Blog
News and writing from the Roots team.
Colorado Builds Hard Things
Colorado's best-funded startups build rockets, spacecraft, AI data centers, and quantum computers.
Columbia, MO: The Town That Keeps Building Category Leaders
If you dropped a pin on Columbia, Missouri, you'd see a college town of about 130,000 people, a few hours from anywhere anyone's heard of.
Georgia: Top Companies & Startups
Georgia is home to 18 Fortune 500 headquarters. Nearly 70% of every credit and debit card transaction in America routes through a company based here. A pantyhose company built with $5,000 in savings turned its founder into the youngest self-made female billionaire in the country.
Georgia: Top Founders
A pharmacist chasing a morphine cure. A woman who cut the feet off her own pantyhose. A Nigerian immigrant who'd already failed at five companies. A 20-year-old who dropped out of Georgia Tech to start a security company in his dorm room. None of them had a network.
Georgia: Top Inventions
Georgia was the 13th and final British colony in America, chartered in 1732 by James Oglethorpe as a buffer state against Spanish Florida and a fresh start for England's debtors.
Kansas City: A $28 billion exit, and what it seeded
Cerner started in Kansas City in 1979 with three founders. They had a hunch that hospitals would eventually run on software instead of paper charts.
Missouri's Startup Ecosystem: The People and the Money Behind It
Missouri's startup scene runs on a pattern most states can't claim: the people supporting it, and the people funding it, mostly made their money in Missouri first, then chose to stay and reinvest it here instead of writing checks somewhere else.
Missouri's Top Companies
Missouri doesn't get talked about in the same breath as Texas or California, but it should. The state is home to two of the largest privately held companies in the entire country. Nine Missouri companies made the 2026 Fortune 500, led by Centene at No. 19 with nearly $195 billion in revenue.
Springfield: Built without a Series A
Bass Pro Shops started in Springfield in 1972 out of the back of a liquor store, when Johnny Morris began selling fishing tackle out of eight square feet of retail space his father owned. It grew into the largest outdoor retailer in America.
St. Louis: The Companies That Never Left
St. Louis doesn't feel like a comeback story, because it never really left. Most Midwest cities that produced a corporate giant eventually watched it get bought, gutted, or relocated to a coast. St. Louis has watched that happen too, but kept building anyway.
Top Things Invented in Missouri
The 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis is where the ice cream cone got its national debut, popularized when a waffle vendor next to an ice cream stand rolled his waffles into a cone to help the ice cream seller who had run out of dishes.
Why We Built Roots
Talent is everywhere. Network connectivity is not. Why we built Roots, a social platform connecting founders, talent, investors, and enterprises through shared roots.
This is your
network.
Roots is built by Redbud VC — the early-stage fund founded in Columbia, Missouri, by the team behind EquipmentShare.
