The Innovation Vision for Colorado

This Strategic Plan was triggered in part by The Open Letter titled Ensuring Colorado's Innovation Future, a statement signed by 425 Colorado business and community leaders in March 2026 and published at ensuringcolorado.com. The signatories signed the Open Letter only.

The Honest Assessment, published at thehonestassessment.com, was prepared by Dan Caruso with content and editing contributed by many of the signatories of the Open Letter. However, the Honest Assessment was not reviewed by most of the Open Letter signatories and was not endorsed by the signatories. The Honest Assessment should be viewed as reflecting the opinions of only Dan Caruso.

Following the launch of the Honest Assessment website, Dan Caruso established Engage Colorado, published at engagecolorado.com — a website and body of work that reflects solely his own perspective, opinions, and editorial judgment. The Open Letter signatories do not review and have not endorsed the content published via the Engage Colorado brand. The Engage Colorado analysis, conclusions, and recommendations are those of Dan Caruso.

The Strategic Plan, like the Honest Assessment, is being prepared by Dan Caruso. Feedback will be sought from many others. Until and unless the Strategic Plan is signed off by others, the Strategic Plan should be viewed as reflecting the opinions of only Dan Caruso.

The Innovation Vision of Colorado becoming the most attractive innovation ecosystem in the world is both deliberately bold and realistically achievable. For most geographies, it would not be — but Colorado is uniquely positioned to deliver on it because Colorado already has the foundation. The work of the next twenty years is to extend, deepen, and accelerate what has been built over the last many decades. Few states or countries could pursue this Vision from where they currently stand. Colorado can.

Colorado begins from a place few states in the world can claim. Mountain ranges, high plains, and three hundred days of sunshine define a setting in which outdoor activity — skiing, hiking, climbing, biking, fishing, paddling — is part of ordinary life for Coloradans rather than a brand marketed on weekends. For more than a century, this combination has drawn talented and ambitious people from every corner of the country and from around the world.

The cultural life of the state is similarly disproportionate to its size. Colorado hosts professional teams across all four major American sports leagues, and Red Rocks Amphitheatre offers one of the most distinctive summer concert calendars in the country. The state's place in film, music, and ideas culture is among the strongest outside New York and Los Angeles: the Telluride Film Festival and Jazz Aspen Snowmass Labor Day Experience each Labor Day weekend; the Bolder Boulder 10K each Memorial Day, one of the largest road races in the United States; and beginning in 2027, the Sundance Film Festival, which is relocating to Boulder after four decades in Park City. The Boulder Roots Music Festival and Denver's annual Outside Days have emerged as meaningful additions to a state cultural calendar that gives Colorado depth comparable to metropolitan regions many times its size.

Built on that foundation, Colorado has developed one of the most concentrated innovation economies in the world: more than 302,000 technology workers, over $106 billion in gross state product from technology, and the third-highest tech-sector concentration in the nation. Two major research universities, four federal laboratories (NREL, NCAR, NIST, and NOAA), and a globally connected international airport extend the state's institutional capacity. The greater Denver–Boulder corridor has recently produced dozens of unicorns and public-market exits across software, life sciences, aerospace, energy, and digital infrastructure.

The breadth of Colorado's existing innovation strength is the most distinctive part of the foundation. The state ranks among the country's leaders in aerospace and space (major federal anchors plus a deep private-sector base from established primes to fast-growing startups), AI / digital infrastructure (Zayo and Lumen in bandwidth, plus major data-center operators Vantage, Crusoe, CoreSite, and Cologix headquartered in Denver), and quantum technology (a U.S. Department of Commerce Tech Hub designation, with more commercial-stage quantum companies than any other geography in the world). It holds equally distinctive positions in life sciences and medical technology (anchored by the Anschutz Medical Campus and complemented by Boulder's biotech ecosystem), energy (NREL's clean-energy research alongside established traditional-energy operators and a rising next-generation sector), agtech and regenerative agriculture (one of the largest such ecosystems in the world), and the outdoor and recreation industry (a global hub built on the state's geography and outdoor culture). Detailed sector profiles — with named companies, recent milestones, and competitive positioning — are provided in the appendix.

The momentum matches the depth. Venture capital deployed in Colorado reached $7.46 billion in 2025, the second-highest year in the state's history, with new companies forming in sectors that did not exist a decade ago. The engine Colorado has built over the past several decades is real, and it is running. The task before the state's leaders is to ensure it accelerates rather than stalls — and to use the foundation already in place to deliver on this Vision.

Section III described a trajectory that is real, accelerating, and — critically — self-inflicted. What is self-inflicted is also correctable. The chapters of this Plan that follow lay out how Colorado reverses the trajectory and pursues the Innovation Vision: by declaring its intent, repositioning its brand, resetting its posture on the technologies and policies that matter most, and building the coalition and policy foundations the next twenty years require.

Declaring Colorado's Intent to be the Most Attractive Innovation Ecosystem

The first step in achieving this Vision is to declare Colorado's intention to be the most attractive innovation ecosystem in the world. This declaration carries two obligations. The first is to articulate the positive attributes Colorado already has — the strengths described in Section II that have long made the state a place talented and ambitious people actively choose to live, build, and invest. The second is to acknowledge the factors that have led Colorado to be increasingly perceived as a less attractive place to build, invest, and operate — and to commit publicly to addressing them.

The areas to be reviewed and addressed include Colorado's brand and positioning; the regulatory signal sent on artificial intelligence; the relationship with the federal government; the strategic priorities across Colorado's leading sectors; the recruitment of Big Tech companies; the support of manufacturing; and the cultural and community infrastructure that gives the state its distinctive character. The detail of how Colorado addresses each follows below.

This declaration carries an equal commitment to the second part of the Vision: that every Coloradan benefits from Colorado's leadership in innovation. The intention of the Vision is that prosperity, opportunity, and well-being generated by innovation leadership reaches every Coloradan in every community across the state.

Colorado Political Positioning

Colorado occupies a strategic position in American innovation geography that no other state can credibly occupy. The conservative-leaning states that are winning — Florida, Texas, and others — carry political identities that limit their appeal to Democrats and, to a lesser degree, independents. The far-left states that are losing — California, New York, Illinois — are driving away individuals of all political affiliations. Colorado has the unique opportunity to credibly position itself as a place that is politically balanced — where individuals from across the political spectrum can feel welcomed.

The state's majority-unaffiliated voter base — more Coloradans identify as independent than as Democrats or Republicans — makes this positioning politically credible in a way that few other states can match. The combinations that other states treat as contradictions — low taxes and quality of life; fewer regulations and environmental stewardship; welcoming business and broadly shared prosperity — are precisely the combinations Colorado is positioned to hold together.

The work to claim and sustain this positioning is explicit and continuous. It is communicated through the policies the state enacts, the rhetoric its leaders use, the marketing and recruitment programs it runs, and the daily behavior of every official whose voice carries beyond the state. Done well, it positions Colorado as the most attractive destination for the founders and investors who value a politically balanced, less hostile, more welcoming, and more stable political environment.

Resetting the Signal on Artificial Intelligence

Nothing requires a sharper change in Colorado's posture than its relationship to artificial intelligence. The signal sent by the Colorado AI Act (SB24-205) — that Colorado is the most restrictive state in the country for the development and deployment of AI — is not a position the state can afford to maintain. This Plan requires flipping that signal entirely: Colorado must become the state most committed to preparing its people for the AI era and most thoughtful and proactive in how AI is developed, deployed, and applied across the economy and society.

That commitment runs across every level of the system: K–12 education integrating AI literacy from elementary school forward; higher education producing engineers, researchers, applied scientists, and domain experts in volume; workforce reskilling for adults whose careers will be most directly affected; and the active application of AI to the public services Coloradans depend on — health care delivery, public safety, transportation efficiency, and the operation of state government itself. The Colorado AI Act will need to be substantially reformed or repealed, and the workforce, education, and applied-AI investments that should accompany a serious AI strategy must be built in its place. The goal is to be the state where AI's economic opportunity and AI's human consequences are both addressed more seriously than anywhere else in the country.

