NextGen Insights: Midcon is the Next Frontier for Tech Innovation

by | Dec 3, 2025 | Blog, Media

 

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Authored by Elianna Huang

 

“In the past four years, the Mid-Continent region has seen $48 billion in IPO value,” a figure shared by Josh Pherigo during the Midcon VC Summit in Tulsa, Oklahoma in April 2025. At the same time, many of the states in this region rank among the top 10 most underfunded when it comes to venture capital. This leaves a massive opportunity for investment within the region.

What is Midcon?

Before we can discuss the vast opportunity in tech investment in the Midcon region, we first must define what the Midcon is. The Mid-continent (Midcon) area as we refer to it today is based on Oklahoma and its bordering states: Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas.

These states are historically the Country’s centers for major legacy industries such as energy, aerospace, manufacturing, healthcare, and agriculture. As more startups innovate within these verticals, founders familiar with them are gaining an edge.

But they don’t only house legacy industries anymore. States like Colorado and Texas have become strong players in space tech, especially with SpaceX’s headquarters in Brownsville, Texas, and Maxar Technologies in Westminster, Colorado, which was recently acquired for $6.4 billion. Kansas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma have seen higher-than-average VC investment in DeepTech (figure1). The data shows that the region is starting to build its own identity in tech.

(figure1) (Source: SVB)

Who’s Paying Attention?

It isn’t just those in the region noticing this shift as well. National coastal venture firms have begun initiatives focused on sourcing startups in Midcon. In an interview with Adithya Sanjay from Insight Partners, he told me that the firm has launched a project focused on building networks outside the coasts, including in the Midcon region. When asked why, he pointed to something that a lot of founders here already understand: in many industries, “knowing the customer matters more than knowing the code”. As he put it, “Trucking, farming, real estate, legacy industries that Silicon Valley won’t jump at, I would rather trust a founder in say, Oklahoma for a legacy industry vertical software startup cause you need to be closer to the industry than the software.” Insight isn’t the only national VC taking notice either. Revolution in DC launched a Seed Fund called Rise of the Rest in 2018 to invest in noncoastal seed stage startups, many of which are in Midcon.

Why Now?

So, what’s changed? Why is Midcon getting more attention now?

Two reasons: talent and capital.

Since remote work became more normal, more engineers and operators have had the flexibility to live where they want. Before the pandemic in 2019, only about 4% of the US workers held remote-work roles. Now in 2025, 13% are fully remote and 24% are hybrid. And many of them are choosing cities like Austin, Denver, and Tulsa. As talent moves, capital follows. In 2024, Austin saw the largest increase in remote workers moving to the city during the pandemic with Denver being second. Additionally, initiatives like Tulsa Remote have attracted 3,554 full-time remote worker residents to Tulsa. Companies like Palantir, Oracle, and Tesla have moved headquarters into the region, bringing job opportunities and attracting more people.

Founders don’t need to be in San Francisco to find engineers anymore , and that means they don’t need to build their companies there either.

Continued Challenges

Even with all this momentum, there are still challenges. The biggest issues are still capital access, talent retention, and helping founders understand the resources available to them.

The Heartland generates a third of the country’s R&D, patents, and top talent. But it only receives about 5% of U.S. venture funding. That gap makes it harder for startups to grow and, in many cases, pushes founders to leave the region to build elsewhere.

Firms like Cortado and Plains Ventures are working to change that by backing more founders here and helping them scale without leaving the region. But access alone isn’t enough, retaining talent is a separate challenge. Founders and engineers often don’t know what capital exists in their own backyard or how to access it. Mark Ballard at OCAST mentioned this exact issue when we talked. His own biotech startup struggled, not because there weren’t resources, but because he didn’t know how to find them. That’s a problem we can solve.

Groups like gener8tor and Startup World Cup are making progress on this front, offering programs that help founders learn the ropes. But more needs to be done.

Everyone has a part to play in expanding the Midcon opportunity. LPs need to invest in venture firms that prioritize Midcon investments, ecosystem builders need to place an emphasis on educating the community at large on how to be a founder, VC firms need to begin viewing the Midcon as an opportunity and not a flyover, and governments need to build out greater incentives for tech startups to thrive.

A New Midcon

Midcon is becoming its own kind of startup ecosystem, shaped by its industries and people.

The startups here are evolving. They continue to expand within the verticals we’ve long expected: energy tech in Houston, ag tech in Kansas, etc. But they’re taking on a new form at the forefront of innovation that looks more like space startups in Denver, deep tech in New Mexico. And they’ll be built by founders who know their industries because they grew up around them.

Midcon isn’t an extension of Silicon Valley, it’s an entirely new frontier.

About Cortado Ventures

Cortado Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in ambitious, growth-driven companies to define a new generation of economic prosperity for the Midcontinent region. As one of the largest VC funds in Oklahoma, Cortado’s focus is on tech companies bringing innovative solutions to the energy, logistics, life sciences, aerospace, and the future of work sectors. For more information, visit cortado.ventures.

Works Cited

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