Venture can be better, so we’re building it differently.

Traditional venture capital overlooks the strategic advantages of building outside major hubs, creating unnecessary barriers to funding for exceptional founders in rural and overlooked markets.

As a founder in these communities, you may question whether you need to relocate to be taken seriously—despite knowing your location provides distinct advantages.

Great ideas and exceptional talent shouldn't be limited by geography. The venture ecosystem should reward deliberate choices about where to build, not penalize them.

This all started with a simple question:

What if the most compelling entrepreneurial opportunities exist where others aren't looking?

Our founding team loaded up vans and traveled to communities across rural Colorado, meeting with entrepreneurs who had deliberately chosen to build where their values and vision aligned. What we found were exceptional founders creating remarkable companies—not despite their location, but because of it.

Today, Howdy Partners provides first-check capital to founders who recognize that overlooked markets offer distinct advantages: stronger talent retention, deeper community support, and the freedom to focus on sustainable growth rather than short-term hype.

Our investment thesis is both contrarian and confident: the next generation of category-defining companies will emerge from places others underestimate, led by founders who see opportunity where conventional wisdom sees limitation.

People who have chosen to prioritize where they call home are optimizing their life with intentionality. This intentionality translates into how they build their companies and communities around them, and those are the founders that we want to partner with. We’ve been supporting the best founders in the best places since 2018.

The face of entrepreneurship has changed - for the first time in generations people are choosing to live in rural communities.

We believe that entrepreneurship is what drives our communities, our state, and our country forward. Innovation and the pursuit of opportunity created America while access to it has become incredibly concentrated. We’re on a mission to bring the American Dream back into reach for people not living in urban centers.

We believe that place matters.

Access to capital and opportunities for founders in rural america is hard.

80% of Colorado startup funding comes from out-of-state investors.

Colorado as a whole:

  • 5.96 million people call Colorado home

  • 1.87 million live in counties with 170K people or less

  • 31% of Colorado’s population lives in a rural county

  • There are 64 counties in CO. 54 of these are rural

*metrics from 2024 census

We invest in founders who make deliberate choices about where they build.

Capital distribution:

  • 137,000 new business filings in CO in 2022

  • Nearly 6% of these new businesses were in rural CO

  • $6.8B of VC invested in CO companies

  • Only $70M (1%) was invested into rural companies

Your decision to create value in overlooked markets reflects strategic insight about what truly drives sustainable growth—stronger talent retention, deeper community support, and the ability to focus on long-term value creation rather than short-term hype.

Howdy Partners provides first-check capital, typically between $250,000-$500,000 with the opportunity to increase over time, to companies with the potential to define categories and create significant returns, regardless of location. We believe these markets produce returns that rival or exceed coastal hubs because of their unique strengths, not despite them.

where you choose to build matters.

We invest in founders who leverage these strategic advantages to build remarkable companies precisely where they want to be.

Founders who build where they choose to live make deliberate decisions that strengthen their companies:

  • Your values naturally infuse your company culture when you build in a community that reflects them.

  • Teams built around shared lifestyle priorities demonstrate higher engagement and retention.

  • Deep local relationships provide resources and support that transcend typical business networks.

  • Distance from conventional thinking creates space for truly differentiated approaches.