Anchoring Colorado's Sector Leadership

A central theme of Colorado's brand positioning around innovation leadership must be the breadth of the sectors in which Colorado leads — sectors that will collectively define the global economy over the next fifty years. Few states or countries can credibly claim meaningful leadership in even one of these industries. Colorado has built genuine, defensible positions across all of them — extraordinary in their own right, highly relevant to the coming decades, and growing fast. Articulating that breadth, and emphasizing the combination of sectors Colorado leads, is one of the highest-leverage moves in the branding and marketing work associated with this Plan.

Aerospace and space technology. Colorado is home to one of the largest aerospace and space corridors in the country — federal installations anchored by Buckley and Peterson Space Force Bases and the Air Force Academy, established primes including Lockheed Martin Space and United Launch Alliance, and a fast-growing roster of next-generation companies leading commercial space, the lunar economy, and national security work. Few geographies in the world combine federal anchors and a deep, ambitious private sector at this scale.

Quantum technology. Colorado leads the world in commercial-stage quantum companies — anchored by Elevate Quantum's federal Tech Hub designation, the research depth of CU Boulder, JILA, and NIST, and the country's first bachelor's degree in quantum systems engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. No other geography in the world combines this academic, federal, and commercial concentration.

Energy and climate innovation. Colorado holds positions across the entire energy spectrum — NREL's clean-energy research base, a substantial traditional energy sector, and a rising next-generation cluster spanning advanced nuclear, geothermal, grid modernization, and carbon capture. Few states are positioned to lead in both the energy transition and the energy reliability the next decade requires.

AI / Digital Infrastructure. Zayo and Lumen — the two largest bandwidth providers in North America — are Colorado-headquartered, joined by the highest concentration of major data-center operators in any US metropolitan area, including Vantage and Crusoe. Colorado sits at the physical center of the internet, with the geographic and energy advantages that the AI era's hyperscale infrastructure demands.

Biotechnology and medical technology. The Anschutz Medical Campus is one of the most concentrated biomedical research environments in the United States, complemented by Boulder's biotech ecosystem and a growing roster of publicly traded Colorado life-science companies. The combination positions Colorado to compete directly with the leading life-science hubs in Boston, San Diego, and the Bay Area.

Across each of these five sectors, artificial intelligence will play an essential role over the coming decade — and Colorado's most consequential AI leadership going forward is precisely the applied AI work conducted within them: AI applied to space and aerospace systems, to quantum technology, to energy generation and grid operations, to hyperscale digital infrastructure, and to medical imaging and drug discovery. Sector-applied AI, more than AI treated as a standalone industry, is the form of AI leadership central to Colorado's positioning in this Plan.

Embracing Manufacturing

Each of the industries described above — aerospace and space, quantum, energy, digital infrastructure, and biotechnology — carries a manufacturing tier essential to scaling the technology, the products, and the value those sectors create. Colorado today is home to a growing number of companies whose product roadmaps require significant manufacturing capacity at scale, yet many of them are choosing to build that capacity in other states. The reasons cluster around a familiar set of issues: regulatory friction, permitting timelines, tax treatment of manufacturing investment, workforce availability, energy reliability and cost, and the incentive packages other states have been willing to offer. Each is addressable.

Manufacturing operations bring more than the scale-up of innovation. They create substantial employment for technicians, plant operators, supply-chain and logistics workers, and the broad workforce that supports advanced production at scale — jobs that broaden the benefits of Colorado's innovation economy well beyond the engineering and research roles concentrated at its top. Capturing manufacturing as Colorado's leading sectors scale is among the most direct mechanisms by which the prosperity of the innovation economy reaches a wider share of the state's residents.

The work of the next decade is to make Colorado one of the most attractive states in the country for the manufacturing operations of Colorado-rooted companies — through dedicated manufacturing-focused incentives, accelerated permitting, energy and infrastructure investment, and the workforce-development pipeline that advanced manufacturing requires. If Colorado does not act, the state will continue to produce companies whose manufacturing benefit accrues elsewhere. If Colorado does act, it captures the full vertical value of the innovation it incubates.

Attracting Big Tech to Colorado

A specific operational priority of this Plan is to substantially expand the presence of Big Tech in Colorado. NVIDIA, Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity, Alphabet/Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta — among the largest and most consequential technology companies in the country, including the leading AI companies of this decade — represent the highest-leverage targets for Colorado's recruitment work. Colorado cannot become the most attractive innovation ecosystem in the world without a substantially stronger presence of Big Tech operating at scale in the state. Most of these companies operate in Colorado today with relatively small presences. The work of the next decade is to substantially expand those footprints, and to bring the engineering centers, regional headquarters, AI infrastructure investments, and research laboratories that today land elsewhere.

The presence of Big Tech at scale strengthens nearly every other element of Colorado's innovation ecosystem. Major Big Tech operations deepen the partnerships with Colorado's research universities and federal labs that drive the next generation of applied research, technology transfer, and federally funded science. They strengthen Colorado's K–12 school districts through engineer-in-residence programs, STEM and AI curriculum support, philanthropic investment, and the broader civic engagement that follows when large technology employers concentrate in a community. They strengthen Colorado's arts and culture institutions and the outdoor industry through philanthropic support, sponsorship, board engagement, and the patronage of employees who become consumers, ambassadors, and stewards of the institutions and the industry. And they generate the deep, renewing talent pool — engineers, researchers, product builders, and operators — that every other Colorado technology company, from the largest sector leaders to the smallest startups, depends on for recruiting. This is why attracting Big Tech is treated as a priority in this Plan.

Restoring the Federal Partnership

Colorado's relationship with the federal government has been one of the dimensions on which the state has lost ground. The U.S. Space Command relocation to Alabama in 2025 was the most visible federal-asset loss in recent memory. Buckley Space Force Base, Peterson Space Force Base, the U.S. Air Force Academy, the four federal laboratories (NREL, NCAR, NIST, NOAA), the Anschutz Medical Campus federal partnerships, the Department of Energy presence, and the broader defense and aerospace contracting community all represent federal investments that benefit Colorado disproportionately. Each requires active stewardship.

This Plan requires a sustained Colorado-federal relationship-building effort, led by the governor and supported by the state's congressional delegation, the coalition's senior leadership, and the major federal contractors operating in the state. Specific work includes pursuing the next generation of federal lab funding, defense and space contracts, NIH and NSF research grants, and federally supported infrastructure investment — and repairing the perception, where it exists, that Colorado's state-level posture is in tension with the federal partnerships its economy depends on.

This commitment holds regardless of the political alignment between Colorado's state leadership and the administration in Washington. Even when the federal political leadership is different from what Colorado's political leaders may feel most naturally aligned with, the work of building a strong, productive Colorado-federal relationship continues — because it is in Colorado's interest to do so, and because the federal investments, contracts, and funding the state depends on must continue to flow.

Investing in Culture and the Outdoor Industry

Colorado's cultural and community life is among the foundations of the state's appeal. The arts, music, sports, festivals, and outdoor culture that knit Colorado together are not separate from the innovation economy — they are part of what makes the innovation economy possible. The talented people who choose to live in Colorado do so in significant part because of what life looks like outside of work.

This Plan requires sustained investment in the institutions that produce that life. The cultural calendar that gives the state its national reputation now reaches every corner of it — the Telluride Film Festival, Jazz Aspen Snowmass, the Bolder Boulder, the Boulder Roots Music Festival, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and Outside Days, alongside the gatherings that anchor communities well beyond the Front Range: the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in Colorado Springs, FoCoMX in Fort Collins, Country Jam and the Palisade Peach Festival on the Western Slope, X Games Aspen, and the Steamboat Springs Winter Carnival, held every year since 1914 — together with the cultural assets that will join them, including the Sundance Film Festival's 2027 relocation to Boulder. That investment extends to the continued strength of professional sports as a civic asset and the cultural institutions that anchor Denver, Boulder, Colorado Springs, Fort Collins, and Colorado's smaller communities.

