NearSt has raised £2 million in seed funding to drive more footfall into bricks and mortar stores.

The Google-backed UK startup was founded in 2015 by Max Kreijn and Nick Brackenbury, using technology to link products on shop shelves in real-time with nearby customers searching online.

The latest funding takes the total raised by NearSt to £3.2 million, and brings in finance from angel investors Will Hobhouse (Heal’s, Jack Wills, Whittard of Chelsea) and Ben Laurie (Google Research & Machine Intelligence), alongside senior engineers from DeepMind. The round was led by consumer tech specialists YYX Capital.

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

The platform currently sends around 5,000 extra customers per month to the UK High Street - who would have shopped online - and plans to grow this to over 100,000 a month by year end.

“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.”

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

Retailers 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.

James Cox, founding partner at YYX Capital, said: “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 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.

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