By the end of the first quarter of 2026, Howdy Partners (formerly Greater Colorado Venture Fund) was prepared to invest in more rural startups than all of 2025.
Cory Finney, Managing Partner at Howdy, was as much impressed as he was surprised. As the only fund focused on rural Colorado, Howdy has been actively engaged in the state’s startup ecosystem since 2018. In that time, they’ve seen Colorado become a national leader in rural entrepreneurship. Still, the spike in investment-ready businesses is noteworthy.
Finney attributes it to two factors: the maturity of rural Colorado’s startup ecosystem and the rise of AI.
Although many of the challenges of launching a business in rural remain, Colorado is showing that rural founders can not only compete with their urban counterparts, but often lead. These gains are made possible by the collaborative efforts of “ecosystem builders” —typically business support, local community organizers, funders, and entrepreneurs themselves—over a period of more than ten years.
Alongside state, regional, and local efforts, technological advances and shifts in work culture have helped rural communities strengthen their entrepreneurial ecosystems. Since the pandemic, remote work and video conferencing have expanded the types of businesses founders can build from rural places. Even before AI, we saw growth in tech startups, advanced industries, service-based businesses, and outdoor recreation manufacturing. These founders drew on local assets while also tapping resources beyond their immediate region.
Now, AI is helping founders move more quickly from idea to launch to investment-ready. This includes founders who are building AI into their products, as well as those using it to streamline operations, synthesize research, and reach customers.
Today, we’re looking at three recent Howdy investments that reflect the rapid evolution of rural Colorado’s startup ecosystem.
Rever founders strike back with KOPILOT.ID
When founders Justin Bradshaw and Mark Roebke sold their motorcycle app—the Eagle-based Rever in 2020—neither was ready to retire. They turned to the slush pile of R&D projects from their previous startup, ideas that had never been fully fleshed out or built, to see if there might be something worth exploring.
One idea stood out: a digital emergency ID tag to help provide critical information to outdoor enthusiasts when things go wrong and they can’t speak for themselves . Both founders had either experienced or witnessed motorcycle accidents in which the rider was knocked out and unable to communicate their medical details—such as allergies or asthma—to emergency workers. The device would have applications well beyond motorcycles, with use cases across outdoor recreation segments like mountain biking, climbing, skiing, and ultrarunning.
They launched KOPILOT.ID in the fall of 2025. The digital ID tag uses Near Field Communication (NFC) technology to transmit data. Almost any modern smartphone can use it, easily accessing the user’s emergency profile via their browser or free app. For adventurers interested in international travel, instant AI language translation is available in more than 20 languages.
While both Bradshaw and Roebke are experienced founders, the speed of their launch was accelerated by AI. Bradshaw estimates it decreased their startup time by upwards of 50%. They use it throughout their business processes, from developing and iterating new app features to analyzing marketing analytics. For example, comparing cost-per-click rates or other web metrics once required several meetings and a dedicated team. Now, it’s as simple as asking an AI agent.
“We still do a lot of things old school, and I would say we really do the AI in support of things, not in replacement of a lot of things,” Bradshaw said.
In addition to Bradshaw and Roebke, KOPILOT.ID currently contracts a team of developers, a graphic designer, social media coordinator, and a fractional CFO.
The founders originally planned to bootstrap the company, but as the business grew, they saw the market opportunity was bigger than originally anticipated. They turned to Howdy, which had been an early investor in Rever, to discuss their new venture.
Howdy is currently leading the pre-seed round into KOPILOT.ID The $1M round is expected to close in July. The capital will help them hire additional team members, attend more athletic events, and increase the marketing spend.
Wise Bar brings advanced nutrition to retailers nationwide
Wise Bar co-founder Josh Dominick calls most energy and protein bars “advanced candy.”
And as a competitive snowboarder growing up in Colorado, Dominick consumed a lot of them. He also suffered from anxiety and depression, and said that western medicine consistently failed to address those mental health challenges.
After studying culinary arts in Florence, Italy, where he could eat “pasta, sandwiches and pizza every day, and was in the best shape of my life,” he shifted his diet toward cleaner, healthier foods. Around the same time, he became interested in adaptogens and functional mushrooms as a way to manage his anxiety.
In 2017, Dominick launched a sports bar company from his apartment kitchen while attending CU Boulder. The first iteration of Wise Bar sourced clean ingredients, as well as adaptogens and CBD. The company was on a roll until the CBD market became saturated with misinformation and Dominick’s team found themselves spending “as much energy getting people to try the product as we were defending cannabinoids and CBD.”
In 2023, he relaunched the company with a focus on adaptogens and functional mushrooms. The brand has since landed retailers across the country, including Whole Foods. True to the original mission, Wise Bar sources organic, gluten-free ingredients and avoids added sweeteners and syrups. The company currently manufactures in Austin and Las Vegas, and will soon begin contracting with a facility in Denver.
While Wise Bar precedes the rise of AI, Dominick and his co-founder have quickly integrated it into their organizational and product development processes. Dominick uses it to support his day-to-day workflow, syncing his email and calendar to Claude to help create task lists and priorities. They’ve also experimented with AI to help synthesize research into functional mushrooms.
“That used to take months of communicating with researchers—and we still do, we still follow up with all of the primary folks—but now we have better questions to ask.”
