How this Columbia innovation center seeks to keep young entrepreneurs in the Midlands

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Anyone looking for the future of tech innovation in the Midlands would have seen it on display on a recent Wednesday night in Columbia’s Five Points District.

More than 150 people packed into a room at the Boyd Innovation Center on Saluda Avenue to hear some of the area’s newest tech starters present their ideas.

Cole Kountis and Matthew Harrison described their fitness app to make gyms more accessible and less intimidating for beginners. Angel Lee pitched a game-based productivity app designed specifically for neurodivergent minds. Lauren and Jordan Tillar presented a new tool to simplify the online planning of class and family reunions. Ziliang Chen showed off technology designed to detect and prevent driver drowsiness.

These entrepreneurs and five others made up the spring 2025 cohort of ColaStarts, a six-week pre-accelerator program for people with tech-based business ideas who aren’t quite sure how to launch them. They were presenting at “Pitch Night,” held at the end of each six-week session to allow participants to share their ideas in front of an audience of investors, mentors, community leaders and fellow entrepreneurs.

ColaStarts is the Boyd Innovation Center’s flagship program, just one of many activities the  center has developed for tech-based entrepreneurs in the metro Columbia area since its launch in fall 2022 thanks to funding from the Boyd Foundation, started by Darnall W. and Susan F. Boyd with the goal of promoting Darnall’s goal of improving the quality of life for people who work, live and play in the Midlands. Led today by Susan Boyd and other board members, one of the foundation’s biggest aims is to encourage young people to stay in the Midlands — a goal that fits right in with the Boyd Innovation Center’s mission.

The center serves entrepreneurs in the Columbia metropolitan region, with a primary focus on Richland, Lexington and Kershaw counties.

The ColaStarts program and all the others put on by the center are fueled by the efforts of GrowCo, a nonprofit whose goal is to inspire and support high-growth/high-tech founders throughout their entrepreneurial journeys.

What is high growth/high tech? These companies are entrepreneurial efforts with the ability to be scaled up for larger growth, especially if they can find the right base of investors, mentors and customers. That’s where the center and programs like ColaStarts come in.

Located in the former location of the White Mule at 711 Saluda Ave., the center provides a wide variety of experiences for entrepreneurs and as much help as possible to anyone who comes to them with an idea but no idea how to make connections to promote it. And all this is done with only two staff members — Executive Director Caroline Crowder and program manager Dana Watkins.

“Our goal here is to offer direction for early-stage founders of tech startups and give them a community to be part of,” Crowder said. “Pursuing the start-up journey alone is a very lonely process and I wouldn’t recommend it to any founder. We want to help people find real business partners that can challenge them and take them to the next level.”

Crowder, a Rock Hill native with degrees in marketing, management and international business from the University of South Carolina, is no rookie in the start-up world. She was working with a tech startup in Singapore in 2022 when Columbia entrepreneur Joe Queenan reached out to her and asked her to come back to South Carolina to run the Innovation Center, which he helped to develop.

“I initially said I would never move back to Columbia but when I heard that the Boyd Foundation backed this and learned the values and the parameters they put in place, I knew it was truly the perfect storm when it came to start-ups,” Crowder said. “I could bring a very global perspective into a regional organization, thinking about how we build a local regional community of tech startups that reaches a global audience.

Crowder started work at the Center in September 2022 and spent the first three months reaching out to as many of the area’s start-up founders as she could, even though she still had no central office and was borrowing co-working space from other local companies. As a natural extrovert, working from home doesn’t work for her – “the best way to communicate is always face-to-face,” she said.

“It was an in-the-trenches mind set,” she said. “During my first few months my goal was to have 100 conversations with founders to gather their insights, to find out what did they want, what did they need, what did they want their outcomes to be.”

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Through her contacts, Crowder not only learned about the needs and desires of start-up founders, but also discovered that the metro Columbia area was home to an extensive community of founders whose story had never really been told. Many of the people she initially approached for suggestions eventually became part of the center’s extensive mentor network.

“The founder community here in Columbia was undercover — we’ve had many founders here who have had tremendous success, who have built and sold start-ups over the years but never told their story,” Crowder said. “It’s never been something that as a community we’ve leaned into as a brand. We talk about traditional small businesses but never really focused on tech start-ups. They really needed a central organization like us, a glue that holds things together for the start-up community and provides resources, because tech startups need a completely different set of resources.”

Crowder was eventually able to move into full-time offices at the center on Saluda Street and from there the programs developed and the events took off. While ColaStarts is the flagship program, the center also offers a variety of educational and networking events, including a popular weekly coffee-and-networking session called Caffeine and Convos (originally known as Tech Beans) and workshops on how to develop and execute ideas. Boyd also offers one-off programs designed to be brought to college campuses, military bases and other locations. One of the most popular is the Startup Sprint, where participants are given 24 hours to develop, pitch and bring an idea to life.

The Boyd Center has also taken full advantage of Columbia’s rich assortment of colleges and universities, forging key relationships with instructors and students at the University of South Carolina, Benedict College and Columbia International University.

Diversity has also been a key element of the Boyd Center’s work from the beginning, with a determined outreach to startups launched by women and people of color.

“Building an inclusive culture of entrepreneurship was a key priority from the start, and it happened very authentically, which is the way an inclusive culture should be built,” Crowder said. “We wanted a place where anyone feels welcome to walk through the front door, and someone greets them and finds out who they are, what they’re about and what they need. That was the culture we wanted to build that hadn’t really existed anywhere else here in Columbia before.”

Some of the successful startups generated at the BIC include Qatalyst Health’s ROSA, an AI-driven platform that maximizes revenue for long-term care facilities by streamlining admissions, optimizing bed use and capturing all billable services. The program has seven facilities signed up as paid customers and recently had seven new commitments.

UpAhead, a coursework management program launched through the center helps students improve their grades by removing the need to manually track assignments. It launched just two months ago and is now active on more than 75 university campuses.

Several other businesses — including a community-driven media and events company for Gen-Z and millennial women, a high-tech volunteering hub, and new platforms for ecommerce and AI-based solutions for the mortgage industry — are also in development.

While the ideas that come through the center’s front door are always new and different, the focus of the Boyd Center doesn’t change, Crowder said.

“From day one, our goal has always been to inspire and support new founders in Columbia on their entrepreneurial journey from idea to exit. We’ve had people come to us who thank us for building this community and who have found a home here. It’s a special asset for Columbia.”