Chris Nielsen

Founder & CEO InFlightAI (formerly Levatas)

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Chris Nielsen runs InFlightAI, a Palm Beach Gardens company that sells visual AI for industrial inspection — software that takes imagery from autonomous drones and walking robots, finds the anomalies in it, and puts a human in the loop before anything is acted on. Its customers are the operators of physical infrastructure at scale: power utilities, chemical plants, breweries, car factories, cruise lines. The company is twenty years old and has been three different businesses in that time, which is the most interesting thing about Nielsen as an operator. He started it in 2006 as a one-man web design service after being laid off, grew it into a full-service digital agency under the name Levatas, then deliberately narrowed it to computer vision and robotics from 2020, and rebranded it as InFlightAI on 3 September 2026. He is, by his own description, not a technical founder, and has been open that the pivot came from his CTO rather than from him.

Career Highlights

• Founded the business in 2006 after redundancy, with what he calls rudimentary digital design skills.
• Built it into a full-service digital agency spanning websites, e-commerce, backend integrations and marketing.
• Repositioned from professional services to software product in 2020, launching the Cognitive Inspection Platform.
• Raised a seed round in early 2022 to expand AI for drone and robot inspection.
• Selected by Boston Dynamics as a Certified Technology Partner in June 2023.
• Integrated ChatGPT with Spot robots in August 2023; featured by Scientific American in March 2024.
• Announced a strategic partnership with the drone manufacturer Skydio in June 2024.
• Integrated NVIDIA’s Metropolis platform in October 2025 and presented with PG&E at NVIDIA GTC in 2026.
• Rebranded the company from Levatas to InFlightAI on 3 September 2026.

Professional Journey

The company exists because Nielsen lost his job. In 2006 he was working in sales for a software firm that sold white-label anti-malware to large telecommunications customers — a business he contributed to by building mock-ups that helped close deals — and he was made redundant along with much of the team when the company ran into financial trouble. What he had left was the design skill he had picked up making those mock-ups, and he began offering custom software design and development to local businesses in South Florida. The growth mechanism was referral and nothing else: “One small business customer referred me to a medium-sized customer, and my new accounts started getting larger.”

That compounded into Levatas, a full-service digital agency doing websites, e-commerce, backend integration and marketing. It was a good business and, eventually, a problem. Nielsen’s own account of why he changed it is a quality argument rather than a market one — the breadth of the service offering was making it hard to be genuinely excellent at any single thing. So the company began narrowing, and between roughly 2015 and 2020 it converged on artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The specific direction came from his business partner and chief technology officer, Daniel Bruce, who pushed towards computer vision and then towards automating industrial inspection. Nielsen was not convinced: “My first thought was that this would be too small of a niche,” he has said, adding, “I couldn’t have been more wrong.” That exchange is worth recording because it describes the actual mechanism by which a non-technical founder gets to a technical company. Nielsen has been direct about it — “thanks to the team I managed to build around me in the early days, my personal lack of technical capability hasn’t been a big hurdle” — and the company’s trajectory is a reasonable argument that hiring for judgement you do not have is a skill in itself.

In 2020 the transition became formal: Levatas stopped being a professional services firm and became a software product company, launching its Cognitive Inspection Platform. The insight underneath it is that industrial inspection is a job done badly by humans not because it is hard but because it is repetitive, dangerous and performed in places people do not want to go — substations, refineries, plant rooms. A robot can go there on a schedule; the difficulty is that nobody wants a robot making an unsupervised judgement about whether a gauge reading is a problem. Levatas built for that constraint, pairing detection models with human review rather than promising autonomy.

Robotics partnerships followed, and the sequence shows a company moving up the stack. Boston Dynamics selected Levatas as a Certified Technology Partner in June 2023, putting its inspection models onto Spot, the four-legged robot; two months later the company integrated ChatGPT with Spot, so that an operator could query a walking robot in plain language. Scientific American covered the work in March 2024. In June 2024 a strategic partnership with Skydio extended the same platform from ground robots to autonomous drones, which is what the company leads with today. October 2025 brought an integration with NVIDIA’s Metropolis vision platform, and by 2026 InFlightAI was appearing alongside PG&E at NVIDIA’s GTC conference — a utility customer willing to stand on stage with its vendor being a stronger reference than any case study.

The client list accumulated across that period reads as a map of heavy physical industry: BMW, AB InBev, Dow Chemical, Praxair, Johnson Controls, NextEra Energy and its Florida Power & Light subsidiary, Carrier, Ryder, Royal Caribbean, HSBC, the PGA of America, AEP Ohio and PG&E. The rebrand to InFlightAI on 3 September 2026 followed, retiring a name the company had traded under for two decades. The new one is narrower and more literal — it describes analysis performed on imagery while a drone is still flying — which is consistent with the pattern of Nielsen’s whole tenure: the business gets more specific each time he changes it. Locally he has stayed visible, speaking in the Kravis Center’s Business Luminaries Series in February 2025, being named a Community Impact Partner by Florida Power & Light two months later, and taking part in AI and robotics convenings at Palm Beach State College.

Education

No education record was found for Chris Nielsen in any source reviewed, including a long-form founder interview and a local profile interview. He describes himself as a non-technical founder who began with rudimentary digital design skills, but no source establishes his formal education either way, and the field is left empty rather than inferred.