A little over a year ago, our board came together around a shared vision we called Endeavor Colorado 2.0 — a stronger, more focused version of our organization, built to match the ambition of the ecosystem around us. They gave our team the resources, the trust, and a clear mandate to make it real. And we got to work.

Endeavor Colorado is the local affiliate of Endeavor Global, the world's leading community of high-impact scale-up entrepreneurs — a network spanning 45+ countries where founders who've built category-defining companies invest their time, capital, and relationships back into the next generation. When a Colorado company earns the Endeavor designation, they join a global peer network unlike anything else in the scale-up world. And through Endeavor Catalyst, our co-investment fund with over $500M in AUM, we put capital directly behind the founders we select.

What's followed has been one of the most energizing stretches in our organization's history. We've rebuilt from the ground up, sharpened our focus on selecting and supporting the most ambitious founders in the state, and started to see the results show up in real ways. I want to share some of what we're seeing, because the story is bigger than Endeavor Colorado. 

Colorado is having a moment.

Over the past several months, we selected four companies into the Endeavor global network: Maybell Quantum, MagicSchool AI, Watchmaker Genomics, and most recently Lunar Outpost. Quantum hardware. AI for education. Precision genomics. Lunar surface infrastructure. Each one is a signal, not just of individual founder ambition, but of what Colorado has quietly become as a place to build something important.

And the proof is everywhere you look. Infleqtion, a quantum computing and sensing company with roots at CU Boulder's JILA research lab, went public on the New York Stock Exchange in February under the ticker INFQ, becoming the first neutral-atom quantum company to do so, and raised over $550 million in the process. That's a Colorado company, built on Colorado research, now competing on the global stage for one of the most consequential technologies of our generation. Just this week, Google announced it's planting its first quantum flag in Colorado, hiring a top CU Boulder physicist to lead a neutral-atom computing team here. The gravitational pull of this ecosystem is real.

Then there's Crusoe. Founded by Colorado natives and high school friends Cully Cavness and Chase Lochmiller right here in Denver, the company raised a $1.375 billion Series E at a valuation of over $10 billion, one of the most significant AI infrastructure bets of 2025. Two guys who grew up in the shadow of the Rockies and decided to come back and build something world-changing in their own backyard. That's the story we want to keep telling.

The numbers back the narrative. Colorado startups attracted $7.46 billion in venture capital in 2025, the second-highest year on record, up more than $2.24 billion from 2024, with growth industries including SaaS, CleanTech, Quantum, Aerospace, and Life Sciences accounting for 78% of statewide VC activity (Innosphere Ventures Colorado VC Report). And nationally, 2025 finished with the second-highest annual U.S. VC deal value ever, a clear signal that capital is moving again and Colorado is positioned right in the middle of it (PitchBook/NVCA Venture Monitor).

On May 20th, the Colorado Deep Tech Summit returns to the Beck Venture Center at Colorado School of Mines in Golden for its second year. The Summit is being built alongside co-hosts from across the country — firms actively investing in physical systems, infrastructure, and frontier technologies. Their presence reinforces what we've believed for a long time: Colorado is no longer an emerging deep tech ecosystem. It's a convening point. Capital is traveling here to be in the room, and that says everything.

At Endeavor Colorado, our job is to find the outlier scale-up founders and wrap around them the mentorship, network, and community they need to go further faster. But we're one piece of a much larger puzzle. This ecosystem flourishes because local VCs are writing checks and staying close to their portfolio companies. It flourishes because former operators are picking up the phone for founders who need someone who's been there. It flourishes because ecosystem builders across the Front Range are creating the conditions for collisions that lead to real outcomes. That's the community that makes Colorado work, and it's what we're proud to be a part of.

‍

The momentum is real. Now is the time to lean in.

‍