Report: Denver/Boulder named top 25 global startup ecosystem

According to a new ranking from innovation policy advisory and research firm Startup Genome, the Denver/Boulder startup scene is one of the top 25 ecosystems in the world.

The Denver/Boulder corridor placed No. 24 in the Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2020, down three spots from the 2019 rankings.

The cities were the 11th highest ranking U.S. startup ecosystems, as Silicon Valley and New York City took the top two spots on the list.

Startup Genome’s analysis has expanded from 60 ecosystems in 2018 to 150 in 2019 and to nearly 300 this year, leading to a ranking of the top 40 global startup ecosystems, as well as 100 emerging startup ecosystems.

For the 2020 rankings, it measured a total of seven success factors: performance, funding, market reach, talent, connectedness, knowledge and infrastructure.

“Developing ecosystems can be a fuzzy business. Together with 300 partners, we made it a science. Without reliable benchmarks or data, innovation policies and programs often don't result in expected economic impact,” the report stated. “Our leading entrepreneurship and startup ecosystem assessment methodologies guide policy executives toward sound decisions to develop more talent, startups, and scaleups.”

The report asked hundreds of founders around the world, while pulling data from Crunchbase, Pitchbook and others to compile the ranking.

Denver and Boulder scored high in the connectedness category, specifically when it came to the number of tech meetups in the ecosystem.

The cities also placed highly in the knowledge category, largely due to a high production of life sciences research.

The ecosystem performed poorly in Startup Genome’s success metric, specifically related to ecosystem value. That metric measures the economic impact of the ecosystem, calculated as the total exit valuation and startup valuations over a two-and-a-half-year time period.

The top 10 are below.