Karen LeVert

Biography

Karen LeVert is a Venture Partner with Pappas Capital, and Co-founder and President of innovation labs, Southeast TechInventures and Ag TechInventures. Karen is in the process of launching a venture fund, LeVert Ventures, focused on AgTech where Pappas Capital will manage the back office. She has a proven track record of progressing early-stage technologies from university research labs to commercialization where Advanced Liquid Logic, Bioptigen, and ImagineOptix initiated and have now been acquired.  Karen’s business experience encompasses both corporate and entrepreneurial worlds with over twenty-five years of successful leadership experience in executive management, start-ups, and technology commercialization. Karen started her career at a Fortune-500 insurance company holding positions of increasing responsibility from computer programmer to controller, to general manager of a 500-person Property & Casualty service center. Before founding the innovation labs, her first entrepreneurial venture was launching a franchise bioremediation company that she later sold. Her next entrepreneurial venture was co-founding a Silicon Valley based software company focused on streamlining recruiting in college athletics. Along with her professional duties, Karen serves as a board member for the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina, the North Carolina Arboretum, AgLaunch, North Carolina State Agriculture and Life Science Foundation, and LCBA Life Insurance Company. She has an MBA from the University of Dayton and a BBA in Information Technology from Eastern Michigan University.