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Jay Kim Built a Security Company From an Elevator Introduction
A chance meeting in Korea gave Jay Kim an idea. Nearly two decades later, his Kansas company is still trying to make serious encryption feel ordinary.
The Insurance Broker That Turned Itself Into an API
Born inside the world's largest independent broker, Mylo spent a decade turning insurance advice into software other companies can plug in. Here is how a Kansas City team quietly became the insurance layer behind small-business platforms.
The 66-Year-Old Radio Company Betting Your Cell Phone Will Fail You
Cell towers go down in storms. Midland Radio has spent 66 years selling the backup - and turned a fading CB brand into the default radio for Jeep trails, farm fields, and emergency closets.
The Quiet Holding Company Behind America's Walls, Ceilings and Firewalls
A private, people-first investment firm in suburban Kansas City has spent two decades assembling a coast-to-coast family of specialty construction companies - and betting that patient ownership beats the quick flip.
Rebulk
Rebulk is a Y Combinator (S25) startup that measures and monitors bulk inventory - feed, sand, grain, logs, biomass and other materials that never fit into boxes or barcodes. Using fixed cameras, drones, LiDAR and computer vision, Rebulk stitches 2D imagery into 3D volumetric models to give industrial teams precise, repeatable volume and weight data instead of rough estimates and manual checks. Founded in Olathe, Kansas by Warren Wang and Cole Robertson, the company pivoted from video transcription (as dScribe AI) to bulk inventory tracking and now runs pilots with partners including Cargill and Charm Industrial.
Nick Smith
Nick Smith is the President, CEO and Founder of Sailes, a New York-based AI company that builds personality-driven autonomous Sailebots to handle B2B prospecting for Fortune 1000 enterprise sales teams. A former sales leader at CBS Corporation and iHeart Radio, he sketched the idea for Sailes on his iPhone at the Lake of the Ozarks on July 4, 2018.
Lead Bank
Lead Bank is a state-chartered, FDIC-insured commercial bank turned API-first Banking-as-a-Service platform. Acquired in 2022 by an investor group led by former Square Capital chief Jackie Reses, the 1928-vintage Missouri community bank now provides regulated banking infrastructure - payments, card issuing, lending, and deposit accounts - to fintechs, consumer brands, and digital-asset companies.
Kyle Vogt
Kyle Vogt is a Kansas-born serial entrepreneur and robotics pioneer who has founded three billion-dollar companies before age 40. He co-founded Twitch (acquired by Amazon for $970M), founded Cruise Automation (acquired by GM for $1B+), and currently leads The Bot Company, developing AI-powered household robots. Starting as a teenage BattleBots competitor who built his first self-driving car at 14, Vogt left MIT to pursue entrepreneurship, becoming one of the rare founders to create multiple unicorns across live-streaming, autonomous vehicles, and consumer robotics.