Colorado Builds Hard Things
Colorado's best-funded startups build rockets, spacecraft, AI data centers, and quantum computers.
Crusoe alone has raised about $6.7B. More than half of the state's fifteen best-funded private companies make physical things or the energy systems that power them.
That is unusual for a state outside the coasts. Most non-coastal ecosystems are known for software, fintech, or services. Colorado's money is going into hardware, defense, and infrastructure, the categories that take the most capital and the most patience to build.
Decades of aerospace contracts, federal labs, and corporate headquarters gave Colorado a workforce that knows how to build complicated things. The new companies are drawing from that same pool.
Colorado's corporate base is broader than most people realize. DaVita runs one of the largest kidney care networks in the country from Denver. Newmont, the world's largest gold miner, is headquartered there too. Ball Corporation makes aluminum packaging out of Westminster. Arrow Electronics and United Launch Alliance both sit in Centennial. Vail Resorts runs its global mountain business from Broomfield, and OtterBox has built phone cases in Fort Collins for decades.
The newest addition to the public list is Ibotta. The Denver cash-back app went public on the New York Stock Exchange in April 2024.
The state has also watched companies leave. Chipotle was founded in Denver in 1993 and moved its headquarters to California in 2018. Palantir moved its headquarters from Palo Alto to Denver in 2020, then announced in February 2026 that it had relocated to the Miami area. At the time it left, Palantir was Colorado's largest public company by market value.
Headquarters move. The people a company trains in a city usually stay, and they become the next generation of founders and operators.
Colorado's biggest exits span across fiber, aerospace, and software.
Zayo Group, the Boulder fiber company, was taken private by EQT and Digital Colony in a $14.3B deal that closed in March 2020, including $5.9B of assumed debt. Ball sold its aerospace division to BAE Systems for $5.55B in 2024. Level 3 Communications, based in Broomfield, was acquired by CenturyLink in 2017.
On the software side, SendGrid was acquired by Twilio for roughly $2B in 2019. Rally Software sold to CA Technologies for $480M in 2015. Gnip, a Boulder data company, was bought by Twitter in 2014.
Each of those deals put money and experience back into the local market. Former employees became angels, executives became board members, and early engineers started their own companies a few miles away.
The leaderboard
Here's where Colorado's private capital has gone, ranked by total raised. Several figures include debt, which is common for companies building physical infrastructure.
- Crusoe (Denver): AI data centers and energy. ~$6.7B
- Sierra Space (Louisville): Spaceplanes and space stations. ~$2.3B
- Redaptive (Denver): Energy efficiency as a service. ~$1.6B, mostly debt
- True Anomaly (Centennial): Space defense. $1B+
- Boom Supersonic (Denver): Supersonic aircraft. ~$0.9B to $1B
- Strive Health (Denver): Kidney care. ~$936M, including debt
- Enveda (Boulder): Drug discovery. $845M+
- DispatchHealth (Denver): In-home acute care. ~$741M, including debt
- Guild (Denver): Education benefits. ~$643M
- Velocity Global (Denver): Global employment. $500M
- Pax8 (Greenwood Village): Cloud marketplace for MSPs. $406M
- Ursa Major (Berthoud): Rocket and hypersonic propulsion. ~$350M in equity
- AMP Robotics (Louisville): AI recycling robotics. $301.4M
- Atom Computing (Boulder): Neutral-atom quantum computers. $300M+
- Defense Unicorns (Colorado Springs): Software for air-gapped military systems. $186.5M
- SonderMind (Denver): Behavioral health. $183M
- AgentSync (Denver): Insurance distribution infrastructure. $161M
- Liqid (Broomfield): Composable data center infrastructure. $156M to $199M
The top of that list reads like what the country will spend the next decade building: compute, energy, space, and defense account for most of the dollars.
On the list, the most interesting names are also the youngest.
True Anomaly was founded in 2022 and already ranks among the five best-funded companies in state history. Its April 2026 round raised $650M at a $2.2B valuation, co-led by Eclipse and Riot. It is the clearest breakout in Colorado.
Defense Unicorns, founded in Colorado Springs in 2021, became a unicorn in January 2026. Its $136M Series B was led by Bain Capital Tech Opportunities and cited 300% year-over-year growth.
Behind them is a group of earlier-stage companies with real traction. Peak Energy, a Denver sodium-ion grid storage company founded in 2023, has raised $65M and signed a deal to supply up to 4.75GWh of storage to Jupiter Power between 2027 and 2030. A commercial contract that size is rare for a company at Series A.
MagicSchool was started in early 2023 by a former Denver principal. It raised a $45M Series B led by Valor and has reached 4.5M users. Zed, the Boulder code editor built by the creators of Atom and Electron, raised a $32M Series B led by Sequoia and now has more than 150,000 active developers. Atom Computing raised a $100M Series C led by Third Point in June 2026 and is working with Microsoft on a commercial quantum machine.
Further upstream, Great Sky raised a $14M seed in March 2026 to build AI hardware combining photonics, superconductors, and semiconductors.
The companies that define a state's next twenty years usually look early and expensive in their first five. And Colorado has a long list of them right now. Don’t sleep on CO.
If you're building one of Colorado's next breakouts, or want to meet the people behind this list, Sign up for Roots.