Beyond preserving what already exists, this Plan recognizes a specific emerging opportunity: the migration of creative talent leaving Southern California and other high-cost, high-friction creative geographies for places like Colorado that offer lower cost of living, higher quality of life, and a growing creative infrastructure. The Sundance Film Festival's 2027 relocation to Boulder will accelerate this trend. Colorado is well positioned to develop the creative economy — film, content creation, immersive media, music, gaming, and the broader creator economy — as a deliberate growth industry. This Plan calls for a deliberate, sustained effort to build content creation and creative tech into one of Colorado's defining industries — and to position Colorado at the leading edge of applying artificial intelligence to the next generation of human experience: in storytelling, interactive media, and immersive experiences.

Colorado's outdoor life is not only a defining feature of the state — it is a major industry in its own right, and this Plan calls for actively supporting both. The destinations and activities that define Colorado — its ski resorts, national parks and monuments, wilderness areas, rivers, and the trail networks that connect them — are central to why talented people choose the state and to a recreation economy that sustains communities far beyond the Front Range. Active support means protecting access, investing in the infrastructure and gateway communities of the Western Slope and the mountains that depend on it, and championing the outdoor-recreation industry itself — the gear, apparel, and equipment companies, many headquartered in Colorado, for which the state is the natural home.

Developing Colorado's Venture Capital Ecosystem

Historically, most of the capital invested in Colorado startups has come from out-of-state investors — and that remains true today. What has changed in recent years is the meaningful growth in venture capital and private equity firms that are either headquartered in Colorado or have partners on the ground in the state. Forty-five venture capital and private equity firms are now active in Colorado — a base that reflects both the foundational strength of Colorado's innovation ecosystem and a growing recognition by capital allocators that Colorado is a market worth deploying from rather than only deploying into.

For Colorado to become the most attractive innovation ecosystem in the world, capital formation must be treated as a strategic growth vertical in its own right — alongside the sectors already named in this Plan. On-the-ground capital matters disproportionately to the long-term geography of Colorado's innovation economy. Founders who can find the capital they need without leaving the state are more likely to stay. Companies that can grow through their early and growth stages without relocating their headquarters are more likely to stay. The presence of Colorado-based capital is among the most direct mechanisms for retaining the next generation of Colorado-founded companies through the stages at which headquarters-relocation decisions are typically made.

This Plan calls for a deliberate, sustained effort to grow the Colorado capital base — expanding the number of venture capital and private equity firms headquartered in the state, deepening the partner presence of out-of-state firms that already deploy capital here, and engaging the institutional capital — university endowments, philanthropic family offices, and Colorado-rooted pension funds — that can anchor multi-decade commitments to Colorado founders. A specific priority is to attract partners from the nation's leading venture firms — the largest and most active funds, concentrated today in the Bay Area and the Northeast — to establish a personal and investing presence in Colorado by opening a regional office. Firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Thrive Capital, Insight Partners, Founders Fund, and Sequoia Capital are exactly the caliber of partner presence that would accelerate Colorado's standing as a place capital is deployed from, not only into.

Strengthening Colorado's Economic-Development Apparatus

Colorado does not currently have an economic development organization commensurate with the competition. The state has no equivalent of the Texas Enterprise Fund, of Florida's coordinated state-development apparatus, of Tennessee's recruitment infrastructure, or of North Carolina's state development corporation. The Office of Economic Development and International Trade has done substantial work with the resources available to it, but its scale, mandate, and tools do not match what destination states bring to the table. That gap must be closed.

A re-imagined Colorado Innovation Office, established by statute and funded at a level commensurate with the state's economic ambitions, would coordinate company recruitment, retention, and expansion across the state. Its work would include a deal-closing fund of meaningful scale; sector-specific recruitment officers for the industries Colorado is targeting; a professional site-selection partnership program with major real estate and development partners; international business attraction missions; and a publicly accountable scorecard tracking deals closed, jobs created, and capital deployed. The office would report directly to the governor and partner closely with the coalition described in Section V. Its institutional design — funding floor, staffing, governance — would be intended to outlast any single administration.

The strategic priorities described in Section IV rest on a set of policy foundations — housing, education, healthcare, public safety, regulation, taxation, and government performance. These conditions serve two distinct ends. They determine whether Colorado is a place people can afford to live in, raise a family in, and stay in. And they determine whether the people building companies here can do so without absorbing cost disadvantages, clearing slow permitting and regulatory hurdles, or struggling to staff the workforce their growth depends on. Some of these foundations bear mainly on one end; many bear on both. Housing is the clearest example: housing a worker can afford is also housing that lets a company hire and grow. These foundations are not separate from the innovation agenda — they are its prerequisites. The subsections below address each in turn.

Housing Affordability

Housing affordability is among the most pressing barriers Colorado faces — and among the most consequential for both ends these foundations serve. For families, the cost of housing determines whether they can afford to live in the communities where the jobs are. For the companies being built here, the cost and scarcity of housing determines whether they can recruit and retain the workforce their growth depends on. A Colorado that prices out the worker also constrains the company — and the broader tech ecosystem.

The core problem is supply. Colorado, and the Front Range in particular, has not built housing at the pace its population and economy require, and the shortfall shows up most sharply in the places where housing is already most expensive. The land exists. What has been missing is a regulatory and permitting environment that allows housing to be built at the speed and cost the market demands.

The goal is market-driven housing growth — a substantial, sustained increase in supply produced by the private market rather than by subsidy. Other states have shown this is achievable. Montana's bipartisan 2023 land-use reforms, the permissive permitting environments of fast-growing Sun Belt states, and similar efforts elsewhere have demonstrated that reducing regulatory friction — not layering on new programs — is what unlocks supply and brings costs down. Colorado should study these models and adapt the elements that fit its geography and its politics.

The specific mechanisms are a matter for legislative debate, and reasonable people will disagree on the details. But the answer certainly requires elements of all of the following — zoning flexibility, faster permitting, by-right pathways for compliant projects, and reform of the mandates that constrain market-rate construction — enacted together rather than piecemeal. What matters most is the commitment: to rapidly develop, secure bipartisan support for, and enact a comprehensive housing strategy that delivers substantial, sustained growth in housing supply across the Front Range, where the affordability problem is most acute.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure capacity is the second condition on which Colorado's growth depends, and like housing it bears on both residents and the companies they work for. Transportation, energy, and connectivity determine whether the state can absorb the population and economic growth the innovation agenda implies without degrading the quality of life that draws people here in the first place.

Transportation is the most visible of these constraints. The I-70 mountain corridor has become an acute bottleneck, and congestion along the I-25 Front Range spine is a growing drag on the daily movement of people and goods. The specific investments — highway capacity, passenger rail, regional transit, and protecting Denver International Airport as a national connectivity asset — will be debated, and reasonable people will weigh them differently. What is not in doubt is that Colorado's transportation network must expand to keep pace with the growth the innovation agenda implies rather than fall further behind it.

Energy is the constraint rising fastest. Demand from AI workloads, data centers, advanced manufacturing, and population growth is climbing steeply, and supply must keep pace — reliably and affordably — even as the state pursues its clean-energy goals. How Colorado gets there is a legitimate question for debate: the right balance among nuclear and advanced reactors, geothermal, renewables, storage, and grid modernization should be worked through on the merits. What the innovation economy cannot tolerate is energy that is unreliable, unaffordable, or insufficient to meet demand.

Education and Workforce Development

Colorado has one of the most concentrated technology workforces in the country — and one of the most poorly ranked K-12 systems among states with comparable resources. Closing the gap between the talent the innovation economy needs and the educational system that produces it is among the most consequential elements of this Plan.

The work begins with K-12. Colorado has been chronically underfunded relative to comparable states, but funding alone has not been the question that explains the gap; rigorous standards, effective teacher development, and accountability for outcomes have all lagged. The encouraging news is that the path forward is no longer theoretical — over the past decade, a cluster of states has demonstrated how quickly disciplined reform can move.

