The Colorado Broadband Office has rescinded a $103 million provisional BEAD award to Parker-based Maverix Broadband, ending the company’s run as the presumptive largest recipient of the state’s rebuilt broadband program after an investigation turned up canceled invoices, unpaid contractors and millions of dollars in costs the state says it may not recover. None of that $103 million had actually been disbursed — the CBO’s own language describes it as “provisional federal funding” rescinded before any money moved. The costs now at risk come instead from separate, earlier state and federal grants Maverix had already drawn on.
The CBO said Monday it terminated six active grants and referred the matter to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of the Inspector General. No criminal charges had been filed against Maverix or its officers as of Sept. 22. The cancellation removes Maverix from the state’s broadband buildout plan: the company’s roughly 10,232 assigned locations and $103 million award had accounted for nearly 25% of the $397 million in provisional BEAD awards Colorado announced under the program’s post-restructuring “Benefit of the Bargain” round — second only to Amazon’s satellite service by location count. That’s a comparison against the state’s current, rebuilt BEAD round, not the $826.5 million Colorado was originally allocated before NTIA’s 2025 overhaul; measured against the original allocation, Maverix’s award was closer to 12%.
Enhanced monitoring turns up a pattern
Colorado did not learn of Maverix’s financial distress until April, when the company disclosed it had been in receivership since January because it was not paying contractors. The Colorado Broadband Office received two whistleblower complaints in May alleging Maverix was submitting invoices for work that had not been completed, froze further payments, and escalated to enhanced monitoring and site visits in June. Interim CBO executive director Alison Terry said what investigators found was not an isolated incident. The review turned up roughly $3.2 million in costs — about $2.5 million federal and $700,000 state, by the office’s estimate — tied to invoices Maverix later canceled or work that was never performed, money the company kept rather than returning to the state as its grant agreements required. That $3.2 million traces to the earlier Capital Projects Fund and High Cost Support Mechanism grants, not to the canceled BEAD award, and the office has been clear the figure is a current estimate rather than a final accounting.
Terry told the Colorado Sun the state’s hands are largely tied on recovering the money outright. “We can’t ask for the money back without going through the courts,” she said.
Six towns left waiting
The terminated BEAD contracts would have brought fiber service of at least 100 Mbps to more than 15,000 households and businesses in small communities along the rural edges of the Front Range, including Kiowa, Livermore and Walsenburg. In Livermore, where Maverix had held a $2.2 million High Cost Support Mechanism grant since 2023, resident Tom Laupa documented the project’s actual state of completion after three years of waiting: buried conduit with open, empty ends and no fiber ever strung through it.
Not every Maverix site told the same story. Terry said a visit to Kiowa roughly a year ago found solid workmanship and customers already connected — one reason the state let some contracts run as long as they did before pulling the funding.
Bankruptcy complicates the cleanup
The termination lands on top of an already tangled corporate picture. A Denver District Court judge placed Maverix into receivership on Jan. 22 after CooperReilly Investment Fund, LLC sued Maverix LLC, Maverix Broadband, Inc. and an affiliate, Viath, Inc., over a defaulted loan. Sonoran Capital Advisors, LLC, led by managing director Bryan Perkinson, was appointed receiver over both Maverix entities. On Aug. 28, the receivership court authorized a sale of Maverix’s assets — three days before Maverix LLC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Colorado. That bankruptcy filing is what now stands between the state and any straightforward clawback, since Colorado must work through the bankruptcy court rather than simply demanding its money back.
Inside the Chapter 11 filing
Maverix LLC’s voluntary petition, filed Aug. 31 under case number 26-16423-MER, lists a principal place of business at 2755 Winter Way in Parker and estimates both assets and liabilities in the $10 million to $50 million range, with 100 to 199 creditors. David Lindauer signed as the company’s authorized representative; John Goutell of The Minerva, LLC is listed as bankruptcy counsel.
The corporate structure behind the storefront name is layered. Maverix LLC, the operating entity that holds the state grant agreements, is wholly owned by Maverix Broadband, Inc., which is in turn wholly owned by Maverix Enterprise Holdings, Inc. The petition’s ownership statement notes no publicly held corporation owns 10% or more of the debtor.
