Rising Startup Stars

Julia Taylor, founder and CEO, GeekPack

Durango

“I used to work for the U.S. intelligence community, and it was a dream job,” says Taylor, 41. “I absolutely loved it.”

Traveling the world, Taylor met her British husband-to-be in Afghanistan. They lived in the United Kingdom and North Carolina as she transitioned out of her intelligence career.

“I found myself moving a lot and going from one admin job to another,” Taylor says. “It was while I was in one of those jobs that I was introduced to tech skills, and I really enjoyed it. I didn’t have a tech background, but I just Googled and YouTubed as much as I could to learn as much as I could and ended up starting my own business offering some of those skills as a service, primarily web design and digital marketing.”

Taylor soon had “a business that I could do from anywhere,” so she and her husband moved into an RV in 2018 and hit the road for 18 months. “People on social media asked how I was able to do it,” Taylor says. “That’s where GeekPack came from: I started teaching other people the same things that I taught myself.”

Taylor and her husband found a new hometown in the process. “Toward the end of 2019, we found Durango and fell in love,” she says. “We’ve been here ever since.”

Now eight employees aided by a network of contractors, GeekPack has taught tech skills to more than 8,000 paying students since its founding in late 2018 and also offers free online resources for self-education.

Taylor highlights a new “B2B2C” model: “We are partnering with nonprofit organizations in order to deliver our content to their clients so we can get the product in the hands of more folks.” GeekPack has worked with the Wyoming Women’s Business Council, First Southwest Community Fund, and Project RUN in this regard.

Taylor says her mission has always revolved around helping women build businesses through tech skills. “Over the years, we’ve noticed a significant divide when it comes to digital skills,” she says. “We really want to bridge that divide and close that gap, primarily with women.

“It’s essential that they learn these skills and apply them to their business in order to grow and scale. Because what are the statistics? One in five businesses don’t make it beyond one year, and half of all businesses don’t make it beyond five years. But yet, small businesses are the backbone of the U.S. economy.”

Taylor says having a concrete rationale, or a “why,” makes all the difference for entrepreneurs. “It is not all rainbows and unicorns,” she says. “When they’re having a bad day, a bad week, a bad month, a bad year, they can remember why they are persevering and why they are going to continue to do the hard thing, because there’s something deeper than just making a lot of money or being their own boss. There’s something more there, and we encourage them to figure that out early on.”

Online: www.geekpack.com

Adeel Khan, founder and CEO, Magic School AI

Denver

Before founding Magic School AI in 2023, Khan was a longtime educator who founded Denver’s DSST Conservatory Green High School in 2016.

“I’ve held every title in a school that you could hold,” says Khan, 37. “I was assistant principal for many years before I founded the school as a principal.”

He took a sabbatical from DSST Public Schools to travel in 2021, then returned to Denver around the time of the ChatGPT launch in late 2022. “I was tinkering with it, and I was just like, ‘There’s so much utility here for educators, I wonder if they’re using it,’” he says.

Khan found adoption to be lacking, in part because teachers are busy enough as it is. “I started doing a little bit of research and saw that there were co-pilots in other industries that were popping up,” he says.

But there wasn’t one for educators, so Khan decided to build one with Magic School AI and launched the company in May 2023. He brought together a team to build the co-pilot and soon garnered some angel funding.

Since then, it’s been a bit of a blur. “Magic School AI grew from 10 users to 1,000 users to a million users in four or five months,” Khan says. “Now we’re sitting at nearly 3.5 million users as the fastest-growing technology product for schools ever.”

Considering there are 3.5 million K-12 educators in the country, it’s a bit of an understatement to say adoption was quick. “It’s more likely that an educator knows what Magic School AI is, then they don’t know what it is, which I just think is astonishing.”

It’s quickly become an indispensable tool for many educators. Notes Khan: “It’s so cool to get to hear from people about how much of an impact it’s made on their lives, like: ‘It has saved me hours of time. It is changing the way I teach. It’s part of my workload. I don’t know what I would do without it.’”