That demonstration has acquired a name: the Southern Surge. Four states — Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Alabama — long anchored at the bottom of national academic rankings, have produced sustained, measurable gains in elementary reading that no other region in the country has matched. Mississippi, for years a punchline for educational underperformance, now ranks ninth nationally in fourth-grade reading. Louisiana moved from 50th to 16th between 2019 and 2024 — the largest improvement of any state in the country and the national leader in reading growth for two consecutive NAEP cycles. Tennessee leads the country in eighth-grade growth, and Alabama is one of only two states to post fourth-grade gains since 2019. Florida, often grouped with these states, sits in the top tier of national rankings and continues to improve.

The common playbook is now well documented: statewide adoption of evidence-based, phonics-grounded reading curricula — the science of reading — combined with intensive, ongoing teacher training and accountability mechanisms with real structural teeth — including, in several states, third-grade reading-proficiency requirements. The reforms have proven durable across party lines: Mississippi launched its work under Republican governance, and Louisiana's gains have spanned both parties. A couple of caveats are noted: math gains have not matched reading gains, and eighth-grade improvement has been more modest. But the lesson for Colorado is concrete: a state that takes K-12 reform seriously, applies evidence-based instruction at scale, invests in teacher development, and enforces accountability through structural mechanisms rather than aspirational ones can move dramatically within a decade.

The Plan requires sustained investment in K-12 quality — particularly in mathematics, science, computer science, and the AI literacy the next generation will need — paired with a serious commitment to outcomes rather than inputs.

Higher education capacity expansion is described in Section V; what matters here is ensuring the state's universities can deliver the engineering, computer science, applied AI, biotech, and quantum programs the next decade requires.

Workforce reskilling for adults — particularly in trades, advanced manufacturing, applied AI, and the sectors most subject to labor-market transformation — must become a core part of Colorado's economic development effort, advanced not by the state alone but by the employers, philanthropies, community colleges, and training organizations already invested in this work. Private training providers, employer-led apprenticeship programs, and short-credential pathways must be expanded and integrated. The Coloradan who is forty-five and in a career being changed by AI must have a credible path to a different career — and building the system that delivers it must be an area of intense focus.

Healthcare

Healthcare is among Colorado's strongest sectors and one of its most consequential public-policy dimensions. The Anschutz Medical Campus is one of the most concentrated biomedical research environments in the United States. UCHealth and Children's Hospital Colorado are nationally ranked. The Boulder biotech ecosystem extends Colorado's life-sciences leadership. These assets are real, and they need to be both protected and extended.

The Plan requires a Colorado healthcare strategy that pursues three goals together: maintaining and strengthening Colorado's national leadership in clinical excellence, biomedical research, and medical-technology commercialization; expanding access and affordability for working Coloradans, particularly in rural communities where healthcare capacity is thin; and accelerating the application of AI, telemedicine, and other innovations that can lower costs while improving outcomes. Colorado has the institutional foundation to be one of the few states in the country that successfully balances world-leading healthcare innovation with accessible, affordable healthcare for its residents.

Safety and Security

Public safety is foundational to every other dimension of the Plan. Founders deciding where to relocate, employees deciding whether to commute downtown, families deciding whether to raise children in a particular community — all of these decisions are shaped by the perception and reality of public safety. Colorado's recent challenges with downtown crime, visible homelessness and encampments, and erosion of civic order have measurably affected those decisions.

The Plan requires sustained investment in public safety as a precondition for the broader work. This includes appropriate enforcement and prosecution capacity, sustained investment in mental-health services and addiction treatment, supportive-housing capacity for the unhoused population, and a coordinated approach to downtown revitalization that combines enforcement, services, and economic activity. It also requires treating visible disorder as a solvable problem rather than a permanent feature of urban life. San Francisco offers a recent and instructive example: a city that had become a national symbol of downtown disorder has, over the past two years, made measurable progress — pairing visible enforcement with expanded services and a focused downtown-recovery effort — and has begun reversing conditions many had assumed were permanent. The lesson for Colorado is that disorder is reversible when a city or state commits to treating it directly. Public safety is not a partisan issue. It is a foundational one.

Regulation

Regulation is the most consequential single dimension on which Colorado has fallen behind, and it is the dimension on which the most ground can be gained quickly. The 2026 passage of SB 26-137 — requiring state agencies to periodically review and recommend the elimination of outdated, duplicative, and overly burdensome regulations — gives Colorado the structural foundation to act. The work now is to turn that foundation into an all-out, government-wide initiative — implemented with intent, resourced to do it well, and accountable for outcomes rather than process — to make Colorado the most disciplined regulatory environment in the country, and through that discipline, one of the most innovative states in the nation.

That initiative must move with urgency and breadth. Its centerpiece is permitting reform — bringing Colorado's housing, infrastructure, and energy permitting timelines within range of the fastest states in the country. Alongside it: sunset clauses on major new regulations as a default, a regulatory-impact-analysis requirement for legislation that touches employers, targeted reform of the FAMLI Act and other cumulative employment mandates to reduce their cumulative weight, and a public commitment that no comprehensive new sector-specific regulation is enacted without explicit cost-benefit analysis and a defined review window. The objective is for Colorado's Innovation ambitions to be enabled by having an efficient, cost-effective, and highly predictable regulatory environment and a true partnership with the state and local governments.

Tax Policy

Tax policy is the most direct lever the state has on competitiveness, and it is the lever Colorado has been least disciplined about protecting. The 4.40% flat income-tax rate is a genuine competitive asset, and preserving its flat, predictable structure should be a priority — and perhaps over time the rate could be reduced. North Carolina's glide path from a higher rate toward 2.5%, and Arizona's move to a 2.5% flat rate, offer credible templates for a state that chooses to compete on this dimension. Predictability also means holding new payroll levies and tax-equivalent fees to a high bar of evidence and a sunset structure that prevents permanent accretion, and respecting the voter-approval guardrails on tax increases. The signal Colorado sends to founders and investors on tax stability is at least as important as the rates themselves; the goal is predictability as much as competitiveness.

Well-designed tax incentives also have a role in attracting and retaining the businesses that create jobs and investment in Colorado. Targeted, accountable incentives — tied to job creation, capital investment, and measurable economic activity — can pay for themselves by expanding the tax base indirectly, as the companies they attract generate employment, spending, and downstream revenue. The discipline is in the design: incentives should be transparent, performance-based, and structured to attract activity that would not otherwise have come, rather than subsidizing what would have happened anyway.

One clarification matters here. The emphasis on competitive rates and disciplined spending could be read as an argument to simply do more with less. It is not. The Plan's central premise is the opposite: by becoming the most attractive innovation ecosystem in the world, Colorado grows its economy — and its tax base — significantly, and the effect compounds. A larger, faster-growing economy raises total tax revenue even as rates hold flat or fall. Higher employment and rising pay per worker broaden the base further. A more vital economy reduces the demand for public assistance and other safety-net spending. And a thriving private sector, together with a strong consensus on the Innovation Vision, contributes more — in revenue and in the civic and philanthropic investment that eases what the public sector would otherwise carry alone. Together, these effects offset the pressure for higher tax rates. The goal is not austerity; it is growth that expands what the state can afford precisely because more companies and people are choosing to build here.

Government Efficiency and Eliminating Waste

Colorado's state government is among the largest single employers and one of the most consequential daily-life institutions in the state. Its operational performance directly affects the cost of doing business, the quality of public services, the credibility of the tax burden, and the perception of state competence. Recent fiscal pressure — the $1.2 billion budget shortfall heading into FY2026 and the 28% growth in general fund spending over five years — has put a sharper edge on the question of whether Colorado is spending its public resources well.

What the Plan requires here is not a list of reforms — most of them are obvious — but the will to pursue them. The single largest opportunity is artificial intelligence: applied deliberately, it can modernize state agencies, make them far more efficient, and eliminate most waste and fraud. That will not happen on its own. It demands a strong commitment — driven from the very top of Colorado's public leadership and shared across state and local government — to modernize, build efficiency, and terminate waste and fraud.

