Kim &
the Force.

Most CEOs raise a round. Kim Getgen sold the Toyota.

In the part of the pandemic where everyone else was buying a Peloton, Kim Getgen was downsizing her life into a duffel bag. Friends' guest rooms. Basement apartments. Eventually, her retired parents' house. The car went next. What replaced it was a software company called InnovationForce, born in Durham, North Carolina, and built around a sentence she keeps repeating like a prayer with teeth: democratize innovation, at scale, for all.

The thing about Getgen, founder and chief executive of InnovationForce, is that she is allergic to the polite version of any story. Ask about funding and she will tell you she has raised, to date, three hundred thousand dollars in seed money - a number most Silicon Valley founders would whisper, if at all. She says it the way a fisherman says they caught dinner. The product, an AI-powered platform that lets corporations actually manage the chaos of innovation instead of pretending to, landed on Fast Company's Top 10 Most Innovative Workplace Solutions list in 2024. Inc. put her on its Top 500 Female Founders list in 2025. The Stevie Awards for Women in Business named her Maverick of the Year. Platts Global Energy made her a CEO Trailblazer finalist. None of those trophies came with a check.

What did come was 165-plus utilities, signed on to a single shared platform, in an industry that famously does not share. If you have ever sat through a procurement cycle with an investor-owned utility, you understand the magnitude of that sentence. Getgen sold AI to the part of the American economy that still faxes things.

Twenty-five years on the seam.

Before InnovationForce there was cybersecurity. Getgen co-founded a security company, ran a Clinton Global Initiative project, and spent a chunk of her professional life translating between disruptive startups and the legacy industries those startups were trying to replace. She is, by her own admission, a translator. Or a smuggler, depending on the day. She moves new ideas across hostile borders.

The pattern is consistent. Energy. Cybersecurity. Now utilities and climate. These are not the glamour beats of the technology press. They are the ones that keep the lights on - sometimes literally. Getgen picked them on purpose. "Build on a solid foundation," she likes to say, "even if it's not sexy." The unsexiness is the moat. Anyone can launch a chat app. Very few founders can read a utility's regulatory filings and still want to write code for them.

That stubbornness shows up everywhere in her resume. Energy Central named her one of its Top Voices of 2024. Utility 2030 named her a "Woman Who Sparks," which is the kind of pun only the energy industry can love unironically. The Biden administration tapped her for a U.S. clean-energy trade mission. The throughline is not the awards. The throughline is that she keeps walking into rooms where most software founders would never bother to knock.

InnovationForce itself is the synthesis. The platform uses AI to bring structure to the corporate innovation process, which historically has been less of a process and more of a series of off-site retreats with sticky notes. Getgen has run plenty of those. She has facilitated hackathons and design thinking workshops on three continents. She knows what good ideas look like before they get strangled by a steering committee. The software is, in a sense, what she wishes she had handed every client for the last twenty years.

What the press release leaves out.

Founder profiles love the inflection point: the garage, the napkin, the demo. Getgen has those. She also has the parts the magazines clip away. During the pandemic, she did not retreat to a writer's cabin to meditate on legacy - she just kept moving. A guest room here. A basement there. The act of constant relocation, she has said, was a way to figure out what her last twenty-five years had actually been for.

Then there is the matter of the meditation teacher training. She enrolled in one. While running an AI startup. While selling into utilities. Most founders treat focus as a productivity metric. Getgen treats it as a practice. It is hard not to see the connection between the contemplative discipline and the patience required to sell technology to a regulated monopoly.

She talks frequently about her "front row" - the people whose belief she borrows when her own runs low. Among them: Clyde Horton, a career coach she worked with from 2016 to 2023, in the years she calls her confidence-rebuilding chapter. Most founder origin stories skip the part where the founder was, for a while, broken. Getgen does not skip it. She turns it into a recruiting pitch for therapy.

The other thing she does not skip: credit. She mentions Linda Hill, her co-founder, by name. She mentions her parents, who took her in. She mentions the utilities by count, not by brag. The pronoun in her interviews is reliably "we." That is rarer than it should be.