The case for Denver as America’s next great tech hub

For a long stretch—specifically, between Kansas City and Denver—Interstate 70 is as mind-numbing of a drive as you’ll find in the United States. If you hit the road in Kansas City heading west, you’re looking at a roughly 600-mile drive before you reach the suburbs of the Mile High City. It’s a drive that mostly consists of nine or so hours staring at flat, featureless grasslands and passing through numerous small farming communities.



But something changes a bit after crossing the Kansas state line into Colorado. The air is drier, the elevation is higher, green turns to brown, and as you approach the outskirts of Denver, you can truly get a sense that you’re not in Kansas anymore. Here, along the Front Range—where the Rocky Mountains punch up and out of the Great Plains, with peaks soaring to more than 14,000 feet above sea level—the pioneering spirit of the West lives on. 



It’s a sight that can give you a charge. That makes you want to get up and go, roll up your sleeves, and plug into the entrepreneurial spirit of generations past, which have made their mark on the land. Denver is, in some ways, the embodiment of that spirit. After all, it’s a city that saw its proportions grow immensely driven primarily by business interests and literal pioneer energy.



!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r



It was first established in the mid-1880s as a mining town, and when the railroads arrived in the subsequent decades, industry flourished, and the city’s population increased by approximately 2,129%. Today, it’s home to nearly three million people and is one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the country.



Part of that is fueled by an influx of entrepreneurs, echoing the influx 150 years ago. But these new Coloradans aren’t looking to strike gold on the side of a mountain or the South Platte River—instead, they’re trying to capitalize on, and further grow, Denver’s flourishing tech scene, a space that is, like the area’s overall population, growing quickly.



Denver: The next Austin?



Over the past couple of decades, Denver has established itself as a go-to place for entrepreneurs and has fostered a growing tech space. But that wasn’t always the case; in fact, the Denver region’s business interests were, traditionally, dominated by fossil fuel, mining, and related industries.



“When I left, it was at an economic low,” says Richard Bartolanzo , a Denver native who left the city in the 1990s and ended up working at Bennett Thrasher, an Atlanta-based accounting and advisory firm. “It was a lot of oil and gas, and it wasn’t the most robust of economic conditions."



But Bartolanzo, now Bennett Thrasher's Mountain West Partner in Charge in Colorado, was able to return to Denver after Bennett Thrasher announced it was opening an office there, in part due to the area’s growing business community. And the city has changed substantially, he says, compared to when he left decades ago.



!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r



“Coming back, there are a lot of tech companies that are popping up or relocating here,” he says. “It seems a lot more stable than when I left.”



Bennett Thrasher, on the hunt for new markets to expand to in recent years, pinpointed Denver as a city that was quickly developing a strong economic ecosystem, and one that’s particularly friendly to entrepreneurs. 



Investors have taken note, too.



As of 2024, Denver ranks 19th in PitchBook’s global VC Ecosystem Rankings , sitting ahead of Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, Dallas, and Atlanta. Globally, it’s ahead of Berlin, Paris, Hong Kong, and Toronto. (Denver is often paired with nearby Boulder when discussing regions or metro areas.) Data from PitchBook’s NVCA Venture Monitor shows that during the first quarter of this year, Colorado as a whole saw $1.12 billion in investments, compared to $209 million a decade earlier.



And data supplied to Fast Company by Range Ventures (citing PitchBook’s data), a Denver-based VC firm, shows that between 2013 and 2022, Denver saw 3,349 venture deals completed, $27.4 billion in investment, and a growth rate of 80%, all of which were higher than Austin.



“If you look at the past decade of data, Denver has grown faster and raised more money than Austin has,” says Chris Erickson, the cofounder and managing director of Range Ventures. “But nobody talks about Denver in the same way as Austin,” he says. 



Erickson says that Denver is currently reaching “critical mass,” meaning it’s become big enough to attract outside talent and companies, creating a self-sustaining entrepreneurial hub. That may not have been possible in years past, as the city was still relatively small and isolated, and had yet to start gaining a lot of attention from founders, investors, and companies looking to relocate from high-cost areas to lower-cost ones.



But that’s changed, and Erickson thinks that one of the reasons Denver doesn’t get as much attention as a hub as a city like Austin is that people in Colorado are relatively quiet about what’s going on along the Front Range. 



“The only drawback I’ve found to the ecosystem is that I don’t think people are apt to talk as loudly and largely about their success here as they are in other markets,” he says. 



“It’s a tendency to not need to talk about it. The success is enough in and of itself. People here are just as ambitious and just as talented as anyone on the coasts.”



How to build a mile-high tech hub



Colorado has a tendency to attract a certain type of person. It’s an outdoor wonderland, for one, and people who like to ski, hike, hunt, and fish flock to Colorado for its outdoors activities. It’s also home to four National Parks . Its population is consistently ranked as one of the healthiest in the nation. And it’s crazy about its professional sports teams—with its NBA, NHL, and NFL teams all having won a championship within the past decade. 



All of those factors combined have helped attract talent.



“I’m part of that story, I didn’t grow up here, I don’t have a single relative here, and my wife is not from here,” says Bryan Leach, the CEO of Ibotta , a cash-back app, which he founded in Denver in 2012. Leach, who previously worked at the State Department in Washington, D.C., was clerking for a Supreme Court justice when he made the decision to move to Colorado in 2007.