Prior to their current seed round with Howdy, Wise Bar was bootstrapped with support from friends and family. The influx of new capital will primarily support their marketing efforts and direct-to-consumer offerings. In July, Wise Bar raised $1.5M from Howdy, CPG experts, and angel investors in the Roaring Fork Valley Community.
Opine
Lindsay Rogers has a long background in storytelling. She worked as an editor and writer for Outside and Skiing magazines before transitioning into marketing roles with outdoor brands.
She soon marked a “big shift in people interested in a brand as it relates to its products and people interested in a brand as it relates to its people.”
Consumers wanted stories.
Rogers pivoted to working as a personal branding consultant for athletes, developing programs to help bring their stories out and tell them in a compelling way. Her consulting work expanded and she contracted with corporate and startup leaders as well. The only problem? Consistent and compelling storytelling content.
“I started to notice that no matter how much I told them what to do. The actual execution piece was challenging.”
Rogers connected with the CTO of a startup she’d previously been involved with and asked him if there was an opportunity to productize personal brand development using AI. He said absolutely.
They began experimenting with and building early tooling. Rogers also conducted extensive customer research and developed financial models that showed they were on the right track.
Several months later, Rogers launched Opine, an AI-powered storytelling platform that helps athletes, founders, and high performers develop, activate, and measure authentic personal brands. Howdy led a $1.25M pre-seed round that closed in May 2026, with Denver-based First Mile Ventures participating as well.
The capital influx supported the buildout of the Opine team. Rogers hired her former colleague as CTO, an engineer to build the MVP, a head of sales, and a UX/UI developer. While Rogers is based in Basalt, her CTO is in Boulder and the rest of the team is out-of-state.
As Rogers developed Opine, she was cognizant to keep a human in the loop to ensure that the content was authentic and true to the customer’s unique experience.
“A human being is constantly evolving. They have very different reactions emotionally, psychologically, depending on the situation, and so we want to evolve our technology to be able to extract those pieces of their lived experience.”
AI also plays an important role in their business operations. They’re building a system of AI tools to streamline communication between product and engineering, as well as a sales tool for their go-to-market lead. Rogers also uses AI to produce and polish sales materials, decks, and other marketing collateral—again, as a tool, not a human replacement.
The company currently sells directly to sports enterprises, such as leagues and brands, but aims to expand their offering to individual subscriptions in the coming months. Eventually, Opine will be available to founders, executives, experts, and other high-performing people across industries at both a personal and enterprise level.
When asked why they chose to invest in Opine, Finney said, “Lindsay has a unique right to win in this space. She has built her career and expertise solving this exact problem for athletes. AI allows her to take her expertise and scale it to a level that was previously unattainable.”
Rural ecosystems need to keep up with founders
For years, the dominant question was whether rural places could produce scalable companies. Today, the question we should be asking is whether our systems are ready for the founders emerging in rural Colorado.
The companies in this story are not anomalies. KOPILOT.ID was founded by experienced entrepreneurs who had already built and exited a rural company. Wise Bar is growing a national consumer brand with sophisticated manufacturing, retail, and marketing needs. Opine raised a $1.25 million pre-seed round for an AI-powered platform while building from Basalt with a distributed team.
That is what makes Howdy Partners’ role so important. Since 2018, Howdy has been one of the few funds consistently focused on rural Colorado, and its recent investments show what becomes possible when investors build enough trust, proximity, and pattern recognition to see rural founders clearly. In some cases, that means making repeat investments into founders who have already proven they can build from rural places.
That continuity signals that entrepreneurship in Rural Colorado is a maturing market.
AI is only accelerating that reality. Founders can move faster from idea to launch, operate with distributed teams, synthesize information, reach customers, and build tech-enabled systems from the places they call home. But while AI may reduce some barriers, it does not eliminate the need for a strong startup ecosystem. If anything, it raises the stakes.
Today, the founders who can move fastest will need ecosystems that can keep up.
The Center on Rural Innovation’s Uneven Ground report offers a useful frame; rural communities are often asked to build long-term economic opportunity with fewer locally controlled resources and less access to the flexible, place-based investment needed to shape their own futures. The report argues that lasting rural resilience depends not only on stabilizing people, but on investing in the local capacity, infrastructure, and institutions that allow communities to generate opportunity from within. (THANK YOU, CORI for your great work on this!)
We would make the case that entrepreneurship also belongs in that conversation.
Capital alone will not build a healthy rural startup ecosystem. But a rural startup ecosystem cannot become healthy without intentional capital. It also needs storytelling, founder-to-founder connection, local champions, economic developers, and mentors who understand that rural companies may look different from their urban counterparts without being less sophisticated.
That is why Startup Colorado and Howdy Partners’ work is complementary. Howdy is proving that rural founders are investable. Startup Colorado is strengthening the statewide pipeline of founders, relationships, visibility, and readiness that allows more of those companies to emerge.
And this October, Startup Colorado, in close partnership with Howdy, will launch the Rural Angel Investment Network aka RAIN, to help activate more local and regional capital around rural founders.
The future of rural Colorado will not be built by importing someone else’s version of a startup ecosystem. It will be built by the timely recognition of the founders already here, investing in the networks around them, and creating more pathways for local capital to meet local ambition.
Rural founders are already building, now the ecosystem’s job is to catch up.
Join us in empowering rural entrepreneurs and ecosystem builders to achieve even more in 2026. Contributions of any amount directly power our mission to build a sustainable statewide network of resources supporting rural entrepreneurs, so that people and places can thrive and chart their own futures! Will you help us?
