From “Gold Rush” to “New Space Race”
History
Colorado’s heritage of innovation goes back to the late 1800s, when, despite risks and uncertainty, bold Americans migrated west seeking fortune, land, and new beginnings. Their grit, adeptness in navigating uncertainty, and eagerness to tackle the most consequential challenges – including survival – created the “frontier ethos” that persists across the Rocky Mountain region today.
Once the “gateway” to the physical frontier; Colorado is the gateway to technological frontiers – from subatomic quantum scale to farther reaches of the universe – to improve life on Earth, including through sustainability and security.
RMSEC’s origins
Like ideas and technology, RMSEC wasn’t born in a vacuum: we’re the latest step in an evolutionary process rooted in a generational commitment to outside-the-box thinking and an operational obligation to view established processes, methods, and tools with a constructively skeptical eye.
The Defense Entrepreneurs Forum (DEF) was founded in DC 2013 to foster a “virtuous insurgency” to spur innovation across the defense establishment by focusing on interpersonal relationships to bridge functions and organizations and create a network of positive change-makers throughout the next generation of defense leaders.
Over the next decade, DEF expanded to other regions in the US via local chapters (“agoras”), including Colorado: DEF-Front Range launched in 2024 to promote collaboration across Colorado’s burgeoning aerospace and defense startup community.
Early roots
2013
DEF
2024
DEF-Front Range
Local evolution
2026
RMSEC
Over the next couple of years, two themes emerged about Colorado’s ecosystem:
Colorado has had all of the components of a booming deep tech ecosystem – startups, corporates, research universities, investors, military and intelligence, and eager state and local governments – but it was missing infrastructure for collaboration across functions and geographic areas.
Much of the post-COVID deep tech innovation had significant implications for and applications in national security, but wasn’t specifically “defense.” Almost overnight, Colorado became a center of gravity for a number of deep tech fields – including space, quantum, autonomy and AI, robotics, critical minerals, and advanced manufacturing – that became national priorities after COVID and the Ukraine war demonstrated our modern vulnerabilities.
To reflect these themes and the nuances of Colorado’s tech economy, DEF-Front Range evolved in early 2026 into the Rocky Mountain National Security Alliance (RMSEC), an independent 501c3 nonprofit.