“I came out here with my wife and we fell in love with the place,” he says. “It was quiet and clean . . . there are 300 days of sunshine per year, no crazy commute times, more affordable, and it’s easy to get to—it wasn’t anything like D.C.”



After a few years in Colorado, Leach started working on Ibotta, which recently went public . While Denver was not yet a primary destination for tech entrepreneurs, the wheels were already in motion when Leach arrived. “It turned out that there were a lot of talented tech people between [ages] 20 and 40,” and perhaps most importantly, “you had Techstars in Boulder.”



Techstars , a tech startup accelerator in nearby Boulder, was founded in 2007 and was instrumental in putting Colorado on the map as an entrepreneurial hub. Similar to Y Combinator or other accelerators, Techstars helped the small mile-high tech community come together and grow, and eventually, saw one of its cofounders—Jared Polis—ascend to the state’s highest office.



“Colorado is different from when I was an entrepreneur in the late ‘90s,” says Polis, now serving his second term as the governor of Colorado and who was a five-term congressman representing the state’s 2nd congressional district. “We didn’t have a well-established early-stage funding network, we had very little professionally managed funds, we were more of a novel destination for capital from the coasts.” 



It was between 2010 and 2012 that Denver and the surrounding areas really started to see investor and entrepreneurial activity kick into gear.



“We’ve moved a long way in the last 20 years,” he says, and Denver is now seeing companies relocate from places like California to the Front Range. 



Polis credits his predecessor, John Hickenlooper (now a U.S. senator representing Colorado), with kick-starting Colorado’s entrepreneurial culture, as well as the state’s major research universities and the presence of federal research laboratories that have all contributed to its growth. “When I’m done, we’ll have had 16 years with an entrepreneur at the head of the state,” he says. 



That certainly couldn’t have hurt the state’s economic growth. 



It’s difficult to fully deconstruct Denver’s recipe for creating and fostering a fresh nerve center for tech-minded entrepreneurs and founders. But Polis mentions several business-friendly rules and regulations that he’s put into place that have helped—a list that includes lowering the cost to start a business in the state to $1, and even signing a bill that prevents cities from banning kids’ lemonade stands. 



“These seem like small things, but they make a difference,” he says.



Further, Colorado is a relatively low-tax state, ranking 27th in the Tax Foundation’s 2024 State Business Tax Climate Index . The cost of living can also be comparably lower than other tech-heavy cities or regions, such as the Bay Area, and Colorado lacks some of the political baggage that states like Texas or Florida may have—or New York or California, depending on your views.



“We get some share of political refugees from both California and Texas,” says Polis, a Democrat. “Our state is very supportive and has great resources for everybody—we just want everybody to live up to their potential here,” be it in Boulder or in Colorado Springs, two cities that are traditionally on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum.



“An innovative state at heart”



While Techstars, Hickenlooper, and Polis may have played an outsized role in developing Denver’s business community, there are plenty of others that have played, or are playing critical roles, says Leach. That includes individuals like Brad Feld , the cofounder of VC firm Foundry, organizations like Silicon Flatirons , and events like Denver Startup Week , which started in 2012 and helped grow Denver’s reputation of having a great tech community. 



You can’t overlook the fact that Denver also has a huge airport, and it’s easy to get there on a nonstop flight from almost anywhere in the country. Leach says that Mike Johnston, Denver’s current mayor, is also working with the airport to add additional nonstop airline routes, helping grease the economic wheels even more. This could help Denver get an additional leg up on other burgeoning tech centers, such as Salt Lake City, which is considerably smaller and not quite as easy to fly into.



A pitch deck from Range Ventures shows Denver-area companies that have been acquired or went public.



Meanwhile, a number of larger companies have moved to Denver, or opened offices in or around it, bringing talent with them. Leach mentions companies such as Google, Palantir, Gusto, and even McKinsey & Company all having established themselves in Colorado.



Denver having traditionally been an extraction-focused town makes its transformation in recent years all the more notable. “Denver wasn’t like Seattle, where you had Amazon and Microsoft,” Leach says. 



Likewise, Erickson says that “the knock on Denver 10 years ago was that you didn’t have enough senior executives to scale companies.” But now? “We have a lot more—if you move here, and it doesn’t work out at a specific company, there are 30 other companies there growing fast that you can go join,” Erickson says.



The future looks promising, too. The state projects that its population will swell to 7.75 million by 2040 (a nearly 50% increase from 2013 levels), and by 2030, Denver’s population should top more than 3.6 million. That should help fuel the state’s economy and business sector, which, as of mid-2024, continues to pick up steam.



Business confidence is increasing in the state, and during 2023, Colorado ranked fifth in the U.S. in terms of overall VC deal flow, with 388 deals closed and $4.244 billion in new investments, according to the National Venture Capital Association’s 2024 Yearbook.



Polis says that taken as a whole, Denver’s growth as a core U.S. business center shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, as the entrepreneurial spirit is more or less a part of Colorado’s DNA.



“We have a strong economy, a strong culture, and a great quality of life with a great business environment,” Polis adds. “Colorado is an innovative state at heart.”



“It’s all very much weaved into what we do.”