In the past year, Colorado has attracted many big-name tech expansions and stamped a new class of unicorns as the ecosystem smashes venture funding records.
But it’s not just the established players that have been making waves.
The next generation of startup and technology leaders have been quietly building their companies at local college campuses, raising capital from investors and getting a foothold in the fast-paced Colorado innovation ecosystem.
If you’re trying to forecast what the future holds for Colorado’s startup scene, look no further than these young entrepreneurs who are currently making an impact.
With a decorated accelerator and incubator system, strong innovation programs at the state’s higher education institutions and a plethora of boot camp options, Colorado is ripe with startup resources and the next generation of innovators are taking advantage.
To highlight a handful of Colorado’s most accomplished young entrepreneurs, we reached out through our newsletter, social media, community leaders, accelerators and schools for nominations. We’ve trimmed that to a list of 12 local innovators who are 25 years old or younger.
Here are Colorado’s 2021 Inno Under 25:
Trina Jefferson, 23
Jefferson has quickly risen through the ranks at Colorado’s Ball Aerospace, making noise as a mechanical engineer at the company. While she thought in college that she’d end up in entertainment or journalism, Jefferson has excelled in her engineering role and is also pursuing an online degree in Space Systems Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to her day-to-day activities, Jefferson has become a leader in Ball’s diversity and inclusion efforts, sitting as a Divisional Lead for the company’s African American Ball Resource Group. While she admits that she has faced challenges in her engineering career as a young, Black woman, Jefferson is taking the crucial steps to tackle these problems at Ball.
Scott Romano, 23
Romano has been busy since graduating from the University of Denver in 2020, serving as the chief of staff and director of operations at the small business nonprofit Energize Colorado. After launching in response to the pandemic, Energize has provided a variety of resources to support Colorado’s vibrant small business ecosystem. In his role, Romano’s primary tasks include project management, process implementation and team oversight. Prior to Energize, Romano built and sold social media company Cultivo Media, and worked with former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, the Boston Consulting Group and the Colorado Media Project.
Veda Gerasimek, 22
On Colorado’s Western Slope, Gerasimek is bucking the stigma associated with young innovators. The Colorado Mesa University student aims to prove that age isn’t the only factor in entrepreneurial spirit, as she holds marketing-focused roles at Maverick Innovation Center, Founder Institute, among others. Gerasimek, who jokes about her alter-ego “Inno-Veda,” also spoke at West Slope Startup Week this year, sharing her story of how an autoimmune disease derailed her Olympic mountain bike dreams and drove her to entrepreneurship. And, as she starts her final year of college, Gerasimek is dedicating her time to building a network of innovation centers to support budding entrepreneurs.
Marlo Vernon, 24
Like many entrepreneurs, Vernon’s first startup was influenced greatly by a personal pain point. When Vernon’s family became worried about her grandmother’s status living alone, the former CU Boulder graduate got to work. She began developing a nonintrusive way to monitor her grandmother’s movement, launching water tracking startup CarePenguin in 2020. With the startup’s combination of sensor hardware and partner application, users can monitor human behavior by tracking water usage. Once the temperature sensor is placed on the hot water pipe, it monitors each time the temperature spikes and sends an update to the application. Earlier this year, the company wrapped up beta testing of the product and launched in the app store.
Since her early teenage years, Kershner has been a leader in the conversation surrounding mental health. Using her own life experiences, Kershner became an international spokesperson for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and by the age of 17, was a published author and keynote speaker on mental health. Since graduating college early at 19 years old, Kershner has built her skills as a marketing and communications manager, launching a social media outlet and a digital magazine named Operation L.O.V.E. (Letting Our Voices Echo). Earlier this year, Kershner founded marketing firm BMK to help businesses of all sizes create customized branding kits.
Adam Pollack and Nick Friedman, 25
Pollack and Friedman first floated the idea for Accept.inc in their sophomore year of college, wondering how they could rebuild the real estate industry. With that huge goal in mind, they decided to narrow their focus to simplifying real estate transactions and launched the company in 2016. Now, five years later, Accept.inc has grown massively and recently raised $90 million in debt and equity capital to scale its platform, double its team and expand to new markets. Accept.inc is a technology-enabled lender that helps buyers who qualify for a mortgage submit all-cash offers on a home at no additional cost. At the time of its fundraise in June, the company had grown to about 90 employees. It started 2020 with only eight.
Hannah North, 24
In a high-tech field like quantum, North is breaking down barriers. The former engineering physics student from Colorado School of Mines has worked at Boulder’s ColdQuanta since 2019 as an engineer and project owner. As the company has grown, so has North. She has built ultracold matter systems from raw materials, worked on quantum matter generation and experimentation and trained the quantum workforce in a remote laboratory. And, North has served as the technical project owner for ColdQuanta's cloud-accessible quantum matter machine: Albert Cloud, which is set to release an alpha version soon. Outside of her daily duties, North has assisted in hosting an internal speaker series at ColdQuanta that covers topics like quantum, cryptocurrency and blockchain.
Nina Vendhan, 23
Vendhan is active both on the economics scene and in Colorado’s nonprofit space, as she’s focused on creating upward mobility and access to technology for people worldwide. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in economics and mathematics, Vendhan has gone on to work for venture investor Studio Management as chief of staff and an analyst. She also serves as an advisory council member of the Women and Girls of Color Fund supported by the Women's Foundation of Colorado is a board member of nonprofit YouthRoots.
Alex Fletcher, 25
For the past three years, Fletcher has been building tour guiding platform Origin to bring technology to a primarily analog business. The startup offers an automated booking and scheduling platform for outdoor guiding companies, aimed at streamlining the booking process. After successfully navigating the challenges of Covid-19, Origin has grown to a team of five and built its customer base month over month.
Maggie Grout, 22
Maggie Grout has dreamt of doing good in the world using technology since she was a 15-year-old high school student. At the time, she founded Thinking Huts, a nonprofit dedicated to making education more accessible with humanitarian-driven technology. Now, years later, she’s taken the next step and announced a partnership with architectural design agency Studio Mortazavi to develop a pilot project to build the world’s first 3D printed school in Madagascar. The pilot school will consist of a hybrid design featuring 3D printed walls and locally sourced construction materials for the roof, door and more. Studio Mortazavi will handle the design aspects and Finnish tech company Hyperion Robotics will print the school, while Thinking Huts handles the funding to back the project. The nonprofit aims to raise about $350,000 from private donors, corporate sponsorships and more to bring the project to life.
Gitanjali Rao, 15
Late last year, Time Magazine released its first-ever Kid of the Year honor and Colorado’s Rao took home the title. The 15-year-old from Lone Tree, was named the 2020 Kid of the Year, beating out more than 5,000 Americans between the ages of 8 and 16. Rao has worked on and developed technological solutions to a variety of issues that plague the world, from contaminated drinking water to opioid addiction and cyberbullying. She was previously named to the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 list and Colorado Inno’s 2019 Under 25 list for her work in developing a solution that detects lead in water with the help of a mobile app. Rao is currently developing Kindly, an app and Chrome extension that detects cyberbullying at an early stage, based on AI technology. Kindly’s AI is able to identify language that could be considered bullying, and it gives the user the option to edit it or send it the way it is.