The following profiles expand on the sector overview in Section II. They are intended as reference material for readers who want named companies, recent milestones, and the depth of Colorado's competitive positioning in each sector — and as a resource for the policy and operational work the Innovation Vision requires.

A.1 — Aerospace and Space

The space economy is among the largest growth opportunities of the next two decades. Valued at roughly $630 billion in 2023, it is projected to nearly triple to $1.8 trillion by 2035 — about 9% a year, well above global GDP — with the fastest growth in satellite communications and Earth observation, positioning and navigation, the emerging lunar economy, and national-security space.

Colorado is positioned to capture an outsized share. The state anchors one of the largest aerospace and space corridors in the country, combining a federal footprint few states can match with a deep and ambitious private sector — including the robotics and autonomy capabilities that increasingly define modern space and defense systems. The sector employs roughly 55,000 people directly and another 184,000 indirectly and attracts approximately $38 billion in federal contracts each year. Buckley Space Force Base, Peterson Space Force Base, and the U.S. Air Force Academy anchor a federal presence that has placed Colorado at the center of American national security and space leadership for decades, and the Catalyst Campus in Colorado Springs clusters 30+ aerospace and defense companies alongside U.S. Space Command, NORAD, and U.S. Northern Command.

The private base is equally deep. Lockheed Martin Space (Littleton), United Launch Alliance (Centennial), Sierra Space — builder of the Dream Chaser spaceplane (Louisville) — Maxar Technologies (Westminster), and BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems, the successor to Ball Aerospace (Boulder), are headquartered in the state, and the major primes — Northrop Grumman, RTX, L3Harris, and Boeing Defense, Space & Security — all operate significant Colorado footprints.

A fast-growing next generation extends the base further: York Space Systems (Denver, NYSE: YSS), building satellite platforms with capacity for up to 540 a year and holding Space Force and Space Development Agency contracts exceeding $850 million; Voyager Technologies (Denver), leading the commercial Starlab space station with Airbus; Redwire Space (Longmont and Littleton); Lunar Outpost (Golden), producing NASA's Artemis lunar terrain vehicle; Agile Space Industries (Durango) and Ursa Major (Berthoud) in propulsion; Advanced Space (Westminster), prime on NASA's CAPSTONE cislunar mission; H3X Technologies (Louisville); Radia (Boulder), building the WindRunner, the largest aircraft ever designed; and Boom Supersonic (Centennial), building the first commercial supersonic aircraft since the Concorde. Together, Colorado's federal anchors and private companies give the state a combined space and aerospace presence few geographies in the world can match.

A.2 — AI / Digital Infrastructure

Digital infrastructure is in the middle of one of the largest build-outs in economic history. Driven by AI, global data-center capital spending is on track to reach roughly $1.7 trillion in annual investment by 2030, and McKinsey estimates a cumulative $5–7 trillion data-center build-out through 2030 to meet AI demand — with AI-accelerated computing accounting for roughly two-thirds of it. The physical layer of the internet — fiber, data centers, and the power to run them — has become one of the most strategically valuable asset classes in the world.

Colorado sits at the physical center of that build-out. Zayo — founded in Boulder and now headquartered in Denver — is the largest bandwidth-infrastructure provider in the world, a position it cemented in May 2026 by completing the $8.5 billion acquisition of Crown Castle's fiber business, the largest of Zayo's 50 acquisitions, extending its network to roughly 224,000 route miles. Lumen Technologies, successor to Colorado-headquartered Level 3 Communications, anchors the state's bandwidth leadership alongside it.

The Denver metro is the corporate home of an unusually high concentration of major data-center operators — Vantage Data Centers, CoreSite, Cologix, Flexential, and STACK Infrastructure — and of Crusoe, the Denver-based “AI factory” company that has become one of the most valuable AI-infrastructure businesses in the country: valued at more than $10 billion in its late-2025 Series E, raising a pre-IPO round at a higher valuation in 2026, widely viewed as a 2026 IPO candidate, with revenue projected to surpass $2 billion. Beyond the operators headquartered here, Colorado is increasingly drawing the broader cloud-data-infrastructure layer as well — Fivetran, a leading enterprise data-movement platform, is expanding its Denver presence with a new RiNo office opening in 2026. And Hydra Host — a bare-metal GPU cloud and AI-compute marketplace managing more than 20,000 GPUs across 40-plus global data centers — is led by Colorado-based co-founder and CEO Aaron Ginn. Colorado is also home to Riot Platforms (Castle Rock), which operates some of the largest data-center and power capacity in North America, and BettrData (Arvada), which automates the data-operations layer that AI systems run on.

As power becomes the binding constraint on AI compute, Colorado is building the systems that feed the data centers. Boom Supersonic (Centennial) — adapting the Symphony turbine core it built for supersonic flight — launched Superpower, a 42-megawatt natural-gas turbine packaged for on-site data-center generation; its first customer is Crusoe, and Boom has placed firm orders for 31 Baker Hughes generators totaling 1.3 gigawatts, targeting up to 4 gigawatts of annual output by 2030. Peak Energy (Broomfield) develops the long-duration energy storage that AI-era data centers and the grid increasingly require.

Colorado's strength extends to cybersecurity, the discipline that secures all of this infrastructure. Colorado Springs anchors one of the country's densest concentrations of military, federal, and commercial cyber activity, home to the National Cybersecurity Center. The state hosts a deep bench of established security companies — Optiv, Ping Identity, Swimlane, Automox, Strata Identity, and Webroot — alongside a fast-growing next generation: Red Canary in managed detection and response, JumpCloud in cloud directory and identity, StackHawk in API security, FusionAuth in authentication, DuploCloud in secure cloud operations, and RADICL, a rapidly growing Boulder firm bringing enterprise-grade threat protection to small and mid-sized businesses.

Across all four layers — bandwidth, data centers, the power that runs them, and the cybersecurity that protects them — Colorado is one of the most strategically important digital-infrastructure clusters in the world, precisely as the AI era makes that infrastructure decisive.

A.3 — Quantum Technology

Quantum technology is approaching a commercial tipping point. The quantum market is projected to grow from a few billion dollars today to as much as $97 billion by 2035 and roughly $200 billion by 2040, with quantum computing alone scaling from about $4 billion in 2024 to as much as $72 billion by 2035 — and McKinsey estimates the broader economic value quantum could unlock across industries at up to $2.7 trillion by 2035.

Colorado leads the world in this race. CU Boulder, JILA — the joint institute of CU and NIST — and NIST itself form one of the largest concentrations of quantum scientists and engineers in the world, supported by the CUbit Quantum Initiative and the NSF Quantum Nanofab. Elevate Quantum, the nonprofit managing the regional consortium, has been designated a U.S. Department of Commerce Tech Hub — the largest regional quantum consortium in America — and awarded a $40.5 million federal implementation grant. The Colorado School of Mines launched the country's first bachelor's degree in quantum systems engineering in January 2026 and opened a new Quantum Commons facility in partnership with Elevate Quantum.

The commercial concentration is equally distinctive — and increasingly validated by the markets. Three Colorado-based quantum-computing companies received $100 million each in federal funding under the CHIPS and Science Act in 2026: Atom Computing (Boulder), Quantinuum (Broomfield), and Infleqtion (Louisville). Quantinuum is among the most valuable quantum-computing companies in the world — backed by Honeywell, it raised roughly $600 million in 2025 at a $10 billion valuation and filed in 2026 for a U.S. IPO targeting about $12.7 billion. Infleqtion became the first publicly listed neutral-atom quantum company through a 2026 SPAC merger and trades on the NYSE (INFQ) at a market capitalization of roughly $3 billion. IonQ — one of the most valuable pure-play quantum companies in the world, publicly traded with a market capitalization that has consistently held above $20 billion (recently near $24 billion) — opened a 22,000-square-foot R&D facility in Boulder in May 2026.

