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The 2026 New Venture Challenge (NVC) culminated in a final showcase on April 22 with a live audience cheering on CU Boulder’s next exciting innovations. Six ventures competed for $336,000 at the event filled with big ideas, entrepreneurial passion and record-setting prize money.��

CU Boulder �Թ��� Justin Schwartz launched the packed event at the Boulder Theater to celebrate the 19th season of the top-ranked entrepreneurial competition. “Every company, every breakthrough, every idea that changes the way we live starts the same way—someone decides to build something that does not exist,” he said.

Two categories, six judges, innovative solutions

After months of preparation, six finalist ventures emerged to pitch to an enthusiastic crowd at the Finals. They represented two distinct tracks: “Deep Tech”, for ventures based on scientific or technological innovations developed using fundamental scientific disciplines, and the “Open” track, which includes ventures innovating beyond the Deep Tech criteria.��

Open category founders presented new solutions for freeing up mechanical engineers to spend more time on cognitive tasks, making effective wealth management techniques more accessible to more people and democratizing high-impact weather data.

The Deep Tech pitches included ventures focused on intellectual property originating from CU Boulder, including tech related to groundbreaking treatments for metabolic diseases; restoring cognitive resilience with post-biotics; and enabling 6G networks through scalable precision clocks.

Event emcee Kristin Salada introduced the Open category judges including Adeeb Kahn, executive director, Denver Economic Development and Opportunity; Zeb King, managing director, Endeavor Colorado; and Rithi Prabhu, partner, Campus Founders Fund. Deep Tech judges included Kelly Coyne, venture capitalist, D4 Investments; Sally Hatcher, managing partner, Buff Gold Ventures; and Shay Har-Noy, managing director, Techstars Boulder.

AquaPuck, the winning team from the 2026 High School New Venture Challenge (HSNVC)—powered by FirstBank, made a cameo appearance, reprising a pitch for an innovative idea to develop a "puck" that attaches to a water bottle that tracks and prevents dehydration. HSNVC is a spin-off of CU Boulder’s nationally recognized New Venture Challenge, designed specifically for Colorado high school students in support of entrepreneurial learning.

An active ecosystem

NVC, a signature program of the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative, provides aspiring problem-solvers and creatives a chance to build impactful non-profit or for-profit ventures through entrepreneurial events and programming, community support, mentorship and—ultimately—the chance to compete for funding. Schwartz told the cheering crowd that this year’s finalists emerged from a field of 138 ventures, a more than 30 percent increase from last year.

Stan Hickory, director of NVC and the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative, described the university’s entrepreneurial ecosystem as a “town and gown system” that thrives on support from Boulder’s business leaders, who lend both financial and volunteer support to lift and inspire founders and their fledgling companies. “It wouldn’t happen without the community,” said Hickory.

This year’s $336,000 in prize money came from D4 Investments, Buff Gold Ventures, the Campus Founders Fund, Venture Partners at CU Boulder and the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative, adding to the more than $2.1 million awarded to 1,400 ventures since the program began.

Developing an entrepreneurial mindset

At CU Boulder, entrepreneurship is an interdisciplinary effort, according to Hickory. He highlighted the importance of cross-campus collaborations and programming—including with Colorado Law’s Silicon Flatirons and the Leeds School of Business Deming Center for Entrepreneurship—for bringing together would-be entrepreneurs, supporting them with mentors and helping them solve problems facing industry and the wider world.��

For NVC finalists/founders, that programming has been transformative. Arkana Therapeutics co-founder Jack Gugel summed it up this way. “CU Boulder is the place to be for aspiring entrepreneurs. The amount of support available, from mentorship and programming to early-stage funding, makes it an incredibly fertile environment to start a company,” he said. They plugged us into Boulder’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, pushed us to refine our story into something we could confidently take onto a larger stage and provided early opportunities for funding that helped us get started."

David Baines of Pantile Investments agreed. “CU has done a great job with their programming, whether it’s through NVC, Silicon Flatirons, the Deming Center or the numerous speakers and events for entrepreneurs on campus and in Boulder,” he said. “We’ve met amazing people at these events, and those relationships enable us to do what is traditionally very difficult—build a great company for our clients, our employees, our investors and us as founders…it's programs like NVC that get us all together so we can build great things together.”

