Meet Your 2026 Casper Start Up Challenge Finalists
Every entrepreneur has a beginning.
A problem that keeps them up at night. A question no one has answered quite right. A moment in the backcountry, on the open range, at work, or immersed in the everyday that makes someone stop and think: There has to be a better way.
But turning that moment into something real, a tangible solution, takes more than a good idea.
It takes the willingness to build it. Test it. Talk about it. Change it. Put it in front of people and believe it might become something bigger than where it began. Again and again and again.
And it takes people willing to get behind it.
That’s what the Casper Start-Up Challenge has always been about.
This year, five finalists are taking the stage with businesses born from entirely different experiences. One is making the pack-out more purposeful for hunters. Another is reimagining how ranchers manage cattle across the range. One is building a community around more human leadership. Another is asking how we build better judgment into artificial intelligence. And one very dedicated bird guy is taking on a billion-bird problem, one window at a time.
Some are just getting started. Others have already put their work into the world. But each is building from here with the potential to reach far beyond Wyoming.
On September 30, they’ll take the stage at The Rialto and compete for a share of up to $50,000 in seed funding.
But before they pitch, we want Casper to know who they are, what they’re building, and the story behind what got them here.
Meet the five businesses Backed by Casper:
Vouno Pack
Pack Out With Purpose
Like many ideas, Vouno started from inside a moment that left Phil and Megan asking, “Isn’t there a better way?”
For this family-owned business, that moment found them in the backcountry.
You see, both Phil and Megan grew up in Wyoming with a lifelong connection to the outdoors. Phil has been hunting since he was a kid, and today, their two young children regularly join him and Megan on hunting trips. Over the years, they’ve become intimately familiar with one particularly messy part of a successful hunt: the pack-out.
Hunters often rely on trash bags to contain blood and moisture while carrying harvested game. But under the weight and demands of a backcountry pack-out, those bags are known to puncture, tear, and leak – leaving an expensive hunting pack and the gear inside it soaked.
So Phil and Megan built something specifically for the haul.
The Vouno Pack Liner is a lightweight, waterproof, reusable liner designed to fit inside a hunting backpack and stand up to heavy, irregular loads. Welded seams help keep liquids contained, while its design allows it to pull double duty in the field as a dry bag, bear hang, or even a cooler liner.
At its heart, Vouno is a Wyoming-made answer to a problem Phil and Megan know firsthand. Above all, it’s about honoring the entire process of a successful hunt: respecting the land, caring for the harvest, and bringing home what you came for.
Built from experience. Made for the backcountry. Backed by Casper.
RangeLink Technologies
Livestock Management Technology Built For The Modern Rancher
There’s a lot about Wyoming ranching worth preserving. Miles of interior fencing might not be one of them.
Born in Wyoming and built with the realities of Western ranching in mind, RangeLink Technologies is developing a new approach to virtual fencing that allows ranchers to know where their cattle are and adjust grazing boundaries remotely from a phone, truck, or office.
Behind RangeLink is a team of founders whose experience spans engineering, economics, robotics, ranch work, and the trades. Many grew up in Wyoming and around the ranching industry, giving them both the technical experience to imagine a different approach and a personal understanding of the people and places they’re building it for.
But what they’re developing isn’t only about managing cattle differently. It’s about what that could give back to the people doing the work: fewer hours spent maintaining and moving interior fencing, more flexibility in managing grazing, and perhaps something even more valuable: more time where they’re really needed on the ranch and with their families.
And RangeLink is already putting the idea to work. Its system has reached Version 2 and is approaching larger field trials, with an early ranch partnership program beginning this fall to put the technology into the hands of producers who can help shape what comes next.
Rooted in Wyoming. Built for the range. Backed by Casper.
Culture Club
A Home For Human-Led Leadership
Being good at your job and knowing how to lead people are two very different things.
Yet every day, people step into leadership roles and are expected to know how to communicate, build trust, navigate hard moments, shape culture, and bring out the best in the people around them – often without ever being taught how.
After nearly two decades working in human resources across both public and private organizations, Nicole Carlson has experienced that gap firsthand. And with Culture Club, she’s creating the kind of space she believes leaders need to close it.
Culture Club is a ten-month immersive leadership experience built around the human side of leading. Rather than a one-and-done workshop, participants learn together over time, putting practical skills around communication, trust, self-awareness, and workplace culture into every day practice while building relationships with other leaders doing the same.
For Nicole, the idea is as much about the people being led as the people doing the leading. Because when someone becomes a stronger, more thoughtful leader, the impact rarely stops with them. It carries into their team, their workplace, and eventually, the larger community around them.
Better leaders. Stronger teams. Backed by Casper.
Legacy AI Technologies
The Future Of Trusted Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is learning to do more for us every day. The team behind Legacy AI Technologies is asking an increasingly important question:
Can we trust how it chooses to do it?
Today, many of the protections surrounding AI are added after a model has already been built. Rules and guardrails designed to control what it can and cannot do. Legacy is taking a different approach: building values and sound judgment into the AI from the beginning.
Founder Kaleb Koslowsky puts it simply: think of the difference between posting a security guard at the door and raising someone who doesn’t need to be watched. One depends on an outside layer of protection. The other has learned how to make better choices for itself through strong character development.
And this isn’t simply an idea on paper. The Legacy team has already built its own working AI model from scratch and trained it on nearly 200,000 examples of what they describe as sound judgment. They’ve put the model through thousands of attempts to make it behave badly, with early results strong enough that their next step is a larger controlled test to find out just how well the approach holds up.
Behind the technology is a team with experience spanning AI research, engineering, technology, operations, entrepreneurship, and finance. Working on a question with implications far beyond Wyoming!
Because as AI becomes more capable and more present in everyday life, Legacy believes the future isn’t just about building technology that can do more. It’s about building technology capable of better judgment while it does it.
Built with judgment. Designed for trust. Backed by Casper.
Flocking Around
Protect Your Birds & Windows
If investing in specialty bird seed, bedazzling the feeder on your porch, and becoming best friends with the wild birds out your window has become your hobby; this one’s for you.
An ornithologist, certified bird bander, and longtime bird conservation advocate in Wyoming, Zach knows just how dangerous something as ordinary as a window can be. According to his extensive research, window collisions claim an estimated one to two billion wild birds each year. And homes and other low-rise buildings are an important part of the problem.
His answer is refreshingly simple: Flock Blocker.
Created through Zach’s bird education and conservation business, Flocking Around, Flock Blocker is a reusable 8-by-8-inch plastic template that lets homeowners apply a bird-safe pattern directly to their own windows and reflective surfaces. Unlike decals or stickers that need to be purchased for individual windows, one template can be stored, reused, and applied across an entire home for under $20. Zach says the pattern can reduce bird collisions by up to 95 percent.
And perhaps that’s what makes Flock Blocker feel so fitting for the Casper Start-Up Challenge: Zach took more than a decade of specialized knowledge and turned it into something almost anyone can use.
No complicated installation. No expensive equipment. Just one bird guy trying to make our windows a little safer for the birds on the other side of them.
Bird nerd approved. Backed by Casper.
Now It’s Your Turn To Show Up, Casper
These five finalists have done the building, testing, questioning, and refining. On September 30, they’ll put it all on the line at The Rialto.
Join us at 5 PM for the 2026 Casper Start-Up Challenge Pitch Night and see what happens when local ideas meet a community ready to get behind them.
Learn More About Advance Casper
To learn more visit organizations website and don’t miss next year’s event. If you’re interested in becoming a part of our Advance Casper membership community, sign up here.