Matthew Levin's pitch, boiled to one sentence, is that if you sell software to businesses with a physical address, the tools you use to find those businesses are broken. Lariat, the company he co-founded and now runs as CEO, is his answer. It is an AI-native sales platform aimed at a category most founders would rather not build for: the offline economy, where the accounts don't have a crunchbase page and the decision-maker's mobile number is written on a piece of paper taped to a register.
Lariat launched publicly in June 2025 with a claim that would be extravagant if the incumbents weren't so obviously bad at the same job. The company says it covers roughly 90% of decision-makers in brick-and-mortar businesses. Traditional prospecting tools, by Lariat's math, hit under 10%. This is the sort of claim you get to make when your competition has spent a decade scraping LinkedIn and calling it a database.
The product does things a spreadsheet cannot. It qualifies locations. It reads PDFs of government filings. It looks at review velocity and store photos. It calls stores. It maps franchise ownership across the messy layers of holding companies and DBAs that make the small-business world look like accounting fiction. If this sounds like a lot of separate problems being solved by a lot of separate agents, that is because it is, and the fact that a five-person company is attempting it at all tells you something about what a good model with the right context can now do.
The bet, in one line
"Traditional sales platforms are built on top of LinkedIn profiles and corporate websites - not the unstructured text, government filings, and offline sources where the real intelligence lives."
- LARIAT PRODUCT MANIFESTO
The Operator
Levin is a career B2B operator - the kind of person who ends up running marketing at companies for two years at a time because there is always a next company that needs the same thing built. Before Lariat there was Nosto, the ecommerce personalization outfit where he was Global Head of Marketing from 2018 to 2020. Before that, mParticle, where he ran marketing from 2014 to 2016, back when customer data platforms were still being explained in every deck. Before that, a co-founding run at a consumer venture called Plenishable. Before all of that, in an order that reads like a lightning tour of the previous generation of enterprise software, roles at Experian, Ericsson, and Borland.
He went to UC Berkeley for undergrad, and lives now in Brooklyn, which is where Lariat is being built. The company's corporate address on file sits in rural Pennsylvania, which is either a formation-services quirk or a small piece of evidence that Levin is unusually literal about the physical world he's selling into. He publishes on LinkedIn under the handle mblevin - his initials, no ornament - and the writing tends toward the flat, opinion-forward mode of a founder who has been through enough go-to-market cycles to have real takes.
The strongest of those takes may be the one that most closely explains his current company. Levin has argued publicly that the biggest hiring question in vertical SaaS is not seniority or geography but domain expertise. If you are selling software to accountants, hire someone who knows accountants. The people who understand this argument tend to be the same people who understand why a general-purpose prospecting tool won't work for anything specific. Lariat, in this reading, is the product form of an argument he was already making about the market.
"Today we're launching Lariat - an AI-native platform for prospecting into brick-and-mortar."
Matthew Levin, June 2025The Sales-Tool Gap, In Chart Form
DECISION-MAKER COVERAGE - LARIAT'S CLAIM VS INCUMBENTS
Chart per Lariat's public materials. Independent verification pending. The vibe is that Lariat is measuring the roof by the height of the doorway.
Career, In Bullets Because Some Of It Has To Be
Begins professional career, per public work-history records.
Roles at Borland Software, Ericsson, and Experian - the old enterprise software middle.
Co-founds Plenishable, a consumer venture.
Joins mParticle as VP of Marketing during the customer data platform boom.
Global Head of Marketing at Nosto, the ecommerce personalization company.
Co-founds Lariat.
Publicly launches Lariat as an AI-native prospecting platform for brick-and-mortar businesses.
What Lariat Actually Does
Qualifies locations
The system reads store photos, review counts, and web presence to decide whether a business fits your ideal customer profile. It does this at scale for the kind of five-million-location markets that manual research cannot touch.
Reads filings
Government filings, franchise agreements, PDF disclosures - the unstructured public record where corporate structure actually lives. Traditional data providers skip this because it is expensive to parse and easy to break. Lariat's agents parse it.
Finds the mobile number
Personal mobiles, personal emails, and a claimed 90% decision-maker coverage. The company argues this is where B2B outreach in physical markets has to happen, because most operators don't check LinkedIn once a quarter.
Fun facts, in the sense that they are true
Fifteen jobs
SignalHire's records show Levin has held roughly fifteen roles since 2004. Average tenure works out to about one year and nine months - which is a specific way of saying he keeps ending up at the beginning of something.
Two Switchboards
The Apollo record filed against his current email lists the company as "Switchboard," matching an earlier project name. Sometime between founding and launch, it became Lariat. Both names refer to the same idea: a piece of infrastructure that connects the caller to the right person.
Handle: mblevin
His LinkedIn slug and his X handle are both his initials, with no digits, which in 2026 is a form of seniority.
Address: Pennsylvania
Corporate filings put the company at a rural Pennsylvania address while he operates out of Brooklyn. The paperwork lives where paperwork lives.
The Argument About Vertical SaaS
Earlier this year Levin posted about what he called the biggest hiring debate in vertical SaaS. The version he seems to endorse: if your product is designed for a specific industry, your sales team needs people who have worked in that industry, not people with a generic SaaS sales pedigree. This is a spicier position than it sounds. The mainstream go-to-market playbook of the last fifteen years has been to hire quickly from a small pool of trained enterprise sellers and let them figure out the vertical. Levin's position, roughly, is that this doesn't work when the vertical is complicated, and most verticals are complicated.
You can see the same argument implied by Lariat's product. If a sales rep at a dental supply company needs to sell to a hundred thousand independent practices, no CRM in the world is going to help unless it understands what a dental practice is. So you build agents that understand dental practices. And you hire, or advise your customers to hire, salespeople who have worked in dental practices. It's the same claim from two directions.
"The biggest hiring debate in vertical SaaS."
Post title, @mblevin, LinkedInAspirations, stated plainly
The medium-term goal, on the evidence, is to build the sales database for the 90% of the American economy that Apollo, ZoomInfo, and their kin can't see. The long-term goal is presumably to be what those companies were for the last cycle - the default place a B2B seller starts when they need to find someone to call. Whether that goal is reachable in a market where AI-generated contact intelligence gets cheaper every quarter is the interesting question, and Lariat's answer is that the intelligence itself, not the delivery of it, is the moat.
Where to find him
FAQ
Who is Matthew Levin?
He is the co-founder and CEO of Lariat, an AI-native B2B sales platform focused on prospecting into brick-and-mortar businesses. He is based in Brooklyn, New York.
What is Lariat?
Lariat is a sales platform that uses AI agents to qualify locations, read filings, make outbound calls, and surface decision-maker contacts for companies selling into physical, non-tech businesses. It publicly launched in June 2025.
What did he do before Lariat?
Global Head of Marketing at Nosto, VP of Marketing at mParticle, co-founder of Plenishable, and earlier roles at Experian, Ericsson, and Borland Software.
Where did he go to school?
The University of California, Berkeley, where he received a bachelor's degree.
Where is he based?
Brooklyn, New York.