Levellr has raised $1.75 million for its community management and insights tools used by companies to manage Discord communities.

The money comes from from a group of video games and media industry investors including Mitch Lasky, Fuel Ventures, Colopl Next and LFG Holdings (headed by SuperAwesome founder Dylan Collins) as well as senior executives from Krafton, Riot Games, Amazon, EA and SuperAwesome. 

Levellr also announced that Collins, the serial entrepreneur behind companies including SuperAwesome, Jolt and Demonware, is joining the company as chairman. In an email to GamesBeat, Collins said the Discord tools are already used by more than 60 game studios and tech companies including Scopely, Hutch, Pathea, the NFL, Google and YouTube.

Discord has become one of the largest messaging platforms in the world, with over 200 million monthly active users. It has become one of the most popular new digital engagement spaces for Gen Z and Gen Alpha players.

The value of Discord communities is increasingly being realized across gaming organizations, with multiple teams tapping into the value provided by Levellr’s software, including  professional community managers, marketing, partnerships and licensing, customer support, engineering and commercial teams.

Levellr’s Discord tools are used across hundreds of communities by major gaming and consumer brands to provide detailed analytics, sentiment tracking, in-community engagement, content scheduling, monetization features and key enterprise functionality.  

Tom Gayner, CEO of Levellr, said in a statement, “As community and superfan engagement has become increasingly important for revenue growth, we’re incredibly pleased to raise capital from angel investors who see and deal with some of these challenges daily. Rising UA costs and the excess of opportunity for players and consumers is creating astonishing bottlenecks around customer acquisition, which has woken the industry up to the importance of community platforms. Discord is an incredible space for community engagement and we’re excited to be contributing towards that ecosystem”

Founded by Tom Gayner and Ben Barbersmith in 2021, Levellr’s team is distributed across North America and Europe with customers globally. The company has 22 people, starting in London and New York. They have remote employees as well.

The founders have been building communities for the last decade, Gayner in gaming, consumer and entertainment brands from his time at Interpublic Group agencies, and Barbersmith from his time at YouTube.

“When we launched Levellr over three years ago, we noticed a growing shift with traditional social media platforms moving from spaces where we engage in the conversation, to becoming broadcast media platforms at their core, with the platforms encouraging short-form algorithmic content,” the founders said in an email to GamesBeat. “This shift was pushing community driven businesses in gaming, consumer and entertainment to move conversations onto platforms like Discord and Reddit, where they could bring together their players and users into one space to give engaged users a microphone and make them part of the conversation in a way that traditional social was no longer providing.”

They added, “But what publishers, developers and brands couldn’t articulate, was what the value of a community on Discord was providing. How much game time are you driving from those users? Are you re-engaging lapsed users? What is the dollar value of a user on Discord? How do you increase that dollar value? How do you sift through the thousands of messages sent by your players on a daily basis and turn that into nuggets of insights that can drive decision making across the business?”

And they said, “We took those challenges & learnings from our early customers to build our software solutions to ultimately help them power unmatched insights, drive meaningful engagement & turn communities into revenue generating platforms. Today our tools plug into Discord and Telegram, but Reddit is on the roadmap for 2025 and we’ll continue to be layering on additional community platforms to give our customers a one source of truth for what is a fragmented community landscape.

Prior to this round, Levellr has been largely bootstrapped, raising just over $1 million. Although breakeven in Q2 this year, the company felt it was time to respond to customer demand and raise some capital to move faster.

“We wanted money which was experienced and connected in the gaming industry, so we’re pleased that the majority of investors are experienced founders and operators from the industry,” the founders said.

As for what the company does, they said they are seeing community and superfan engagement become increasingly important for revenue growth, driven by rising user-acquisition costs and the excess of opportunity for players and consumers creating astonishing bottlenecks around customer acquisition, which has woken the industry up to the importance of community platforms.

But community building comes with challenges, they said.

“None of our customers could concretely explain internally or externally what the value of their community was before working with us. It was evident they had highly engaged communities based on the number of users and daily messages sent, but how do they actually turn that engagement into business insights and value?” they said.