Rounding out the cluster, Maybell Quantum (Denver) builds the dilution refrigerators quantum computers depend on; Vescent (Golden) supplies the precision lasers and control systems used in quantum sensing and computing; and Bifrost Electronics, on the Elevate Quantum campus, is the only U.S.-based commercial producer of quantum-limited readout components. The combination of academic depth, federal designation, commercial breadth, public-market validation, and degree-level workforce development positions Colorado as one of the leading quantum geographies in the world.

A.4 — Energy and Climate

Energy is the largest market in the world, and it is being rebuilt. Global energy investment is running about $3.3 trillion a year and is projected to climb toward $4.8 trillion annually over the next decade, with the IEA estimating cumulative investment needs of roughly $48 trillion through 2035 — and AI's surging power demand has only sharpened the urgency. Running alongside it is a critical-minerals market — the raw materials for batteries, grids, and defense — projected to nearly double from about $390 billion in 2025 to $716 billion by 2035.

Colorado holds positions across the entire energy spectrum. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) — the only federal laboratory dedicated solely to renewable energy and efficiency — anchors a clean-energy research base few states can match, alongside a substantial traditional-energy industry and the Colorado School of Mines, one of the world's foremost institutions for energy and earth-resources engineering. That breadth lets Colorado lead in both the energy transition and the energy reliability the AI era now demands.

The private base is deep and fast-growing. In storage and batteries: Solid Power (Louisville) in solid-state batteries, Peak Energy (Broomfield) in long-duration sodium-ion storage, and Forge Nano (Thornton) and Mana Battery (Boulder) in advanced battery materials. In next-generation energy: Koloma (Denver), a leader in natural “geologic” hydrogen; Electra (Boulder), producing clean iron; and Cowboy Clean Fuels in carbon-negative fuels. In critical minerals — the supply-chain choke point for the entire transition — an emerging cluster has formed: Travertine (Boulder), recovering minerals and carbon from mine waste; Endolith (Arvada), using microbes to extract critical metals; and Alta Resource Technologies (Boulder), in bio-based mineral recovery. And in the software layer, Uplight (Boulder) and Project Canary (Denver) lead in grid-energy software and emissions measurement.

Colorado's environmental-technology strength extends to food and agriculture — a market in the middle of its own transition. The global organic food and beverage market is on track to roughly triple to about $700 billion by 2035, the regenerative-agriculture market is growing 15–19% a year, and the broader agtech market approaches $100 billion by 2030. Colorado sits at the center of all three. Boulder is the natural-and-organic-foods capital of the country — the cluster that produced WhiteWave (Silk, Horizon), Celestial Seasonings, and Justin's, and a generation of better-for-you brands — and it has become the institutional home of the regenerative-agriculture movement: the Savory Institute, a Boulder nonprofit whose Ecological Outcome Verified program runs through 50-plus hubs worldwide; Mad Agriculture, which pairs regenerative agronomy with its own financing arm (Mad Capital) and the Restore Colorado initiative; the MASA Seed Foundation; and investors such as Trailhead Capital dedicated to regenerative food and agriculture. Colorado State University — one of the nation's leading land-grant agricultural universities — anchors the research base, and its CSU Spur campus in Denver is purpose-built around the future of food, water, and health. Few states combine a global consumer-brand cluster, the movement's leading institutions, and a top land-grant research university the way Colorado does.

A.5 — Health, Wellness, and Life Sciences

Few categories are larger or growing faster than health and wellness. The global biotechnology market is projected to roughly triple from about $1.8 trillion today to more than $6 trillion by 2035, while the broader wellness economy — preventive health, nutrition, fitness, and mental wellness — hit a record $6.8 trillion in 2024 and is forecast to approach $9.8 trillion by 2029, already larger than tourism, IT, or the green economy. Colorado is one of the rare states with genuine strength across the full span: cutting-edge biomedical research, large-scale health-care delivery, and a deep health-and-wellness consumer economy.

Colorado's research and care institutions are top-tier. The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora — a 256-acre complex drawing roughly $700 million in annual research funding — anchors one of the most concentrated biomedical research environments in the United States, complemented by nationally ranked UCHealth, Children's Hospital Colorado, and National Jewish Health. Colorado is also home to DaVita, the Fortune 500 kidney-care company headquartered in Denver that serves roughly 200,000 patients across some 2,600 dialysis centers — one of the largest health-care companies in the country. In all, more than 720 bioscience companies operate in the state, and the Denver–Boulder market has recently ranked among the fastest-rising life-sciences hubs in the country by venture funding.

The biotech base spans therapeutics, diagnostics, and the tools that power them. In therapeutics: Edgewise Therapeutics (Boulder), a public company developing treatments for rare muscle disorders that has raised more than half a billion dollars; Enveda Biosciences (Boulder), applying AI to natural molecules for drug discovery; and a lineage of Boulder breakouts including Array BioPharma (acquired by Pfizer) and ArcherDX. In diagnostics and tools: SomaLogic (Boulder) in data-driven proteomics, and Watchmaker Genomics (Boulder), which engineers best-in-class enzymes and reagents — using directed evolution and computational protein design — that power next-generation DNA sequencing, synthetic biology, and molecular diagnostics worldwide; founded in 2019, it has raised roughly $54 million to date.

Colorado has also become a center of gravity for digital health, where several companies have scaled to billion-dollar valuations. Cleerly (Denver) applies AI to coronary CT scans to characterize plaque and assess heart-disease risk, raising more than $410 million to redefine how the world's leading cause of death is diagnosed. DispatchHealth (Denver) delivers hospital-grade acute care in patients' homes — a hospital-at-home model that has raised over $900 million at a roughly $2 billion valuation. Strive Health (Denver) runs a value-based kidney-care platform, also valued near $2 billion, focused on improving outcomes and lowering costs in chronic kidney disease. And SonderMind (Denver) operates a behavioral-health platform matching patients with insurance-covered therapy and psychiatry — a unicorn that has raised more than $275 million.

Colorado's wellness economy is equally distinctive. The state is a national hub for health-and-wellness brands and media — including Natural Grocers (Lakewood), the publicly traded natural-and-organic grocer; Gaia (Louisville), a public wellness-media platform; and Boulder's Outside Inc., the outdoor-and-wellness media company profiled in the Outdoor, Creative, and Experiential section below. Combined with the natural-and-organic-foods cluster described in the Energy and Climate profile, Colorado spans the entire arc from biomedical discovery to everyday well-being.

A.6 — Outdoor, Creative, and Experiential

Outdoor recreation, creative media, and live experiences form a fourth great Colorado vertical — rooted in the state's geography and way of life. The U.S. outdoor-recreation economy generates $1.3 trillion in annual output (2.4% of GDP); the creator economy is projected to roughly triple to $500–750 billion by 2030; and the global market for experiences and tourism runs into the trillions. In Colorado, where this is simply how people live, the state is positioned to lead all three.

Colorado's outdoor-recreation economy ranks among the top ten in the nation — roughly $18 billion in annual value, 3.3% of state GDP, and about 138,000 jobs — and it is home to the Outdoor Industry Association and a deep roster of brands: VF Corporation (Denver), the Fortune 500 parent of The North Face, Vans, and Timberland; Crocs (Broomfield); gear makers from OtterBox (Fort Collins) to Big Agnes (Steamboat Springs); and fast-growing newcomers like Halfdays (Denver), the women-first technical apparel brand growing roughly 80% a year. The state also hosts marquee action-sports properties — most prominently the X Games, whose flagship winter event runs in Aspen and which is now led by Colorado's own Jeremy Bloom, Olympic skier and former CU football star.

