Zach Ferres is a life-long entrepreneur who began his entrepreneurial journey as a teenager. He sold his first tech company at the age of 24 and was recognized as one of the top student entrepreneurs in the world in 2010. His passion for entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial communities has followed him throughout his career.
This passion led Ferres to Coplex, where he became the CEO in 2012, which was a design and innovation firm at the time. In 2016 he bought out the existing partners. He became the sole owner of the business—just in time to lead Coplex through a pivot to a Venture Builder business model.
Coplex offers structured Venture Builder programs with a proven process and team to shape business models, quickly test, and validate critical assumptions, assemble an operating team, build technology, bring concepts to market, and support in fundraising. To date, Coplex has helped build more than 350 tech companies with an aggregate market value of more than $41.5 billion.
Innovation is the foundation of the Coplex venture building model. For Ferres, the mission isn’t just to build tech companies; it’s to build thriving entrepreneurial ecosystems around the world that spark economies, create jobs, and change lives.
Rapid-growth tech companies with digital business models are the medium through which Coplex accomplishes this mission. Through its venture building programs, Coplex has helped industry experts and corporate enterprises turn their best internal innovation ideas into thriving technology businesses.
Smile Virtual is a case in point. This SMB spin-out, founded by a cosmetic dentist, provides free online consultations for people interested in changing their smile, but don’t have time for an in-person visit. Through Smile Virtual, the cosmetic dentist gained 100 new patients within the first six months, and within one year, reached over $100k in monthly recurring revenue—valuing the SaaS company at over $20 million.
Coplex was also critically successful with companies like Qwick and Insurmi. Ferres and the Coplex team helped Qwick go from concept to revenue in 90-days, to a successful $1.3M seed round in less than 12 months, and $1 million in monthly revenue in just two years. Coplex also supported Insurmi in going from an insurance chatbot concept to a successful $1 million seed round in 12 months.
In 2019 Coplex raised $2.5 million in Q2 of 2019 to continue spinning out high-growth tech ventures and expand into new markets. Ferres also led the company’s expansion into Tulsa—its third market in addition to Phoenix and Los Angeles. As part of this expansion, Coplex inked a partnership with SENTIR Research Labs with the mandate to bring five new ventures to market.
On the strength of its successful venture building programs, Coplex is expanding its focus to helping corporate enterprises innovate faster by unlocking stuck ideas and turning them into digital business models. Many established corporations are faced with the reality that they must innovate; unfortunately, innovation ideas often get stuck in the red tape of operational excellence.
This is exactly where Coplex comes in: To help extract those ideas from the bureaucracy of traditional organizations and turn them into thriving tech startups. The ideas may come from established businesses, but for every idea Coplex turns into a business, there is an entrepreneurial founder, a founding team, and another opportunity to solve big industry problems.