“Our software, which plugs into our customers communities, provides them with access to unparalleled insights via our AI driven social listening tools which they can access through our dashboards and API’s, whilst driving engagement within communities via our unique gamification tools which we can connect directly to gameplay across multiple platforms to turn communities from a separate island for conversation into a truly connected ecosystem with our customers products and games,” they said.

They added, “In September alone, we crunched over three billion data points for customers who are receiving millions of messages in communities per month. This provides a literal goldmine of information to publishers, studios and brands who are using the insights we are driving to fuel change across developer, data and analytics, publishing, player insights, marketing, licensing and community teams.”

And customers are seeing the value, they said. Levellr’s software has been able to prove with existing customers that on average, a Discord user is six times more valuable than a non-Discord user through spend on and off platform, which the company can surface via integrations into e-commerce platforms and customer CRM’s.

National interest technology can show up in a lot of ways, like in data analysis and cybersecurity, as well as satellites and weapons. Many startups with dual-use applications are increasingly looking at the government as an attractive customer due to its wide range of use cases and the amount of federal dollars available. 

And while there are several grant programs (like those offered via the Inflation Reduction Act) that provide nondilutive funding for startups, Rebecca Gevalt, managing partner at Dcode Capital who used to work at the CIA, says she advises companies to go after contracts instead. 

“The real key is, how do you figure out a repeatable way to get government revenue so that it can be a core part of your business?” Gevalt said onstage this week at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024.

Gevalt spoke alongside Topher Haddad, founder and CEO of satellite imagery startup Albedo, and Kai Kloepfer, founder and CEO of biometric weapons startup Biofire, about the boom in national interest startups and how startups can go about getting a foot in the government door.

The DOD is “flush with money”

The goal for startups working with the government should be to get repeatable revenue, not just grant money or other nondilutive funding. One easy target for startups with a national interest use case? The Department of Defense (DOD), which Gevalt says is “flush with money.” 

The DOD’s budget request for 2025 was close to $850 billion, with $143.2 billion for research, development, testing, and evaluation and then another $167.5 billion set aside for procurement. The agency is actively looking to work with startups developing AI, autonomous systems, quantum computing, and space technologies. 

There are a number of entry points for startups, such as the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs through DARPA. And while startups can get a foot in the door through those programs, Gevalt recommends that startups have a partner to guide them from concept and prototyping phases through to commercial contracts. 

“There are strategies to go from that first in the door, R&D dollars for development into more programmatic revenue, and that’s where our advisory firm helps companies, but there’s a number of them in DC that help companies do that,” she said.

And Gevalt has a point. A 2023 Defense Innovation Board report found that only 16% of DOD SBIR-funded companies made it to commercialization contracts over the last 10 years. 

But it’s not all defense

“I think a lot of times people can fall into the trap of thinking, if I want to sell to the government, then it has to be related to defense tech, and I have to be involved in drones, missiles, things like that. And that’s fundamentally not the case,” Gevalt said.

She says Dcode is heavily focused on investing in startups that handle and analyze data, as well as ones that offer cybersecurity solutions. 

“By law, the government cannot delete any of its data, so it’s going to be a continually growing problem for them to manage it and to drive insights out of it,” Gevalt said. “And then, from a cybersecurity perspective, they get hacked rather frequently, so trying to get them access to the best tools.”

Put your blinders up to politics

In the lead-up to the U.S. election, should startups be coming up with contingency plans for different presidential candidates? Gevalt and Albedo’s Haddad say that’s not exactly necessary.

“Across administrations, you are going to have people interested in data, tools, cybersecurity, the latest in AI,” Gevalt said. “Where the dollars flow change, how big the government will be could change. But I fundamentally believe whether or not the government grows or gets smaller, there’s going to be a requirement for them to upgrade their systems from the year 2000.”

Haddad noted that Albedo is in “wait-and-see” mode, as it’s expecting some effects. But not enough to have a Plan A and Plan B for different candidates.

“Generally, space is a big priority, and I don’t think that will change,” Haddad said. “Maybe it will change a bit of the business development in terms of how we focus on different agencies or departments.”

