LevelUp Philly: to celebrate the mobile payment startup’s 500th Philly partner, get a free lunch

This post is provided by guest contributor Jenna Flateman, a community manager at LevelUp, a mobile payment service from SCVNGR, the Boston-based startup with Philly roots and a local marketing presence.

After seven years of being knee-deep in New York City’s startup community, last June, I packed up and moved to Philadelphia to spearhead the local launch of LevelUp, the country’s first universal mobile payment method.

A year later, this week has marked a number of milestones for the LevelUp community: $12 million in funding, 500+ businesses launched in Philly alone, an Interchange Zero pricing model, the addition of our own internal street team and a whole host events and partnerships that are continually putting us on the map.

And, of course, I’m celebrating my own one-year anniversary with this fine city. That move was also accompanied by a marriage, a home purchase and a head-first-dive approach to launching LevelUp in the company’s first-ever remote office.

One of our proudest moments in this market as a company was creating a partnership with The Food Trust, the nonprofit that hopes to give low-income neighborhoods access to healthy food and nutrition information.

At its fundraiser “Night Market,” a debaucherous night of good eats, we teamed up with Yards Brewing Co. to offer a FREE beer to anyone at the night market that signed up for LevelUp. We matched those sign-up purchases at Yards and other participating food vendors with a $5 donation to The Food Trust.

The night was epic. We gained hundreds of new users and raised thousands of dollars for the Food Trust. Relationships like these don’t come around very often, so we plan to continue working together as efficiently as possible to satisfy our mutual needs. We look forward to continuing our sponsorship at the upcoming Bella Vista Night Market on June 28th located on 9th and Washington, 6:00pm-10:00pm.

It’s very exciting to see all of the new startups that are popping up in Philly. It’s no doubt that many are a product of Wharton, one of the most well respected business schools on the planet, or DreamIt Ventures, the startup incubator and mentorship program of which LevelUp is a graduate.

As we grow and continue to saturate the city, and ultimately the country, it is our goal to enable that tech growth city-wide. If you build it, they will come. Well, we’ve built it! It’s here. Philly is hip to the mobile payment scene and we are passionate about helping to put Philly on the tech map!