A $180M Milestone, Seven Years in the Making

Dima Gutzeit, Founder & CEO, LeapXpert 

Seven years since co-founding LeapXpert, Dima Gutzeit reflects on the problem that started it all, the conviction it took to build a category the market wasn’t ready for, and why a $180M growth round is just the start.  

In the more than 20 years I had spent building messaging platforms, the conversation in enterprise had always centered on email: the infrastructure, the governance, the data. But the actual conversations, the ones where decisions were made, relationships were built, and deals were closed, had moved somewhere else. WhatsApp, iMessage, WeChat. The clients were there, the employees followed, and the enterprise had no idea. 

The moment that changed things for me was a dinner with a banker friend who spent most of the meal on his phone. I found it annoying enough to ask what he was doing, and he explained that his real work happens on WhatsApp, not email, because email is for formalities. The actual decisions, the live deals, the relationships worth having were all happening on messaging, and even then, most real business communication was already outside the standard working channels. It has only grown since. 

Those conversations were invisible, ungoverned, and unusable. And that gap is why LeapXpert exists. 

The problem was not that enterprises were careless, but that the tools they had were built for a different era. Compliance infrastructure, governance frameworks, data ownership policies: all of it was designed for email and had not kept pace with how people communicated. Nobody was going to solve it by asking employees to stop using WhatsApp, because the clients were already there. The only real answer was to build infrastructure that could govern those channels without disrupting the way communication naturally flows. 

That is what we spent seven years building: not a layer on top of existing tools, but entirely new, native infrastructure with governance at the point of communication, not after the fact. Every conversation on WhatsApp, SMS, WeChat, Signal, and more, governed from the moment it happens, owned by the enterprise, and available as intelligence the business can act on. The distinction matters because a wrapper that captures data after the fact is not governance, it is documentation. Real governance happens at the source, or it does not happen at all. 

For the first couple of years, almost no one wanted to listen. Then COVID happened and the world of messaging changed permanently. People say founders live in the future, and that is exactly how it felt. We were building the right product for a version of the world we strongly believed was coming, and then it arrived faster than anyone expected. 

What we have learned from global deployments is that the problem runs deeper than most organizations realize when they first come to us. They think they are solving a compliance problem. What they discover is that the conversations they were not capturing contain some of the most valuable data in the business: client intent, relationship context, risk signals, and decisions that never made it into a CRM or system of record. That shift is what the timing of this growth round reflects. 

We ran a competitive process with multiple offers, and chose Riverwood Capital because they saw the same shift we did: enterprise communication is becoming both more conversational and more intelligent, and the infrastructure layer beneath it will matter enormously. We did not need capital that only recognized where LeapXpert is today. We wanted a partner aligned with where this category is going.  

The more important context is what has changed in the market around us. AI has moved the question. For years, enterprises asked whether they could govern channels like WhatsApp, but the better question now is what they can do with that data once they own it. Understanding it is the first layer: client signals, relationship intelligence, risk that surfaces before it becomes an incident. The more significant opportunity is acting on it, through AI agents embedded directly into the communication channels enterprises already use for their most important client conversations, present in those conversations and able to respond, escalate, and inform in real time rather than after the fact. The enterprises building toward that capability now are the ones who will have a structural advantage in the years ahead, and most of them are only beginning to realize they are sitting on a data asset they have never been able to use. 

The $180M goes toward building up that intelligence layer, expanding into markets where this problem is growing fastest, and moving faster on a product roadmap we have been building toward for years.
The broader opportunity is significant: as AI agents become embedded in the communication channels enterprises already use for their most important client conversations, the volume and consequence of those interactions will multiply. The infrastructure to govern them, understand them, and act on them is not a nice-to-have. It is the foundation everything else gets built on. 

This growth round gives us the ability to move faster, but it does not change the problem we wake up to solve. Seven years ago, most enterprises did not acknowledge it. Today, many do. But the gap is still closing unevenly, and the organizations that move first will have a meaningful advantage. 

Building a company is hard. Building a category is harder. As a team we did both, and we are just getting started.