Gevalt said that the best way to remain unaffected by changing administrations is to seek out relationships with nonpolitical appointments. 

“As you’re developing your federal go-to-market motion, you don’t typically want to talk to the politicals,” she said. “You want to talk to the people who are doing the jobs day in, day out, regardless of who’s in the administration, because those are the people who are going to buy your products.”

Made in the USA

Gevalt said that for government, contracting with startups that are based in and producing products in the U.S. is preferred — but more so for software than hardware. 

“If there are certain people on your team doing certain work from certain countries, then it makes it very hard to do sales into the government, at least into the DOD and into some intelligence community agencies,” she said.

Both Albedo and Biofire are based in the U.S., with manufacturing facilities in Colorado. Kloepfer noted that building in the U.S. was important for Biofire because of the nature of its business. 

“We are quite strongly regulated by the Department of Commerce with respect to export controls. … [T]he U.S. is excited about keeping its weapons technology inside the U.S.,” he said, noting that Biofire would likely need special approval to contract foreign manufacturers.

He added that investors also like to see onshored manufacturing because it helps with quality control and scaling.

“For the early stage that we’re at, it’s how fast can we iterate? How fast can we improve?” Kloepfer said. “And doing that at our current headquarters facility … is orders of magnitude easier than iterating with some sort of overseas vendor, if that’s even possible.”

Finding product-market fit in government

Gevalt says that her firm often sees early-stage companies hire a salesperson or lobbyist out the gate when trying to secure contracts with the federal government. She advises instead that startups first figure out which agencies have a need for their technology using available data from sites like Bloomberg Government (BGov), GovTribe, and GovWin IQ. 

“When the government says they want to go buy something, they have to put it out publicly, unless it’s a classified thing,” she said. “So … you can sift through that data. And if you know whoever your competitor is, and you know they’re selling to the government, you can … see what contracts have they won? In what offices have they won them? Are they working with partners like Deloitte or Booz Allen?”

That’s also true for AI startups looking to work with government.

The key mindset is to be strategic and tactical, Gevalt says, noting that startups should look at the government’s overarching strategy documents regarding AI and then tactically seek out offices that are actively leveraging AI technologies. 

“You have a lot of people who’ve been in the government for a very long time, and so they know conceptually what AI is, but a lot of the data architecture that they have won’t actually facilitate the use of an AI product on whatever datasets they’re working on anyway,” Gevalt said. “So … strategically, you can see the Biden administration right now wants to leverage AI in this way. But tactically, how are the agencies actually doing it? … How are they buying it? Are they buying it through a partner?”

Hyundai is one of several automakers working to make hydrogen-powered electric vehicles a thing, and a good first step is making sure they’re not ugly. I think the designers hit the target with the “Art of Steel” design language used in the Initium concept SUV revealed this week at an event in Korea. It seems to borrow some of the fearlessly angular and retro-inspired looks it’s teased over the years on other vehicles like the N Vision 74 concept and the Seven (which will eventually become the Ioniq 9).

According to Hyundai’s estimates, the Initium can drive more than 400 miles (650km) on a single refuel — about 30 miles further than its production Nexo fuel cell SUV. Hyundai says the Initium is a “preview” of an upcoming fuel cell EV it will reveal in the first half of next year.

Earlier this year, Hyundai claimed hydrogen vehicles will “play a prominent role” in the company’s goal of going carbon neutral by 2050. It plans to use hydrogen in cars, commercial trucks, buses, generators, and other applications. Hyundai is building it all under its “HTWO” hydrogen business brand.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the world, and vehicles that use it release water vapor instead of tailpipe emissions. However, it’s not easy to package and distribute, and its infrastructure is still in its infancy (despite development lasting decades) compared to how far EV charging networks have come in just over one decade.

This week we announced the TechRadar Choice Awards 2024 winners, Apple launched a slew of M4 Macs, and Marvel outlined its MCU TV line-up (and boy are we excited).

To catch up on all this and more we’ve rounded up the top seven tech news stories from the week below, with links to the original articles if you want to find out more.

