Levitate

Overview

Levitate is a Raleigh, North Carolina-based marketing platform and customer-relationship solution provider that sells an AI-powered “keep-in-touch” toolkit to relationship-based small businesses (TechCrunch). Founded in late 2017 by serial entrepreneur Jesse Lipson — who had previously built and sold the file-sharing startup ShareFile — the company had raised $71 million in total capital by March 2026 and reported more than 8,000 business customers (Pulse2). This profile covers only the Raleigh marketing-software company: the name is also used by unrelated ventures, including the Danish startup Levitate Technology, which makes running blades for amputees (Disability Insider).

A ShareFile founder’s second act

Lipson’s path to Levitate ran through one of the Research Triangle’s notable exits. He founded the cloud storage and file-sharing startup ShareFile and sold it to Citrix for a reported $93 million in 2011, then stayed on at Citrix, most recently as corporate vice president and general manager of the Citrix Cloud Services business unit (TechCrunch). In 2017 he left the corporate world to build Levitate, which by mid-2020 had scaled to more than 1,000 businesses paying on a subscription basis and a team of 80 (TechCrunch).

The founding insight came from watching relationship-based businesses — in financial services, real estate, insurance, and legal markets — struggle to stay genuinely in touch with clients once deals closed (TechCrunch). Rather than positioning the product as another CRM, Lipson framed it as a new category he called “keep-in-touch marketing,” explicitly contrasted with mass-blast email marketing: “We’re not really a CRM,” he told TechCrunch, describing email marketing as impersonal blasts “to users who can’t reply,” versus curating “your list of people who you truly know” (TechCrunch).

How the platform works

The software operates as an email add-on integrating with major providers like Microsoft and Google, as well as a standalone iOS and Android app (TechCrunch). Business customers can import contacts from Excel or CSV files and from CRM and agency-management systems including Salesforce, HubSpot, Dynamics, AMS 360, and others, with API integrations offered in industries like insurance and financial advisory (TechCrunch). Imported contacts are enhanced with publicly available information such as photos, social media links, company details, and bios (TechCrunch).

The toolset centers on staying in touch rather than broadcasting: rules about who to contact and how, reminders to maintain relationships, customizable email templates, and relationship analytics (TechCrunch). AI features suggest who to contact and when, automate workflows such as new-customer welcome kits, and clean up contact data — for example, deciding whether a name field contains a real first name or a company name so outreach does not sound impersonal (TechCrunch). Early pricing was $150 per month for five users, with a free single-user personal plan and a $199-per-month tier adding live onboarding, training, and a personal marketing coach — the human-coaching layer that, combined with the software, defined the offering (TechCrunch, citybiz).

Funding and growth

The capital history shows steady, compounding rounds. In July 2020 Levitate raised an additional $6 million, bringing total funding to $12 million from investors including Tippet Venture Partners, Bull City Venture Partners, and Veeva Systems co-founder and CEO Peter Gassner (TechCrunch). In February 2021 it added $8 million in Series B funding — backed by existing investors Tippet, Gassner, and Bull City, with Lipson participating personally — taking total fundraising to $20 million, with the company reporting 2,000 business customers and revenue that had quadrupled in 2020 (citybiz).

In April 2023 the company closed $14 million in growth capital led by Bull City Venture Partners, with Tippet Partners, Protagonist, Duke Capital Partners, The Tweener Fund, Lipson himself, and more than 60 individual entrepreneurs — including former Citrix and DigitalOcean CEO Mark Templeton, Bronto Software co-founders Joe Colopy and Chaz Felix, and iContact founder Aaron Houghton — reporting $40 million raised since inception and more than 4,000 small-business customers (citybiz). That round also launched the company’s AI Assistant, which helps customers write, reword, and edit emails and social posts and translates content into ten languages (citybiz).

The August 2024 Series D raised $15 million led by Harbert Growth Partners with Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures and Bull City Venture Partners, bringing total capital to $55 million (Pulse2). The company reported 6,000-plus customers and the general availability of online-presence tools — website design, Google Review management, and blog content creation — powered by the AI Assistant (Pulse2). Northwestern Mutual’s Craig Schedler framed the appeal in financial-services terms: the platform could expand advisors’ reach while deepening client relationships (Pulse2). In March 2026 Levitate raised another $16 million led by Harbert Growth Partners with Bull City Venture Partners and Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures participating, taking total capital raised to $71 million (Pulse2). The company said the funding would accelerate an AI innovation roadmap and expand a “Service-as-Software” model — marketing automation combined with hands-on strategic support — while growing customer-success and sales teams across the United States and Canada (Pulse2). Customer count stood at more than 8,000 businesses (Pulse2).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not resolve the roughly $6 million gap between the reported funding totals in February 2021 ($20M) and April 2023 ($40M after a $14M raise) — an undisclosed intermediate raise is the likely explanation, but no independent source documented one. The exact publish dates of the two citybiz articles are approximated from their reporting windows and documented in their source notes. The $93 million ShareFile sale figure is TechCrunch’s, attributed to the Triangle Business Journal, and was not re-verified here. The London meditation venture sharing the Levitate name is mentioned only to disambiguate; nothing in this profile describes its business beyond its existence. A claim that Levitate began inside a parent venture called Real Magic appeared only in an affiliated local source and is not repeated here.