Concrete support beams, their bottom portions painted crayon yellow, loomed behind a projector screen last Friday inside a warehouse near the Denver airport. By 11 am, the space was stocked with aerospace entrepreneurs from 10 startups. The hopeful engineers and scientists had come to the Mile High City from as far away as Spain, to stand beneath that projector and pitch potential investors—on their weather-shielded drones, their gas-free airplanes, and their plug-and-play sensors.

You might think rocket-science and -adjacent companies want to keep their R&D in-house, given how cliche-difficult their work is. But they actually outsource a fair bit, especially to younger and more agile companies. And here in Denver, a Paris-based organization called Starburst Accelerator is helping them do just that.

Starburst is a bit different from other accelerators: It focuses on aerospace technology, doesn’t necessarily think of Silicon Valley as its incubator for genius, and is willing to take on eat-your-vegetables inventions that nevertheless have the ability to “disrupt.” Founded by Francois Chopard in 2012, the organization has offices current or planned in six countries, the better to unearth companies that can’t afford (or don’t want) to hang their shingles in the Bay Area or Research Triangle Park. Its accelerator program takes 18-ish months to mentor small companies and help them—160 so far—meet with the kinds of big-name industrialists and investors with contracts, capital, and fancy facilities.

In Denver, Chopard’s partner Van Espahbodi was emceeing the live event, where would-be investors vetted the startups, rated their performances—and perhaps planned to offer deals after the Powerpoints are over.

Starburst’s sped-up companies include some you’ve probably heard of, like Deep Space Industries, which intends to mine asteroids. But the list contains many more unknowns. Like AVA, a “solution for measurement and interpretation of vibrations,” and Cevotec, maker of a “composite fiber patch replacement.” There’s a reason they’re not household names: While patch replacements and vibration measurements are undoubtedly useful, they’re small, unsexy cogs in big machines—not technologies a CTO can easily pitch a generalist.

But aerospace industry insiders are more likely to hear “revolutionary and lucrative” (instead of “zzzzz”) when a nervous founder says “composite fiber patch replacement.” Those are exactly the kinds of small technical advances that big-fish aerospace companies—Boeing, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman, among others—need to make their technologies more efficient, more communicative, and less likely to blow up. So instead, they support small companies’ development, and perhaps later buy their products (or them). Starburst, for a fee from those big fish and a cut of future deals with the small ones, is more than happy to aid them both.

So they showed up at this warehouse, for the possibility that one of the pitchers will save them a lot of R&D.

Neerav Shah of Aerotronic stepped up to bat first. He flashed a picture of Dauntless, the company’s single-rotor, weather-hardened drone. It looked like a malevolent dolphin-shark. His metaphor, though: “We like to think of it as a truck bed.” Using that bed, Shah imagines the oil industry can detect pipeline leaks, first responders can fly above an Event and send video back to the command center, and power companies can aerially inspect solar panels.

Aerotronic hails from Indianapolis, a place where not so much startup capital ventures. In fact, much of the money stays near the Golden Gate, with the Bay Area snapping up more than 25 percent of all investments. In the world. Because of that geo-centrism, investors likely miss lots of good ideas. After all, smart people live everywhere.

Like in Los Angeles, a city that gets 3.5 percent of the venture budget. It’s home to pitch panelist Wright Electric, which wants to commercialize a short-haul electric airplane. Or the Denver area, which doesn’t break the top 20 VC cities. It’s represented Friday in part by Orbital Micro Systems, which makes weather-monitoring satellites that will produce 30 times more data than the government’s orbiters.

Starburst, in other words, is locations-agnostic. Of the 10 companies presenting, just two were from the Bay Area. Halfway through these 10, the group took a break. Music came on in the background. It was symphonic, no-singer covers of pop music. Like OneRepublic’s “Secrets,” with the apt and unsung lyrics “Tell me what you want to hear / something that will light those ears.”

The projects above are the flashier of the 10, the ones that might warrant some Silicon-Valley syllables. But the event also featured companies whose products made me wish there were coffee and not just iced tea.

There was iJet Technologies, predicated on the idea that airplanes don’t send enough self-knowledge back to the ground. Airlines need “intelligent, real-time processing of aircraft data,” as the company’s one-sheeter says. Yawn, right? But iJet claims that could save airlines $7,500 per month—per airplane—with features like alerts for maintenance issues and emissions reporting. Look at the sky: There are a lot of airplanes.

And then there was Farsens, from Spain, for, as the representative said, “whenever you can think about putting a sensor in a place you can’t reach.” (What a slogan!) The company makes battery-free sensors for measurements like temperature, pressure, humidity, and force. They use RFID: the same kind of technology that makes keycards unlock office doors. Stick them anywhere you want, and … sense! That’s straightforwardly useful—especially if you want to know what’s going on in, say, the belly of an aircraft—but again, not a pitch you’d make into an HBO series.

SynapseMX wouldn’t make the TV cut, either. The company’s representative, Shane Ballman of Atlanta, began his presentation by noting that aircraft mechanics are getting up there in years. Half of Boeing’s engineers and mechanics, for example, will be eligible to retire by 2019. Ballman’s fix? A workflow-smoothing text-message system tailored to aircraft technicians, of course. SynapseMX sends an SMS when, say, Frank has fixed that hydraulic leak and is ready for you to check nut torque. (Great, because what everyone wants is more beeps from their phones, specifically ones about what Frank is doing.)

Gripe all you want, but the system cut the average number of techs per plane from 10.2 to 2.6. And that will keep airplanes flying when the Franks retire.

The presentations—the last from local ExoTerra, which proffers thrusters for CubeSats—ended a few minutes early, and the entrepreneurs propelled themselves over to the waiting wine, to talk about sensors and workflow and electromagnetic spectrum allocations. And maybe—just maybe—to strike a deal with one of the nicer-suited executives, to be contractualized or monetized at a later date.

There was no saving the world at the Starburst pitch event, no high-flying rhetoric. Just hardware, specs, the solving of specific physical problems. And the sense that the big fish might need the little ones, in addition to the other way around, regardless of which ocean they inhabit.