NearSt, the UK-based retail tech firm, has raised £2 million in seed funding.
The funding has been made from the Grosvenor Group, retail specialists True Global, consumer tech specialists YYX Capital and Moscar Capital.
The new investment takes the total sum raised by NearSt to £5 million.
The company’s technology allows the physical retailers to make the products in their physical stores visible to the customers shopping online.
Nick Brackenbury, Co-founder, NearSt, said “We’ve witnessed extraordinary growth in ‘local-availability’ searches throughout 2020. In the first lockdown, customers searching for products nearby surged 620 per cent compared to February levels, before levelling off at a 270 per cent increase between July and September.”
The start-up backed by Google mentions that the shoppers’ demand for the local product availability in 2020 almost tripled as shopping behaviours shifted online.
Furthermore, the recent lockdown in UK has driven another 500 per cent surge, making it quite clear that the shoppers are adopting the online shopping to find things in the local businesses they prefer to buy from.”