LevelUp is an American mobile ordering and

mobile payments A mobile payment, also referred to as mobile money, mobile money transfer and mobile wallet, is any of various payment processing services operated under financial regulations and performed from or via a mobile device, as the cardinal class of ...

platform created by Boston, Massachusetts–based start-up SCVNGR. On July 25, 2018, it was announced that LevelUp would be acquired for US$390 million by

Grubhub Grubhub Inc. is an American online and mobile prepared food ordering and delivery platform. The company is based in Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 2004, it is a subsidiary of the Dutch company Just Eat Takeaway since 2021. Grubhub has been crit ...

, an online food delivery platform.

History

LevelUp was initially launched in March 2011 and operated for its first 3 months as a daily deals platform. In July 2011, LevelUp shifted away from daily deals to focus exclusively on facilitating mobile payments. In July 2013, around 200,000 users and 3,000 companies were using LevelUp. In October 2014, around 14,000 stores were using LevelUp. In May 2017 they announced that they had raised $50 million in funding, with over 50,000 locations and more than 200 brands using Levelup.

Overview

The LevelUp mobile application for iPhone, Android and

Windows Phone Windows Phone (WP) is a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones as the replacement successor to Windows Mobile and Zune. Windows Phone featured a new user interface derived from the Metro design lan ...

allowed registered users to securely link their debit or credit card to a unique QR code displayed within the app. To pay with LevelUp, users scanned the QR code on their phone at LevelUp terminals located at local businesses who accept LevelUp as a form of payment. Some merchants that accepted LevelUp as a form of payment also offered monetary savings to users. Users are given “First-Time Visit Specials” the first time they made a transaction at the merchant's location. Users could also unlock "credit" to a merchant's store after spending a certain amount at the merchant's location. As of June 2016, LevelUp was available for businesses in the

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the capital city, state capital and List of municipalities in Massachusetts, most populous city of the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financ ...

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = List of sovereign states, Count ...

Washington DC ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

Northern Virginia Northern Virginia, locally referred to as NOVA or NoVA, comprises several counties and independent cities in the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. It is a widespread region radiating westward and southward from Washington, D.C. Wit ...

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

St. Louis St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the bi-state metropolitan area, which e ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the U ...

Atlanta Atlanta ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the seat of Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia, but its territory falls in both Fulton and DeKalb counties. With a population of 498,71 ...

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

Dallas Dallas () is the List of municipalities in Texas, third largest city in Texas and the largest city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the List of metropolitan statistical areas, fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States at 7.5 ...

San Diego San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United States ...

Minneapolis Minneapolis () is the largest city in Minnesota, United States, and the county seat of Hennepin County. The city is abundant in water, with list of lakes in Minneapolis, thirteen lakes, wetlands, the Mississippi River, creeks and waterfalls. ...

, Montgomery,

Kansas City The Kansas City metropolitan area is a bi-state metropolitan area anchored by Kansas City, Missouri. Its 14 counties straddle the border between the U.S. states of Missouri (9 counties) and Kansas (5 counties). With and a population of more ...

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a port, seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the county seat, seat of King County, Washington, King County, Washington (state), Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in bo ...

, and Wilmington (North Carolina) areas. In early 2018, the company announced the release of Broadcast, enabling restaurant brands to reach new customers by allowing them to browse live menus, order ahead and pay directly from high-traffic apps such as

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin ...

Messenger ''MESSENGER'' was a NASA robotic space probe that orbited the planet Mercury between 2011 and 2015, studying Mercury's chemical composition, geology, and magnetic field. The name is a backronym for "Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geoch ...

Yelp Yelp Inc. is an American company that develops the Yelp.com website and the Yelp mobile app, which publish crowd-sourced reviews about businesses. It also operates Yelp Guest Manager, a table reservation service. It is headquartered in San F ...

, Foursquare,

Amazon Alexa Amazon Alexa, also known simply as Alexa, is a virtual assistant technology largely based on a Polish speech synthesiser named Ivona, bought by Amazon in 2013. It was first used in the Amazon Echo smart speaker and the Echo Dot, Echo Studio ...

and Chase Pay. As of September 30, 2021, the LevelUp app is no longer available.

References

External links

* {{Official website, https://www.thelevelup.com Financial services companies established in 2011 Online financial services companies of the United States Mobile payments Online food ordering Financial technology companies Companies based in Boston 2011 establishments in Massachusetts

History

Overview

References

Further reading

External links