Weekly Status Report

🚀 Week 1 by the Numbers:

• 📅 Membership Calls Scheduled: 7

• 🛩️ Inbound Alumni-Founded Startups: 5

• 🤝 Newsletter Subscribers: 189

📣 Announcements:

In the next several months, there are several opportunities to see key exhibitions of CU Boulder startups. Boulder Angels will be attending all of them:

The Embark program from Venture Partners at CU Boulder is hosting their 2025 Deep Tech Startup Creator Showcase on March 12th from 11:45am - 3pm at The Riverside in Boulder. Make sure to register here!

The 2025 New Venture Challenge finals are April 23rd at the Boulder Theater. This year, the winners of both the open track, and deep tech track will receive $144,000 each in investment. The amounts to over $320,000 in capital going to CU Boulder startups at this event. Learn more here.

🤲 Special Offer:

We are looking for a few more deep tech-minded angels and vertical experts to join Boulder Angels. If you have experience in the following verticals and are an active angel, your first year of membership is on us:

• Biotech / Therapeutics

• Medical devices

• Quantum

• Aerospace

Startup Spotlight: Refr Sports

There is a common conception of what student-founded startups look like, especially out of undergrad.

It looks something like this:

Luckily, this just isn’t the case at CU Boulder. Countless departments and programs on campus contribute to building a mountain of entrepreneurs, and a select few students really go far in pursuing their vision.

Refr Sports is a company I was exposed to through the New Venture Challenge at CU Boulder in 2024. Unlike many other competitors, they had already gone out to raise over $500k in VC funding, and had been through the Minnesota Twins Techstars cohort as undergraduates.

Refr Sports makes sports referee management simple. The platform provides a solution for sports organizations, referee assignors, and referees who face scheduling challenges and referee shortages. It is a streamlined platform that simplifies operations, enhances connectivity amongst users, and facilitates seamless payments.

They quickly stood out for all the right reasons, and our team as part of the 14 Founders program ultimately chose them to receive an additional $140,000 in investment.

Now, Refr Sports founders Huck Sorock (CU Boulder alum) and Wyatt Gustafson (U of Minnesota alum) have continued down their path to achieve some incredible things.

To date, they have:

• Successfully raised $1M in venture funding

• Surpassed $20k in MRR, soon to pass $25k

• Transacted over $1M in payments through their platform

• Gained over 2500 users

As they continue to grow, Refr Sports will be an inspiration and and an example to all other CU Boulder students who dare to lead a startup. They are just one example of the fantastic venture-backed startups to originate from CU Boulder alumni, students, faculty, and entrepreneurs-in-residence in the past few years.

Refr Sports has gained some recognition from CU Boulder and 14 Founders, but in my opinion, they should have been showcased in every university publication and business classroom.

The sole objective of Boulder Angels is to provide startups like Refr the platform they deserve to show them off to the CU Boulder alumni community, and help them obtain the early-stage investment needed to scale.

If you or someone in your network would like to join us as an investor member, or is a founder in the process of raising capital, email me at [email protected].

Until next week.