Now with 50 employees, Magic School AI has a “freemium” model where the basic tools are free, and more than 5,000 schools have upgraded to paid subscriptions for additional functionality. The company launched a companion product for students in March and will expand from K-12 to universities in the coming year.

Khan calls Magic School AI “a human-in-the-loop product” that aims “to amplify the powers of teachers, not replace them.”

“I’m a principal, first and foremost,” he says. “The foundation of a school, I would always tell my teachers, is the relationships that we keep with our students. If a teacher is not under a pile of paperwork, they have time freed up to build those relationships and build the human connection that we think is the magic of the education process.”

Khan says Colorado’s tech community has supported the company since day one. “You can get swallowed up by the Silicon Valley environment,” he says. “Here, I get to do the work that I actually wanted to do, which is to serve educators, and there’s not all the noise.”

Online: www.magicschool.ai

Sristy Agrawal, co-founder and CEO, Mesa Quantum

Boulder

Agrawal, 29, moved from India to Colorado to study quantum computation at CU in 2019. “Boulder, in general, has the most thriving quantum ecosystem in the world,” she says.

The overwhelming focus on quantum computing, however, paved the way for Agrawal to co-found Mesa Quantum with Wale Lawal in early 2024. Quantum computing “was something we are still working on developing, while quantum sensing was something which already was much more mature, but there was not as much focus on it, because the market wasn’t well-defined,” she says.

It follows that Mesa Quantum is “focused on chip-scale quantum sensors because we realized that that’s where the market pull was the greatest,” Agrawal says. “Our goal is to build these devices which can fit in the palm of your hand, and they cost a few hundred dollars to make so that we can start bringing quantum sensing to commercial, everyday technology.”

One of the first applications for the technology is as an alternative to GPS, which is akin to “an atomic clock on a satellite,” Agrawal says. “While GPS is an incredible technology, it’s also a single point of failure for our entire economy, so we’ve been aggressively looking for solutions. One of the very promising approaches to solving it is to do it through direct hardware. We’re basically shrinking the atomic clock quite a bit so that you’re not completely reliant on GPS.”

“We’re working on clocks right now, but we are a quantum-sensing company and not a clock company, so the same IP would also, with some tweaks, enable us to develop a suite of quantum-sensing products in the chip-scale space.”

The team of 10 employees is focused on building a prototype by late 2026. “As we do that, we are very highly focused on a manufacturable design, so scaling from the initial few prototypes to like thousands of these units would not be a challenge,” Agrawal says. “We’ve developed these incredible technologies. It’s already out there in ones, twos, fives, and tens, but we’ve not gone through this next process that every tech development goes through of rapid engineering and ensuring scalability. Mesa Quantum is trying to take that first step for the quantum industry.”

Agrawal commends Venture Partners, CU’s technology transfer office, as well as her co-founder, Lawal. “He’s been such an incredible part of this journey, and the most amazing person to work with,” she says.

She encourages would-be entrepreneurs to trust their instincts. “It was sort of crazy to think that this would be possible at that stage, especially not having a lot of business background,” Agrawal says. “I was very nervous, because coming from a purely academic background — I was still working on my Ph.D. when I started the company — and I was an international student, so when I moved to this country, I literally did not know anybody except my partner, who had moved a year before.”

After some introspection, she decided to take the leap with Mesa Quantum. “At one point, I was like, ‘If I don’t do this now, I’m absolutely going to regret it. This may work exactly as I want, but even if it does not, it’s fine. I don’t have to be so critical and so scared constantly.’”

Adds Agrawal: “I’m so glad that I went through that process. I feel like, in academia, if more people were able to do that, we would see so many incredible technologies out there changing the world.”

Online: www.mesaquantum.com

Brian Pontarelli, founder and CEO, FusionAuth

Westminster

Pontarelli, 48, founded CleanSpeak, a provider of online profanity-filtered forums, in 2007.

The technology for FusionAuth arose from an internal need for a user authentication tool for CleanSpeak. “We wrote what became FusionAuth as a little sidecar so we could test our forum,” says Pontarelli.

