is a former senior technology partner at YouTube. The tech he has built uses AI to help brands and games studios understand and monitor Discord.
The London startup’s raise was led by Fuel Ventures and included investment from industry leaders in the video game sector including Mark Pincus’ Workplay Ventures (Zynga founder), Bing Gordon (Duolingo & T2 board member), Frank Gibeau (CEO of Zynga), Phil Mansell (former Jagex CEO), Simon Hade (Space Ape founder), Norman Cheuk (ex-Microsoft executive) & Playformant.
They join a wide roster of existing games industry notaries who have previously invested in Levellr such as Mitch Lasky (Benchmark partner), Owen Mahoney (ex-Nexon CEO), Dylan Collins (SuperAwesome founder), Mika Salmi, Matt Bilbey (former EA executive) and Rich Barnwell (Digit founder).
As Discord has become one of the most important communities, global brands and games companies need enterprise-grade tools and services to support real-time user insights.
Levellr unifies user conversation and engagement signals from the newest generation of social platforms such as Discord to provide real-time intelligence on critical events to support product, live ops, game design, community and support teams.
With community increasingly becoming a commercial driver of consumer revenues, Levellr has seen growing demand for its enterprise products, doubling revenue in back-to-back years.
Levellr is already used by leading gaming and consumer companies including Epic Games, Krafton, Scopely, YouTube and Google.
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Gordon said: “I’ve tracked Levellr’s impressive growth and it’s clear they’re solving a critical industry gap.
“Levellr are shifting the way teams can bring intelligence from core platforms like Discord into the business with real-time sentiment and relationship analysis. But that’s just the start.
“They’re essentially building the CDP layer – the customer data platform – that can amplify value and unlock more revenue for companies with Discord communities and beyond.”
CEO Gayner said: “Our customers told us that while they had clarity on what was happening through product and monetisation data, they often lacked the ‘why’ behind changes in metrics. They needed real-time insight from the user voice to help teams make smarter decisions.
“Before Levellr, teams were manually scrolling platforms like Discord, often undervaluing community signals until a bug or issue had already escalated into user churn. Community reports often lacked sophistication in the form of segmentation, cohort analysis or weighting, so even if customers could see user signals, there was a real lack of clarity as to whether product teams should actually act on it.”
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