Comedy streaming platform NextUp today announced the opening of a new financing round which will be lead by existing investors Velocity Technology EIS Fund. Founded by the BBC Worldwide’s former Director of Comedy – Stuart Snaith, as well as the team behind YouTube channel ComComedy – NextUp streams over 130 stand-up comedy specials from its subscription platform which is available worldwide across mobile and TV apps for £4.99 per month.
The subscription video market is worth £19b globally and has recently seen an influx of genre-specific services such as Shudder for horror, HayU for reality and Crunchy Roll for anime. NextUp is currently the only platform for stand-up comedy specials.
NextUp recently announced the doubling of their content output from one show per week to two. They feature comedians such as Ed Byrne, Rachel Parris, Lou Sanders, Miles Jupp, Stewart Francis, Tiff Stevenson and Richard Herring.
Since its beta-launch in 2016, NextUp have partnered with Virgin Atlantic, South Western Railway, Amazon Channels and Apple. They’ve also brought on Bruce Tuchman, the former President of MGM Worldwide Networks as an investor and Senior Advisor.
NextUp also aims to drive positive change in the comedy and wider community by supporting initiatives such as offering free rehearsal space for up and coming comedians, The Care Home Tour that placed comedians in dementia Care Homes across the UK, as well as the Grapevine Bursary that aims to tackle the lack of diversity in comedy.
This investment round follows on from NextUp’s previous round in 2018; since then it has seen the company value increase 175%. The total round amount is £600k EIS of which there is just £250k remaining at the time of writing.
NextUp’s CEO Daniel Berg said ‘A few years ago, NextUp was just an idea on paper that we hoped would let comedy shows be preserved and enjoyed worldwide like never before – benefiting both fans and comedians. Thanks to incredible support from the comedy industry, our current investors and of course our members, it’s become a reality and we can’t wait to take NextUp to the next level. Plans are still being finalised but without giving too much away – next year we’re hoping to launch in a country that’s run by a strange man with even stranger hair (and it ain’t North Korea)!’
Raj Saxena of Velocity Capital Partners who are leading the investment round said, ‘We’ve seen the inner-workings of NextUp since we first invested in 2017. They have an incredibly capable team, a fantastic product and are facing perfect market conditions to grow NextUp into something very special indeed.”
NextUp’s investment round is open to everyone – from experienced angel investors to first-time everyday investors.
