DENVER — Ten up and coming companies have graduated from CU Denver’s Smart Futures Lab, an incubator that helps get small, tech-minded businesses off the ground.

“We want the best companies to come here to Colorado, and we try to bring them into our ecosystem to introduce to our faculty, to our staff, and then also to our cities, and bringing those solutions here,” said Dan Griner, director of the Smart Futures Lab. “We’re really continually amazed by the imagination and the variety of the people that are applying to our program.”

The goal of the program is to improve Denver through Smart City implementation, where new technologies are being developed to improve infrastructure and benefit the people who live in Denver. Griner said that funding for Smart Cities is lacking in the United States.

“We are under-resourced in terms of investment in that space,” Griner said. “All those technologies are popping up in a lot of different places, and while we’re a tech leader in many ways, our implementation of those things is not matching that.”

One of the companies going through Smart Labs graduation today is Addazu, and its CEO Kelly Pickering. Addazu is a modular home company that specializes in creating homes made of flat-packed, steel pieces that are unpacked on site and put together to create houses.

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“There’s got to be a better way of doing this,” said Pickering, who has become frustrated with the housing industry. “To make us more efficient with our resources, to allow us to be more efficient with our labor constraints that we have with the skilled labor force that’s decreasing, and also to bring a more affordable product to the masses.”

Pickering wants to lower home prices and speed up the build times for new constructions, while also giving architectural variety to the modular home industry.

“If you think about traditional modular homes, which most of us are familiar with, you have your box that’s constrained by certain dimensions, right?” Pickering said. “We are able to break those dimensions because you’re not constrained by what you can ship down the road. We are able to flat pack everything, deliver it on site, and then get some of those more interesting architectural dimensions that help us live in a community that doesn’t feel as rigid and repeated.”

Addazu is currently seeking investments for construction along the Front Range, hoping to expand out of Colorado once they have their footing.