In 2016, the CleanSpeak team thought it might be worth marketing that “little sidecar” to the outside world. “We didn’t do a lot of market research, we just started tinkering and we liked our own product,” Pontarelli says. “We made it really developer-friendly, and then we also did a little bit of a twist, where we made it downloadable, right, so it wasn’t cloud-only.”

FusionAuth launched as a standalone product in 2018, and it took off immediately with an assist from some “lo-fi, guerrilla marketing,” Pontarelli says. Now with more than 7,000 users and 600 paying customers, the company has grown from three employees to more than 50 in the six years since.

Pontarelli lauds the local startup community. “I’ve always been a huge startup junkie,” he says. “I love seeing people in Denver startup companies, rather than moving out to California and starting them there.

“I think we actually have a better system in place than a lot of places, because we don’t focus entirely on these crazy VC rounds and a one in 10 chance. We have a better batting average, better odds. And when you do scale a company here, people are proud of you and the community rallies around you.”

What’s next for FusionAuth? “World domination,” Pontarelli laughs. “We’re just building a ton of new product features to push us ahead of everyone else. We’re hiring like crazy for everything, operations, marketing, sales. We’re going to be doubling team size next year.”

Pontarelli, who bootstrapped the company until it closed on a growth equity round in 2023, says chasing venture capital can be a distraction for startups. His advice to fledgling entrepreneurs: “Try to do this without taking money for as long as possible. It’s going to serve you better in the end, because it makes you focus on the things that are most important: getting customers that’ll pay you real money for a real product.

“There’s no smoke blowing. There’s no trumped-up marketing and sales. You’re not giving it away for free just to get customers. They’ve got to pay you because you’ve got to eat. That’s the best way to think about building a business.”

Online: www.fusionauth.io

Zachary Mannheimer, founder and chairman, Alquist 3D

Greeley

Mannheimer, 47, started the company in Iowa with an unlikely background in theater. His career segued into Atlas Community Studios, a creative placemaking firm. “We were doing revitalization projects and economic and creative development in mostly rural communities around the country,” Mannheimer says. “The one issue we could never solve was housing.”

Mannheimer became increasingly convinced that 3D concrete printing was a big part of the solution and launched Alquist 3D in 2020. Now with 25 employees, the company printed its first homes in 2021 and moved operations to Greeley in 2023.

With a new and improved robotic system, Alquist 3D printed an 8,000-square-foot online pickup addition for a Walmart in Tennessee in 2024. Calling it the “largest commercial 3D print in the world,” Mannheimer says the companies have a similar structure in the works. “They liked it enough that they’ve given us another project that we’re doing in January,” he notes. “Walmart working on 3D gives a pretty good push to the industry that this is becoming viable.”

Locally, Alquist 3D is printing a duplex for a project with Habitat for Humanity in Weld County, and the City of Greeley is ordering 3D-printed infrastructure for installation in early 2025.

“We’re talking to a dozen other communities in Colorado that want to save money on their own infrastructure, things like curbs, drainage, retaining walls, park benches, and planters,” Mannheimer says. “We can’t say yet, but we believe that this is going to be a money saver for those communities once we get them installed.”

Mannheimer says Greeley won out over four other potential locations. “Ultimately, Colorado gave us the best opportunity with partnerships,” he says.

Case in point: Alquist 3D launched a new curriculum with Aims Community College in Greeley in summer 2024. “We have over 100 students that we’ve been training, and many of those students will go on to get a certificate in 3D concrete printing through Aims, and those students that do that are the ones that we’re going to want to hire.”

Alquist 3D is named after the lead character in R.U.R., a 1920 Czechoslovakian play that no one’s ever heard of,” Mannheimer says, calling it a nod toward using automation to replace human jobs. “There’s no way around it. We have to own that. But how many more jobs can we create with this new technology?

“Let’s accept the technology. Let’s be mindful of it. Let’s understand its limitations, and let’s be aware that this creates so many more ideas for us, and stop focusing on the things that it’s going to take away.”

Online: www.alquist3d.com