RALEIGH – Levitate, the SaaS platform from ShareFile founder Jesse Lipson, has raised a new round of capital and despite all the economic pressures in these times the company closed an oversubscribed Series-C funding round of $13.75 million. Durham-based Bull City Venture Partners is the lead investor.
This brings the company’s total funding to close to $40 million since its launch in 2017.
Levitate is a SaaS platform that helps relationship-based businesses keep in touch with clients, prospects, and referral sources personally and authentically at scale, powered by AI. Levitate is a product of Real Magic, Lipson’s holding company.
The latest round also includes backing from with participation by Tippet Partners, Protagonist, Duke Capital Partners, The Tweener Fund, Lipson himself, and over 60 other entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurs included Mark Templeton, former CEO of Citrix Systems and DigitalOcean, Joe Colopy and Chaz Felix, co-founders of Bronto Software, and Aaron Houghton, founder of iContact, according to a press release.
“We started Levitate five years ago with the goal of helping small businesses keep in touch with their clients, prospects, and referral sources personally and authentically… at scale,” said Lipson in the announcement. “With this funding round, we’ll have the resources to help tens of thousands of additional customers deliver happiness by keeping in touch more authentically with their business contacts.”
Jason Caplain, General Partner at Bull City Venture Partners, told WRAL TechWire it was the biggest investment BCVP has made in the firm’s 23 years.
“We don’t usually go out and lead later-stage rounds either,” Caplain told TechWire. “So these are like, first-time kind of things for us. So I think it all just speaks to our excitement around Jes and the team and our belief in a really strong future in the company.”
Levitate logo
Levitate also unveils New AI ASSISTANT
With this funding round, Levitate also is launching an AI Assistant, which will help customers write, reword, and edit emails and social media posts.
According to the press release, the AI Assistant has been fine-tuned for the specific use cases of small relationship-based businesses like insurance agencies, wealth management firms, and accounting firms.
It also translates content into ten languages for customers with multi-lingual client bases.
“With the launch of our AI Assistant, we’re addressing one of the biggest barriers to personal outreach for small businesses: writer’s block,” said Lipson. “AI can be a technology that allows for deeper personal connections, not just a tool for automation. I’m excited about the amazing things we’ll be able to deliver to our customers in the coming months and years to realize our vision of authentic communication at scale.”
Caplain calling new content like the AI features “intuitive.”
“The roadmap is full of inventive solutions to problems that small businesses face and I’m looking forward to seeing how these propel their success even further,” Caplain said.
