London-based NearSt was founded in April 2015 by former Ogilvy employees, Max Kreijn and Nick Brackenbury, with a view to enabling bricks-and-mortar shops to compete with online behemoths like Amazon. The NearSt mobile app enables people to find the closest physical shop that stocks the product they’re looking for, and to reserve that item or have it delivered.

The company believes the next big innovation in retail is having products located where customers are when they search for them: “No shipping, no logistics.”

To gather local shops’ current stock, NearSt collects between three and five million inventory updates from its London-based retailers every day.

Brackenbury says NearSt has seen “strong growth across both users and shops” and there are plans to announce a major product update at the end of Q2 2017. The company is backed by specialist retail investor, TrueStart, along with a number of angel investors