On the content side, Colorado has quietly built a creative-media hub. Outside Inc. (Boulder), led by MapMyFitness founder Robin Thurston, is the world's leading creator of outdoor, fitness, and adventure content (Outside, Backpacker, Yoga Journal, Pinkbike, Warren Miller, Gaia GPS). Spiridellis Bros. Studios — the animation-and-storytelling studio from JibJab and StoryBots co-founder Gregg Spiridellis, a portfolio company of Google's AI Futures Fund — is building the next generation of AI-native family entertainment. In film, A/Vantage Pictures, founded by veteran producer Jason Michael Berman (formerly of Mandalay Pictures) with a Boulder base, debuted with Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest — part of a deep Boulder film-talent bench that includes Bill Holderman (Robert Redford's longtime producing partner, director of Book Club), screenwriter-producer Erin Simms, and screenwriter Harrison Query. In gaming, Sunblink (Boulder), the studio from Backflip Studios founder Julian Farrior, builds original interactive content; and platforms Soona (Denver) and Wowza (Golden) power commercial photo, video, and live streaming used worldwide.

A distinct layer of creative technology has emerged where media, sports, and AI converge. Owl AI (Boulder) — co-founded by the X Games and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and chaired by Jeremy Bloom — builds the AI judging and officiating systems now rolling out across global sports. And VideoAmp, a leading advertising-measurement and media-currency platform, is run by a Boulder-based CEO with much of its team in Colorado. These are the tools reshaping how creative work is measured, judged, and monetized.

The experiential economy ties it together — and Colorado is its corporate home. Vail Resorts (Broomfield) and Alterra Mountain Company (Denver), the two largest mountain-resort operators in North America, are both headquartered in the state. FareHarbor (Denver), the tours-and-activities booking platform owned by Booking Holdings, powers experiences worldwide from a Colorado base. Sage Hospitality Group (Denver) operates 70-plus experiential hotels and restaurants nationwide — and is building agentic-AI hotel tools through its Ramsi venture — while Evolve (Denver) has grown into a vacation-rental platform with more than $2 billion in cumulative owner revenue, and Ramble (Golden) builds boutique, nature-first campgrounds. Together with the festivals and venues in Section IV — Red Rocks, Telluride, the Aspen festivals, and the Sundance Film Festival's 2027 move to Boulder — Colorado is one of the country's premier destinations for live experience.

The vertical has begun to attract specialist capital: FMZ Ventures (Denver), a $300-million-plus fund investing exclusively in the experience economy, and gaming-focused investors Konvoy and BITKRAFT (both Denver).

Accelerated by the Sundance Film Festival's 2027 relocation to Boulder, Colorado has a real opportunity to be recognized as a primary geography for content creation and creative technology. A steady migration of creative talent and companies out of high-cost Southern California is already underway — and with the brands, talent, capital, and culture now in place, few states are as well positioned as Colorado to be one of its largest beneficiaries.

A.7 — Manufacturing

Manufacturing is among the largest untapped opportunities in this Plan. U.S. manufacturing contributes roughly $2.9 trillion to GDP and employs about 12.7 million people, and the reshoring wave set off by the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act has more than doubled annual U.S. manufacturing-construction spending — from about $76 billion in 2021 to a record pace near $235 billion in 2024. A generation of factories is being sited right now, and the states that win them will capture decades of high-wage employment and capital investment. The question for Colorado is whether it captures the factories its own innovation economy will require — or only the engineering that precedes them.

That opportunity is unusually large here because nearly every sector in which Colorado leads is, at its core, a hardware business. Satellites, rockets, and propulsion systems; quantum computers and the cryogenics, photonics, and chips inside them; biologic drugs, cell therapies, diagnostics, and medical devices; battery cells, clean iron, processed critical minerals, and autonomous machines — all are physical products that must be built somewhere, in capital-intensive plants employing technicians, operators, and skilled trades at scale. The production tier is where the broad employment lives, and it is the tier Colorado most often exports. Several of the state's most prominent companies are Colorado-headquartered but build elsewhere — United Launch Alliance assembles its rockets in Alabama, Boom Supersonic manufactures its Overture airliner in North Carolina, and Forge Nano is building its battery gigafactory in North Carolina — even as others prove the work can stay, from Boom's Symphony engine and Superpower turbine in Denver to Sierra Space's Dream Chaser in Louisville. The size of the prize is best understood sector by sector.

Aerospace is the largest and most concrete. Colorado is home to more than 2,000 aerospace businesses and over 500 space-specific companies, roughly 55,000 direct aerospace workers, and more than $31 billion in annual federal contracts — the highest per-capita private aerospace employment of any state. The global market to build the hardware is climbing fast — satellite manufacturing alone is projected to grow from about $22 billion today toward $85–125 billion by 2035 — and it sits atop a deep Colorado roster that already manufactures in-state: Lockheed Martin Space builds spacecraft across its six-million-square-foot Waterton campus in Littleton; BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems, the former Ball Aerospace, builds spacecraft and optical systems in Boulder; Sierra Space assembles the Dream Chaser in Louisville; York Space Systems runs a satellite production line in Denver; Ursa Major builds rocket engines in Berthoud; and Woodward, in Fort Collins, produces aerospace control systems as a multibillion-dollar manufacturer. A fast-growing cohort — True Anomaly, Albedo, Lunar Outpost, Redwire, Blue Canyon, Canopy Aerospace, and Orbit Fab among them — extends the base. Capturing even 8–12% of the global build layer, in line with Colorado's existing share of aerospace design and program work, would imply on the order of $10–20 billion a year of in-state production and 15,000–30,000 direct manufacturing jobs by the mid-2030s.

Quantum, photonics, and semiconductors form a second hardware frontier — and one where Colorado's lead is real. Hardware accounts for roughly two-thirds of a quantum-computing market headed toward $11–28 billion by 2035, and that hardware is physical and exacting: trapped-ion and neutral-atom systems, the dilution refrigerators that cool them — Maybell Quantum, in Denver, builds the units that target a market historically dominated by overseas suppliers — precision lasers and control electronics from Vescent in Golden, and the chips beneath all of it. Quantinuum, Atom Computing, and Infleqtion each build systems in Colorado, and in 2026 each was selected for $100 million within a $2 billion federal quantum program. The fabrication and advanced-materials base is already on the ground: Microchip's Colorado Springs wafer fab is in the middle of a $940 million expansion, Entegris produces semiconductor materials in the same corridor, CoorsTek — the family-owned Golden company that is the world's largest producer of engineered technical ceramics for semiconductors, aerospace, and defense — has committed $120 million to a new advanced-materials center, and Elevate Quantum's new Quantum Commons campus in Arvada adds shared cleanroom and cryogenic-commercialization space. Elevate Quantum, the federally designated Tech Hub, projects roughly 10,000 jobs and more than $2 billion in private investment across the cluster over a decade.

Life-sciences manufacturing is the third tier, and the most under-told. Colorado's 720-plus bioscience companies are usually described as a discovery story, but biologic drugs, cell and gene therapies, diagnostics, and medical devices all require large-footprint, high-wage production — and the state already hosts substantial capacity. Terumo BCT manufactures blood- and cell-processing technology in the Denver metro, where it recently opened a $250 million plant and employs roughly 2,000 people; Agilent is investing $725 million to expand nucleic-acid-therapeutics production; Medtronic manufactures medical devices across its Boulder and Louisville operations; and a contract-manufacturing cluster — Corden Pharma, AGC Biologics, KBI Biopharma, Tolmar, and Watchmaker Genomics — produces drugs, biologics, and genomic reagents in-state. With the biologics-manufacturing market projected to grow from roughly $40 billion toward $190 billion by 2035, capturing even a modest additional share of biologics, device, and diagnostics production would mean several thousand more skilled jobs and well over a billion dollars of new facility investment.

