Innovation & Entrepreneurship

What if improving one’s athletic performance through supplements was simpler and more affordable? What if, instead of producing emissions, airplanes could take carbon out of the air? These ideas and more are realities in the making, thanks to many aspiring entrepreneurs who pitched their products at the 16th annual New Venture Challenge (NVC) finals.

Denver 7—Dumbclub is an apparel line with hoodies and hats and Rylan Montoya (Business Administration) has built the brand by marketing around the CU Boulder campus with trivia and challenge videos on social media.

Erika Gossett will graduate next month with a BM in flute performance, as well as a BA in media studies, a minor in business and a Music Entrepreneurship Certificate, exemplifying the College of Music’s universal musician vision. Additionally, her climate change-focused venture, Piña Designs, is a finalist in the New Venture Challenge. Finals are April 12: Join us!

Scientists from CU Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) made an important leap forward in the quest to diagnose disease using exhaled breath, reporting that a new laser-based breathalyzer—born of Nobel Prize-winning technology from CU—powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can detect COVID-19 in real-time with excellent accuracy.

Five promising startups spun out of CU Boulder comprise the first cohort of companies to receive investment from the Buff Venture Fund. The fund is the newest opportunity for CU Boulder startups to access critical funding on the path to success. The Buff Venture Fund is administered by Buff Gold Ventures, which has a formal partnership with Venture Partners at CU Boulder.

What do Oprah, Forbes, Business Insider, and Vogue all have in common? They endorse and love floral bouquets by Fresh Sends. The fragrant aroma, striking appearance, and heartfelt sentiment behind the gesture create an unforgettable memory. Ty Hiss started Fresh Sends with her co-founder and husband, Jesse Hiss, to help people feel seen, known, and loved through modern gifting.

On two exciting nights of pitches and prizes, ten startups brought a broad range of ideas to the stage, including how to live and garden more sustainably, how to deal with the downsides of social media, how to offer practical prosthetics for kids—and sustainable water filters and hydroponic produce for all. Across the two events, eight teams took home a total of $20,000 to develop their ideas further.

The Engineering Partnership Program was recently awarded a VentureWell Grant that will help make innovation and entrepreneurship a key feature of the program. The funding will help create a formal pathway to innovation and entrepreneurship through curriculum and experiential learning, with plans to integrate into the broader innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem that is thriving in the Gunnison Valley, a collection of rural mountain communities in southern Colorado.

Wanted: entrepreneurs ready to launch startups based on innovations created in CU Boulder’s research labs. The Embark Deep Tech Startup Creator is a new program created by Venture Partners at CU Boulder, the commercialization arm of CU, to match business minds outside the university with breakthrough inventions created within its walls—and provide those ventures with funding.

As a kid, Max describes himself as having a “drive to do good and try and make things better in one way or another.” That’s why he founded Urban Farms: a robotics company focused on indoor agriculture.