Ptarmigan Clockworks co-founder, Benjamin Hunt called NVC the “single most important part” of the company’s journey thus far because it gave them a platform to “relentlessly refine our business.” Jack Mulvaney of WatchPost said NVC has been a guiding light throughout the development of the company. “In our experience, CU is one of the better places to start a company as a student,” he said. “The access to technical talent, the proximity to Colorado’s energy and infrastructure industries and programs like NVC create real on-ramps.”��

2026 NVC Finals Prizes

The judges praised the venture presentations and queried each founder about their business concepts. After a deliberation period, the winners were announced. Each finalist walked away with a check—the top venture in the Deep Tech category received $150,000 and $40,000 went to the judges’ first pick in the Open Category. The additional four ventures split an additional $141,000 in prize money. The $5,000 audience choice award went to WatchPost.��

Deep Tech Category

$150,000 First Place Prize: Arkana Therapeutics

Venture Team Members: Jack Gugel, PhD (alum, Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology), Marty Stanton, PhD (Mosaic Biosciences), Eric Furfine, PhD (Mosaic Biosciences), Leslie Leinwand, PhD (CU Boulder BioFrontiers Institute), Jonathan Long, PhD (Stanford �Թ���), Thomas Martin, PhD (�Թ��� of Nebraska)

Arkana Therapeutics (2025 first place winner, Lab Venture Challenge) has developed a metabolite-based therapeutic for obesity based on pythons’ natural response to eating a huge meal. “They can really eat one of the biggest meals in the animal kingdom,” said Gugel. “We wanted to see what happens to their physiology and what kind of molecules they were producing.” Ultimately, Gugel and colleagues discovered a molecule that increases by 1,000-fold after the python eats and acts as a natural appetite suppressant.��

$75,000 Second Place Prize: Kioga

Venture Team Members: Justin Whitley (alum, College of Engineering and Applied Science), Chris Lowry (professor, Integrative Physiology), Dr. Adam Bohr (alum, Integrative Physiology), Dr. Chris Stamper (alum, Microbiology and Integrative Physiology), Brian Peeters (Substrate LLC), Gregory Bonfilio (Substrate LLC), Christina Ra (Raconteur Strategies)

Kioga was launched to commercialize a “new category of dietary ingredient, one that’s focused on restoring the biology we’ve lost in modern life,” said co-founder and CEO Justin Whiteley. He said that humans evolved alongside “beneficial nature-based microbes” found in soil, food and daily exposure to nature that help calibrate our immune systems to maintain a state of balance. Kioga aims to restore that biological resilience in an effort to tamp down chronic stress and inflammation caused by hypersensitive immune systems.��

$50,000 Third Place Prize: Ptarmigan Clockworks

Venture Team Members: Ben Hunt (graduate research assistant, ), Harikesh Ranganath (), Dan Miltenberger (College of Engineering and Applied Science), Gabriel Hettleman ()

Ptarmigan Clockworks was born out of the National Institute of Standards and Technology where co-founders Benjamin Hunt and Harikesh Ranganath met and recognized how scalable precision clocks could enable 6G, the next-generation wireless network. “After years of building these clocks together, we decided it was time to take them out of the lab and [put them] into the hands of people who could really use them,” said Hunt. “The clocks we’re building today can drastically reduce the energy consumption of the telecommunications industry and save lives through remote surgeries, autonomous vehicles and GPS-free navigation.”

Open Category

$40,000 First Place Prize: WatchPost

Venture Team Members: Jack Mulvaney (College of Engineering and Applied Science), Josh Shewbridge (College of Engineering and Applied Science), Blake Faulkner (�Թ��� of Chicago), Kate Rooney (Colorado School of Mines)

WatchPost is “driven by the mission to defend communities against wildfires and extreme weather,” said co-founder Jack Mulvaney. The company’s hardware-software solution gives critical asset managers the tools they need to make an informed power shut off decision. “This is all to reduce both wildfire ignition risk and unnecessary outages that hurt the communities they serve,” said Mulvaney. “At scale, that means fewer catastrophic fires, lower liability exposure for utilities and more resilient infrastructure across the West.”

$10,000 Second Place Prize: Pantile Investments

Venture Team Members: David Baines (alum, College of Engineering and Applied Science), David Portilla (Colorado State �Թ���), Sri Vamsi Andavarapu (alum, College of Engineering and Applied Science), Marcos Murillo (Northern Illinois �Թ���), Joel Crampton (CMO Alpha), Luke Tobin (Unusual Group)

Pantile Investments taps AI to help investors at all levels understand “how to build wealth in a meaningful way,” according to founder David Baines. While working on his PhD at CU Boulder focused on how to use deep learning algorithms in finance, he recognized a need for better tools—and an opportunity to build them. “For our clients, this approach reduces debt and increases asset ownership, which [enables] them to contribute to their own lives, their families and communities,” said Baines.��

$6,000 Third Place Prize: Aspect

Venture Team Members: Jayce Simons (College of Engineering and Applied Science)

Aspect founder Jace Simons told the audience that, when interviewing a wide range of professional engineers, he heard about a “major pain point” in creating 3D models—and that gave him a business idea. “Engineers around the world hate making technical drawings; it’s tedious,” said Simons. His solution is a new plugin for existing CAD (computer-aided design) software that leverages artificial intelligence automation, “to free them up to spend more time on modeling and other cognitive tasks,” said Simons.��