In March, Brookings Institute listed the Denver area as one of nine “rising stars” for tech headquarters — a new accolade in the Foothills region made popular by its proximity to city greenspaces, top-notch breweries, Buffs and Broncos football games, and a wide palette of mountain sports.
The high altitude might catch hikers breathless halfway up a 14er, but it seems to provide the right energy to fuel the innovative minds at local tech companies. In Q1, the Denver area brought in 92 venture capital deals, totaling about $1 billion in investments.
With innovation comes funding, with funding comes growth and with growth comes big announcements.
At Boulder-based Smarter Sorting, the company’s greentech solution is attracting like-minded VC investors, and a new low-code security platform developed by Louisville-based Swimlane has the potential to disrupt the future of security automation. Built In Colorado recently sat down with leaders at each of these Colorado tech companies to learn more about their mile-high innovation and growth.
Smarter Sorting helps brands and retailers maintain regulatory compliance while reducing their environmental impact. Sustainability metrics are tracked through the company’s product intelligence tools, providing clients with the data needed to identify opportunities to improve efficiency. Reflecting on a year of expansion, Chief Marketing Officer Patrick Armitage explained, “We believe that diversity and innovation are interconnected, and our commitment to both has enabled us to grow.”
What’s a big announcement your company has made recently?
We’re really proud of our March investment news, a $25 million investment round led by G2 Venture Partners, which underlines our success to date. Perhaps even more importantly, the VC firm only invests in technology solutions that bring sustainability to traditional industries, in which innovative ideas can have a positive impact.
G2 Venture Partners invested in us because of our purpose-driven mission to help retailers make better environmental decisions — a mission that delivered a strong new business pipeline this past year. We onboarded some of the biggest retailers in the United States, such as Wegmans and Albertsons Companies, which includes Safeway, Vons and Acme Markets. All the environmentally sensitive products sold by these retailers are registered or on their way to being registered in our product intelligence platform so we can help reduce their environmental impact and remain compliant.
G2 Venture Partners invested in us because of our purpose-driven mission to help retailers make better environmental decisions.”
What makes this announcement so exciting for your team, and what does it mean for the future of the business?
To succeed in all the ways we have over the past year takes entrepreneurial spirit and novel ideas, and I am proud of the team we have built. We’re making a conscious effort to build a company with gender balance and diversity, supported by benefits for maternity and paternity leave, a hybrid-office policy and a performance-based culture. Our team’s hard work and success led to securing this investment as well as several industry awards, including the Real Leaders Impact Award and Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Award.
Our hope is that our commitment to diversity, innovation and hard work will support our next phase of growth, as we have plans to partner with many more major retailers in the United States. We know we can bring a positive impact and rewarding experience to our team, our retail partners and the brands they sell.
Swimlane automates and orchestrates security processes and workflows to deliver real-time analytics and accelerate incident response. SVP of Product Donald Hasson said his team keeps “one eye on customer requirements and the other on market trends” to develop the solutions that customers need. Built to be scalable and flexible, the security automation solutions help clients in industries ranging from financial services to retail to the federal government.
What’s a big announcement your company has made recently?
We’re excited about the launch of our new low-code security automation platform, Swimlane Turbine, which will be available to new customers in July and our existing customers later this year. Security teams are facing a talent shortage while navigating an ever-changing threat landscape. To make security feasible for teams of various skill levels, our low-code solution is approachable for those with no coding experience, and the security automation platform was developed to respond to threats instantaneously — not after detection and data aggregation like most solutions. We feel this is a game-changer not only for our customers but also for the future of security automation.
We’re excited about the launch of our new low-code security automation platform, Swimlane Turbine.”
What makes this announcement so exciting for your team, and what does it mean for the future of the business?
Our team has spent the past two years building Turbine with cloud scale and power in mind so that our customers can unlock the potential of extended detection and response through an approachable low-code automation solution. We’ve had one eye on customer requirements and the other on market trends, and we were able to build and introduce strategic technology developments that raise the bar for extended visibility and response requirements — an exciting goal to accomplish for both our team and our customers.
