Just 10 months after closing our Pre-Seed, we are thrilled to announce our $7M Seed led by Anthos Capital, with participation from existing investors, NextView Ventures and Ascend.vc, and the addition of Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund and others.
Level is building the financial OS to enable microbusinesses to thrive, with a suite of interlocking financial products purpose-built for entrepreneurs. We partner with marketplaces to deliver these embedded financial services. By providing tailored financial solutions to help their workers expand their small businesses, we “grow the pie”, driving substantial financial benefits to our partners and our customers.
In 2021, we grew our business by 10x and empowered our customers to build their microbusinesses by enabling them to invest in trucks, tools and other productive assets, fundamentally shifting their earning trajectories. We expanded our marketplace partnerships with additional world-class companies, including TaskRabbit, Dolly and Housecall Pro, as well as a number of other leading marketplaces.
Level's ambition has always been to create an interlocking suite of financial products purpose-built for entrepreneurs — a financial OS for microbusinesses. With this new capital, we will accelerate our growth and move into the next phase of our product development, building the financial OS that microbusinesses need to thrive.
Why Level + Why Now
There are 32 million small businesses in the United States, but only the top one-third have access to financial services designed for their needs. The remaining 20 million small or microbusinesses — entrepreneurial truck and van drivers, sub-contractors, lawn care professionals and many others — can only access consumer finance, severely constraining their growth and opportunities. They are massively underserved.
With our first product, the Level Advance (a form of non-traditional credit), we have proven that delivering appropriate credit to microbusinesses enables them to grow, boosting income by 30%+, yielding concrete benefits to our customers and our partners. We have built trusted relationships with our partners and customers, who are now seeking additional financial services to help them grow their businesses.
“At TaskRabbit, we are always looking for innovative ways to support our Tasker Community in achieving their individual business goals.” explained Jenna Costa, the Senior Director of North American Operations. “Our partnership with Level has been a game-changer for our Taskers, giving them a customized solution to expand their business and help their customers. We are enthusiastic about expanding our partnership with Level.”
The "great resignation" has led to unprecedented levels of microbusiness formation, with a record 4.35 million applications to start new businesses in 2020. And as The Economist noted, “Perhaps the most striking change is that four times as many single-person companies have been founded since the pandemic began as during a similar time-period in the financial crisis.” The landscape of microbusiness formation has experienced a seismic shift, and Level is extremely well positioned to fuel the "great rejuvenation" of American entrepreneurship.
How We Will Deploy This Capital + Our Exciting Path Ahead
In the past year, we have built the technology, assembled a stellar team and established the partnerships to scale with confidence.
In the next stage, we will aggressively grow our Level Advance business and begin to scale additional interlocking, embedded financial products. With the Level Account at the core of our customers’ businesses and a roadmap to enable a suite of financial services, we are poised to deliver on our mission: to empower people to build microbusinesses with the financial OS they need to thrive.
We are building Level to become the platform of choice for delivering embedded financial services to the 20M+ micro and small businesses which are stuck with consumer financial products today. As we grow, we continue to be driven by our vision of a world where the smallest businesses have the biggest opportunities.
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If you are enthusiastic about our mission to empower microbusinesses to thrive, energized by the opportunity to shape our direction and ready to take on a leadership role on our purpose-driven, A+ team, one of these roles may be for you.
And if you seek to empower entrepreneurs who are building their microbusinesses on your marketplace, reach out to learn more about how partnering with Level can drive meaningful benefits to your company.