It’s that time of year once again. The leaves are changing, the weather is getting colder, and it’s just about time to set your clocks back an hour. That’s right! On Sunday, November 3, daylight saving time officially ends, and you’ll need to set your clocks back an hour.

However, it’s important to know whether your phone will automatically change to daylight saving time or if you need to do it manually. It’s a question that applies regardless of which phone you have. Whether you’re rocking an iPhone 16, Google Pixel 9, Samsung Galaxy S24, or any other smartphone, it’s essential to know whether or not you need to change it for the new time.

Before the advent of smart devices, we manually changed the clocks to adjust for either daylight saving time or standard time. However, some clocks, such as wall clocks, oven clocks, and car clocks, are still non-internet-connected and require manual adjustment.

If your smartphone’s software is up to date, its clock should automatically adjust. But if you had previously customized the date or time settings, you might have to update your clock manually to ensure it’s ready.

When is daylight saving time?

How to update your iPhone when daylight saving begins

First, let’s look at how to update the time on the iPhone. If you have an iPhone, like the iPhone 16 Pro, go to the Settings app, select General, then Date & Time, and toggle on Set Automatically.

Once that’s done, your iPhone time will automatically update — no extra work from you is required! When daylight saving begins, your iPhone won’t skip a beat.

How to update your Android phone when daylight saving begins

The process for Android is mostly the same, though it follows a slightly different process. On an Android phone like the Google Pixel 9 Pro, go to Settings > System >Date & Time, and toggle on Set Automatically.

On a Samsung phone, like the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, you’ll need to follow a slightly different path. Go to Settings > General Management > Date and Time, and make sure Automatic Date and Time is turned on.

With these settings configured, your Android phone is prepped and ready to automatically change the time once daylight saving time begins for another year.

Other daylight saving phone tips

Although the above steps should be all you need to worry about, there are some other things you can do to be extra sure your phone changes when it should for daylight saving time.

If you haven’t updated your phone in a while, ensure it’s running the latest available software. Open the Settings app on an iPhone, tap General, and then Software Update. If you have an Android phone, go to the Settings app, scroll down the page, and tap on Software update or System update (the wording will be slightly different depending on which Android phone you have).

Outdated software shouldn’t impact your phone automatically changing for standard time, but installing an update if one is available doesn’t hurt. If you have any alarms set on your phone, they’ll also automatically update to the new time without any extra work required from you.

Mint Mobile, now owned by T-Mobile and with Ryan Reynolds as its most prominent public face, has launched a new kids-focused plan. The company touts it as an ideal, easy-to-manage plan for parents. However, there are still some questions about what makes it so ideal for little ones.

Mint Mobile’s kids plan includes 5GB of mobile data

Mint Mobile’s new kids plan offers 5GB of data quota so your kids can stay connected and in touch when they need it and there’s no WiFi available. The plan has an introductory offer of $15 a month, though you have to pay three months upfront if you want to sign up ($45). After that period, you’ll have to pay the equivalent of $25 a month for the three-month plan.

You have the option to subscribe for either six months at $20 per month or for twelve months at the initial price of $15 per month, with quarterly payments. Yes, the plan seems designed for parents to opt for the year-long option. Aside from the 5GB of mobile data, the kids plan is pretty similar to Mint’s standard plans in terms of features, including hotspot support. Once they go over the 5GB data limit, kids will still be able to stay connected through the T-Mobile network, but at 2G speeds.

Parents will receive email communications, announcements, and advertising from Mint Mobile. The carrier also states that parents can “monitor child’s data usage.” However, beyond that, the plan doesn’t appear to offer any additional options or features specifically designed for children. For example, there isn’t a dedicated app with additional parental control and monitoring options, or anything like that.

Other plans offer better value for money

Mint Mobile already offers other plans that, for a similar price, offer a much higher data quota. Therefore, if you’re seeking an affordable plan for kids that doesn’t necessitate heavy mobile data usage, other options appear to be more suitable. The carrier should provide more details about all the features that are actually available in the plan and what makes it so special for children.