NearSt clinches £2m to drive more people into high street shops

The company is the first to provide a truly live, complete view of inventory across thousands of local bricks and mortar shops

TUESDAY 18 FEBRUARY LONDON: NearSt, a British retail technology startup that Google is backing to drive more people into the high street, has raised £2m in seed funding to drive more footfall into bricks and mortar stores at a critical time for the high street.

Founded in 2015 by Max Kreijn (36) and Nick Brackenbury (31), the duo developed a powerful technology that links products on shop shelves in real-time to nearby customers searching in Google.

The latest funding takes the total raised by NearSt to £3.2m, and brings in finance from notable angel investors Will Hobhouse (Heal’s, Jack Wills, Whittard of Chelsea) and Ben Laurie (Google Research & Machine Intelligence) alongside senior engineers from pioneering AI firm DeepMind.

The round was led by consumer tech specialists, YYX Capital, who also led the seed round of SuperAwesome, which recently announced that Microsoft’s venture fund, M12, had just acquired a stake in the ‘kidtech’ pioneers.

NearSt will use the cash injection to accelerate uptake by retailers in the UK with a wave of new hires, and launch the start-up’s offering in the US.

Currently sending 5,000 extra customers per month into UK high street stores via its technology, who would have otherwise shopped online, NearSt will also use the new cash injection to grow this to over 100,000 a month by year end, providing a welcome boost for the high street.

“Most of the products we buy online are stocked in a store nearby” says Nick Brackenbury, co-founder of NearSt. “Until today though, they were invisible to your smartphone, so online was the only easy option. We’re solving that problem for retailers by making it effortless to get their products seen by the millions of local searches happening everyday near their stores.”

“The magic of NearSt is how simple it is for a retailer to take advantage of this cutting edge technology. A few minutes and a few clicks is all it takes to get their inventory management system hooked up.”

Shops install a piece of software that automatically connects to any type of shop till or inventory management system. Shortly after, they will start seeing their products appear in local search results, sending nearby shoppers in-store who might otherwise have ordered online.

The technology has seen widespread uptake by British retailers as a low-effort but powerful tool to fight back against the likes of Amazon, with over 30% of independent retailers in some sectors already using the service.

Speaking to Steven Senior, owner of Yorkshire-based hardware shop, Mortens of Ilkley, about his first month on NearSt, he said, “We had customers actually come into the shop saying they searched for something online and we came up in Google – each of these led to a sale.

“I’m sure there were many more instances where local people came to the shop after finding us on Google. I would recommend NearSt to other retailers as a way to increase footfall.”

James Cox, Founding Partner at YYX Capital, said, “Many people presume e-commerce signals the death knell for the high street, but over 90% of all purchases still happen in-store globally. This is a multi-trillion dollar market that technology has barely touched, and NearSt has the potential to truly transform how we all interact with physical retail. Google already see the impact live in-store inventory data can have, and we’re just scratching the surface with the potential this can have for other technology companies.”

“NearSt epitomises the type of next generation business that YYX Capital aim to back; those developing genuine innovations that will transform the way we interact with commerce on a daily basis.”

NearSt first struck a partnership with Google in 2018, pioneering a solution enabling local shops to automatically list live inventory in Google See What’s In Store and Local Inventory Ads.

Today shops pay a one-time connection fee of £399 and then NearSt’s core search product is free, with the option of purchasing weekly add-ons to drive additional local visibility. In addition to listing a shop’s products in Google, NearSt also provides detailed insights to the retailer about what’s popular with customers searching nearby.

Retailers who are interested in joining should visit near.st to begin their quick and simple setup.

ENDS

Notes to Editors:

About NearSt (www.near.st)

NearSt was founded in 2015 by Max Kreijn and Nick Brackenbury, who had worked together developing digital experiences for major brands at a top global agency. Kreijn came up with the concept in a literal lightbulb moment, when a bulb went in his flat and he searched online to see where he could buy a replacement.

“I was shown lots of places where I could order it online, but I couldn’t find out which local shops had one for me to pop out and buy.” he recalls.

The pair started out by spending 2 months cycling around London on Boris Bikes visiting hundreds of shops to understand why no one had solved this, before starting work on the first NearSt prototype.

The result was a tiny piece of software that can link any shop till system to a powerful central platform, and automatically send live barcodes and stock data to be transformed by a closely guarded algorithm into rich product information with pictures and descriptions, ready to be streamed into Google.

Once connected, if a customer near the store wants to buy – for example – a particular brand of moisturiser, when they search in Google he or she is shown live product and availability information from beauty shops that stock it nearby.

The technology has enabled NearSt to create the most detailed, extensive and live picture of what is available on the high street ever.

In 2019 the technology collected a host of top industry awards, including Retail Tech Startup of the Year at The Europas, In-Store Technology of the Year at the Retail Systems Awards, and Top European Startup at the Emerce E-Day Awards.

About YYX Capital

YYX Capital is a special situations focused firm that found and fund next generation Consumer Internet, eCommerce and FinTech companies. Taking calculated risks are intrinsic to a startups growth and by applying our proven playbooks – we formulate strategies to execute alongside teams as they scale.

YYX Capital founders include James Cox, founder of sleep tech company Simba, former chief Marketing Officer of Zoopla from start-up to its £1.6bn IPO, Charlotte Harper, hedge fund  and family office specialist Julian Barnett,  Michael Jackson, former chairman of Sage and PartyGaming and Sir John Hegarty, the advertising guru. They have previously helped to build the following companies: Simba Sleep, Treatwell, Zoopla, JustEat TransferWise, eharmony, airsorted, SuperAwesome, FundingCircle, Saatchi & Saatchi, BBH and Camden Town Brewery

YYX Capital, also led the seed round of SuperAwesome, who last week announced that Microsoft’s venture fund, M12, had just acquired a stake in the ‘kidtech’ pioneers.

Statistics:

One in ten shops now lay empty as high street slumps (12 Aug 2019 – British Retail Consortium and Springboard)
Searches for “shopping near me” have grown 200% in the past two years (Google Data, March 2018)
83% of online shoppers are willing to go in-store if they can confirm a product’s availability beforehand (Frederic Clement, Increase Footfall In Your Store With Google Local Inventory Ads)
25% of the time a shopper leaves a store without making a purchase, it’s because the item they wanted wasn’t in stock (Google Data, Dec 2017)
76% of people who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a physical place within 24 hours and 28% of those searches results in a purchase (Google Data, May 2016)
88% of people who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a related store within a week (Google Data, Mar 2016)
6 in 10 internet users check whether a product is available in a local store before visiting (Google Data, Mar 2016)
85% of UK consumers still prefer to physically purchase products in-store, and 78%  like to see and feel products in person before buying online [source; marketingsignals.com]