As a Latino founder, David Lopez, co-founder & CEO of Gritly (acquired in 2024), had to get creative when carving out a place in tech for himself. He learned early that his entrepreneurial spirit wasn’t enough to break down the historic disparities with venture capital and funding startups from his community.

"The numbers are staggering when you look at the venture capital dollars that are provided to Latino entrepreneurs in the United States,” he told ABC’s Denver 7. “Despite making up 20% of the population in the U.S., only 2% of all venture capital dollars goes to Latino-led startups.”

His success against the odds caught the attention of those running Silicon Valley. Lopez was named one of 50 recipients of Google's inaugural Startups Latino Founders Fund.

Gritly was inspired by his own experience trying to break into the startup world. Coming from a low-income, single-mother household, he faced financial barriers to the education he thought was required for success. 

But as he navigated the higher education machine, he found that – with new sales professionals – hiring managers often valued grit over a college degree.

“That brought me excitement because that’s the main thing that my community does have,” Lopez told BuiltIn. “We know how to get up, we know how to survive, and we know how to make things work.”

Seeing an opportunity to create career pathways for their own communities, David and co-founder Venkata (Avi) Uddaraju set out to provide people with tech sales training and mentorship for Black and Latino communities, women, veterans and those previously incarcerated.

After all he’s accomplished, he hopes to “be the change that I wanted to see in the world.” 

“I understand that the problem that Gritly is solving is much bigger than ourselves,” he told Camelback Venture in an interview. “I want my legacy to show kids in marginalized communities that they can go out and build the version of the world that they want to be a part of. I want to show them that you can be successful despite having all the odds against you from day one.”

Ambitious Student

Lopez was first struck with entrepreneurial inspiration in high school when he and his three best friends learned about how much pollution from countries like India and China was spilling into smaller nations. Believing they had found a worthy cause, Lopez began his venture into business.

In 2017, the four boys launched Airnovate as a way to provide pollution masks with filters to people in Southeast Asia, employing a buy one, give one model. They wanted to create a company they had a true passion for, assuring they could build Airnovate the right way from day one. But inexperience would halt their progress.

After analyzing market research and customer development, their results showed target consumers were already satisfied with the current products available. It didn’t take long before the teens decided the best option was to shut down their first venture.

This experience taught Lopez not to be afraid of failure and that it is okay to admit defeat – “but only if you analyze it and grow from it.”

“Yes, your ego will hurt a bit, but it’s so much more important to analyze why it didn’t work out and fix it,” he explained in an interview with the University of Colorado Boulder’s Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative. “Learning from your previous mistakes teaches you how to avoid mistakes on your next venture.” 

But the end of Airnovate was merely the beginning of something bigger.

Tearing Down Education Barriers

But all of this could have easily passed him by if he hadn’t found the drive. Due to his family’s financial standing, Lopez would have to work hard if he wanted a college degree. He eventually was awarded a full ride scholarship to University of Colorado Boulder where he earned his bachelor's degree, making him the first college graduate in his family. 

When he arrived on campus, Lopez said to Shoutout Colorado in an interview, he quickly realized three things.

"One, there's not a lot of people that look like me. Two, those that did, oftentimes, we're going into debt to pursue these degrees, and three, college isn't for everybody, and that's OK,” he explained. “I was really thinking back to my community growing up in government-subsidized housing, there weren't too many of us that were able to go to a big four-year school."

He knew he had found his calling: Break down the barriers to tech for his community.

Lopez began to take every opportunity to learn about running a successful startup, specifically the resources on campus. This included serving as a program intern at CU Boulder’s startup accelerator, Catalyze CU.  As his confidence and knowledge grew, he began to contemplate his next business step.

Shortly after he completed his contract, he decided to launch Internalyze in 2018. Serving as CEO and co-founder, this bootcamp focused on teaching underrepresented and minority students how to succeed in sales and high-demand industries, as well as providing training on how to use emotional intelligence to overcome hurdles. 

“We started Internalyze because as minority students, we found it was difficult for us to find internships,” he went on to tell UC. “That’s when our market research and customer development showed us that this problem and market are currently growing.”

Internalyze’s program offered a 12 week program that students don't pay until after they've been hired. All students needed was wifi and self-discipline. As Lopez puts it: “No tuition and no debt. We only succeed if our students do.”

Internalyze was quick to take off, which mainly came down to its launch colliding with the  Covid-19 pandemic. The shift to online learning gave the company the opportunity to capitalize on their idea that you don’t have to obtain a four-year degree to be successful. 

Their biggest contribution to overall success was providing an untapped talent pipeline for partnered companies, developing education and training that is specific to their hiring needs.

Gritly and Future

Lopez’s next startup was a more refined version of Internalyze. Launched in 2018, he co-founded Gritly, a startup that provides training for entry-level tech jobs. The online bootcamp lasts 12-week and gives students the support, community, and training to gain employment in entry-level sales roles. The program did not require prior experience and charged nothing upfront.

“We align our incentives with our students’ goals to help them achieve economic mobility, meaning we don’t succeed until our students do,” he went on to tell Shoutout Colorado. “This path hasn’t been easy, but our entire team understands that everything we are working on is bigger than us.”

Gritly was designed to empower disadvantaged groups to think differently about education and their future.

“Our platform and approach, while advantageous to all, is particularly valuable to minorities, women, veterans, and those that followed a non-traditional career path that are passionate about moving into high-tech sales,” Lopez continued.

In an interview with Axios Denver, he added that "college isn't for everybody, and that's okay.”

While he saw success in his latest venture, the initial model was difficult to scale. So Lopez decided to pivot, transforming Gritly into a portal that hosted other bootcamps and edtech programs that provide role-specific training, including front-end development, back-end development, data management, user experience, recruiting and sales.

“By commercializing our software, we went from one player in the vocational training space to building infrastructure for the entire industry,” Lopez explained to BuiltIn Colorado.

His massive achievements didn’t stop there. The success of Gritly caught the attention of IIA Healthcare, which acquired the startup in 2024.

Today, Lopez works as the director of workforce development at Elevate Quantum. But he has never forgotten where he came from and the impact he hopes to make on the world, because “if not me, then who? If not now, then when?”