Energy, advanced materials, and robotics complete the picture — and here the economics are stark. A single battery gigafactory is a $1–2 billion capital project employing around 2,000 people, and Colorado has the companies to anchor several: Solid Power produces solid-state cells and electrolyte in Louisville and Thornton, Peak Energy is siting a sodium-ion gigafactory targeting more than 1,200 jobs, and Forge Nano builds battery materials in Thornton. Electra is building a clean-iron facility in Jefferson County with offtake from Nucor and Meta; Prometheus Materials manufactures zero-carbon biocement in Longmont; and a critical-minerals cluster — Travertine, Endolith, and Alta Resource Technologies — is working to reshore the materials supply chain. In robotics, AMP Robotics assembles AI recycling systems in Louisville and Scythe Robotics builds autonomous mowers in Longmont. Colorado has already proven it can host the largest plants in these categories: Vestas, long the state's largest manufacturing employer, has operated as many as four wind-energy factories along the Front Range with roughly $700 million invested and around 4,000 employees at peak, and the Pueblo tower plant — now operated and expanded by CS Wind — is the largest of its kind in the world. In food, Leprino Foods, the world's largest mozzarella maker, runs major plants in Greeley and Fort Morgan, anchoring a base alongside Boulder's natural-foods cluster.

Taken together, the manufacturing tiers of Colorado's leading sectors represent one of the largest single opportunities in this Plan: a credible path, over the next ten to twenty years, to tens of thousands of high-wage production jobs, dozens of new and expanded facilities, and many billions of dollars in capital investment — the most direct mechanism by which the prosperity of the Innovation Vision reaches technicians, plant operators, and the broad workforce beyond the engineering and research roles concentrated at the top. The proof that Colorado can win this work already exists — in Vestas's factories, Microchip's fab, Terumo's and Agilent's plants, and Lockheed's Littleton campus. What stands between Colorado and a far larger share is the familiar, addressable set described in Section IV: manufacturing-focused incentives, accelerated permitting, reliable and affordable energy, and a skilled-trades workforce pipeline. Close that gap, and Colorado captures the full vertical value of the innovation it already incubates.

A.8 — Capital Formation

Venture and private capital is among the largest and most strategically concentrated asset classes in the world. Global venture capital deployed roughly $368 billion in 2024, with the United States capturing about 57% of it — some $215 billion — while U.S. private-equity assets under management reached roughly $3.1 trillion. Where that capital chooses to base itself, not merely where it deploys, shapes which regions build durable innovation economies and which simply export their best companies.

Colorado's on-the-ground capital base is now substantial — but it is strikingly young. A directory of the state's investment firms counts 65 venture, growth, and private-equity managers representing more than $25 billion in assets, a dozen of them managing over $1 billion each. Yet roughly 56% of those firms were founded in just the past decade; only about half existed ten years ago, and barely a quarter were operating fifteen years ago. The pace is accelerating — about twenty new firms formed in each of the last two five-year windows, against single digits a decade earlier. Colorado's capital ecosystem is not a mature institution but a fast-forming one: it lagged the growth of the company base for years and is only now compounding. Venture capital deployed in the state reached $7.46 billion in 2025, its second-highest year ever — but most of that capital still originates out of state, and research finds that only about a quarter of successful Colorado startups remain headquartered here after an exit. Deepening the home-grown capital base is how that changes.

That base spans far more than classic venture funds. Colorado is home to large alternative-asset managers — Bow River Capital, whose software growth-equity fund closed at $605 million, and Vision Ridge Partners, which manages roughly $5.6 billion in sustainable real assets — alongside long-established growth and private-equity firms such as Delta-V Capital, Rubicon Technology Partners, Alta Partners, and Rallyday Partners. It includes family offices and holding companies whose capital reaches back generations, most prominently The Anschutz Corporation, the diversified Denver holding company founded in 1958, and John Malone's Liberty complex — Liberty Media, Liberty Broadband, Liberty Global, and Qurate, all headquartered in Englewood and together among the largest concentrations of telecom and media capital in the country, with Liberty Global Ventures as its corporate-venture arm. A newer generation of Colorado family offices invests directly: the Gates family's Gates Frontier (Denver), an active backer of fusion, semiconductors, and energy technology; Ken Gart's Gart Capital Partners; Ben and Lucy Ana Walton's Zoma Capital in energy and impact; and, in Vail, Manna Tree Partners, the food-and-health investment firm co-founded by Gabrielle Rubenstein, daughter of Carlyle's David Rubenstein. And the base sits alongside major in-state institutional pools: the University of Colorado Foundation manages more than $3.2 billion, and Colorado PERA, the state pension, holds roughly $67 billion — capital that flows largely to national managers today but could increasingly anchor Colorado funds.

The most consequential single development in Colorado capital formation is the arrival of a global private-markets leader. Partners Group — a Swiss-founded firm managing roughly $185 billion across private equity, infrastructure, private credit, real estate, and royalties, and a major fund-of-funds and secondaries investor — built its Americas headquarters in Broomfield, opening a purpose-built campus of roughly 130,000 square feet in 2019 and basing some 150 investment professionals in Colorado. Its global chief executive, David Layton, is Denver-based, and he has set a target to roughly triple the firm's assets toward $450 billion by 2033. A firm of that scale changes the gravity of the region: it concentrates senior investment talent in Colorado, it can act as a large limited partner to other Colorado managers, and over time it seeds the professionals who spin out to start new funds. This is precisely the flywheel the state most wants to set in motion.

Within venture specifically, the firm cohort spans an established tier and a fast-growing new one. Foundry Group — the Boulder firm whose partners helped define the modern Colorado venture era — is deploying its final fund and winding down by design, even as the ecosystem it seeded matures around it; Access Venture Partners, Boulder Ventures, and Meritage Funds anchor the longer-standing base. A deep new generation of early-stage firms has formed alongside them — Range Ventures, FirstMile Ventures, Stout Street Capital, Industrious Ventures, Massive, Matchstick Ventures, Unless VC, Hannah Grey Ventures, Denver Ventures, and Moxxie Ventures — joined by regional and Mountain West investors including Next Frontier Capital, Kickstart Fund, and Howdy Partners, the last focused on rural Colorado founders. Sector specialists give the state unusual depth: Konvoy and BITKRAFT, both Denver and among the largest gaming-focused venture firms in the world; Blackhorn Ventures in industrial and climate infrastructure; Trailhead Capital in regenerative agriculture; FMZ Ventures in the experience economy; One Funds in defense and aerospace from Colorado Springs; Cottonwood Technology Fund in photonics, quantum, and advanced materials; and Innosphere Ventures in Fort Collins, pairing a fund with a deep-tech incubator. Techstars, founded in Boulder, remains a globally significant accelerator with deep Colorado roots.

Underneath all of it runs the deepest engine of capital formation: recycling. Successful companies create both wealth and seasoned operators, who become the next generation's angels and general partners. Foundry Group and Techstars — both founded in Boulder in the mid-2000s — seeded a generation of local investors and the give-first culture that recirculates capital and mentorship. Dan Caruso, who built Zayo — whose 2014 IPO at roughly a $4.5 billion valuation remains the largest in Colorado technology — after helping found Level 3 Communications, launched Caruso Ventures, which has backed seventeen Colorado deep-tech companies since 2020 across quantum, space, AI / digital infrastructure, and creative technology, two of them (Infleqtion and Voyager Technologies) already public. Greg Fitzgerald, a co-founder of Solana, runs Tranquillion, a Colorado family office that invests in technology; and Steve Carpenter, who ran the enterprise-software company Ventyx before its sale to ABB, co-founded the Boulder software-investment firm Rubicon Technology Partners. Each major exit, from SendGrid's $3 billion sale to Twilio to Ibotta's public offering, converts into liquidity and experience that re-enters the ecosystem as new capital. The more of that happens in-state, the more the next generation of Colorado companies can be funded — and retained — at home.

The work ahead, set out in Section IV, is to treat capital formation as a strategic growth vertical in its own right and to deliberately accelerate this flywheel: expanding the number of funds headquartered in the state; recruiting the national firms concentrated today on the coasts to open Colorado offices; welcoming more anchors of Partners Group's caliber, whose presence compounds into talent, limited-partner capital, and new funds; and engaging the institutional, philanthropic, and family-office capital — including in-state pools like the CU Foundation and Colorado PERA — that can anchor multi-decade commitments to Colorado founders. A larger and more permanent Colorado capital base is the mechanism by which more Colorado companies grow up — and stay — at home.