Who Maverix owes
The company’s list of its 20 largest unsecured creditors, filed with the petition, offers the clearest look yet at the contractors and vendors left holding claims. Excavation and underground-construction firms dominate the top of the list, led by Prodigy Excavating at $2.6 million — more than six times the next-largest claim. Zayo Group, the fiber transport carrier, is owed $432,632 for telecom services. Fiber-network design software vendor Vetro, Inc. and financial restructuring firm Lampert Capital Advisors also appear, underscoring how far the unraveling reaches beyond the construction crews. The 20 largest unsecured claims total roughly $4.15 million; the eleven largest are below.
| Creditor | Nature of claim | Status | Unsecured claim |
| Prodigy Excavating | Trade debt (construction) | $2,600,069.08 | |
| Zayo Group, LLC | Trade debt (telecom services) | $432,632.19 | |
| A-Mac Underground (CSMK LLC) | Trade debt (construction) | $214,951.64 | |
| TSR ComSupply | Trade debt (materials) | Disputed | $168,680.46 |
| Embark Consulting, LLC | Professional services | $129,174.32 | |
| Core Industries LLC | Trade debt (construction) | $119,769.41 | |
| Lampert Capital Advisors | Professional services | $110,000.00 | |
| Bush & Ramirez, PLLC | Professional services (legal) | $69,513.00 | |
| Rapid Wire | Trade debt (construction) | $56,500.67 | |
| Fresnel Software Corporation | Software services | $55,250.01 | |
| Vetro, Inc. | Software services | $30,874.98 |
The two largest creditors sit at opposite ends of the telecom-contractor spectrum. Prodigy Excavating, the biggest claim by a wide margin, is a small, little-known outfit with scant public information about its ownership or workforce — which makes the size of its exposure notable on its own. Zayo Group, by contrast, is a Boulder-founded fiber giant that was taken private in 2020 in a $14.3 billion deal backed by DigitalBridge and EQT, and closed its $4.25 billion acquisition of Crown Castle’s Fiber Solutions business on May 1, 2026, adding roughly 90,000 route miles to its network. A $432,632 unpaid bill is a rounding error for Zayo; for Prodigy, a $2.6 million claim is the kind of number that can sink a small excavation outfit outright.
Two other Maverix funding streams, separate from the canceled BEAD grants, total $27.38 million and remain in various stages of construction. The CBO estimates about $9.17 million of that had already been paid out before the office froze payments. Those three Capital Projects Fund contracts, awarded in 2024, were meant to bring service to roughly 4,500 addresses across Boulder, Chaffee, Gilpin, Kiowa and Saguache counties.
Maverix’s lawyers declined to comment.
A parallel fight: who actually owns the network
Three days before the bankruptcy filing, Maverix’s secured lender closed on a sale of most of the company’s operating assets — and Maverix is now disputing how much of the network that sale actually covered, according to a complaint the lender filed Sept. 18 in the bankruptcy case.
CooperReilly Investment Fund, LLC, a Georgia-based lender, loaned Maverix LLC and Maverix Broadband, Inc. $6.35 million in March 2024, later increased to $7.93 million, secured by essentially all of the companies’ personal property. Maverix defaulted in January 2025. Two forbearance agreements followed, each giving Maverix more time to sell assets and pay CooperReilly off; both ended in default. A court-ordered marketing process drew no qualified bids by a December 2025 deadline — CooperReilly says a rival buyer, BAM Broadband, had offered roughly $12.2 million but later withdrew — and Maverix declined to sign CooperReilly’s own purchase offer.
CooperReilly sued in Denver District Court on Jan. 13, 2026, and won an ex parte order the same month appointing Sonoran Capital Advisors as receiver over both Maverix entities. In May, Maverix signed a settlement agreeing not to oppose a sale of the company’s assets to CooperReilly for a $7 million credit bid plus $25,000 cash. The Denver court approved that sale on Aug. 28. Maverix LLC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy three days later, on Aug. 31.
The Grant Network problem
The sale agreement drew a line between what it called the “Non-Grant Network” — infrastructure Maverix built without state or federal subsidies — and the “Grant Network” built with BEAD, Capital Projects Fund and Colorado Broadband Deployment Board money, which the agreement excludes from the sale. In practice, the two networks are not easy to separate: Maverix built them as a single, physically integrated system, and the purchase agreement includes a provision stating that any fiber asset is presumed to be part of the sale unless Maverix produced contemporaneous documentation proving it was grant-funded. To keep the combined network running, the receiver and CooperReilly also signed a separate agreement giving CooperReilly a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free right to use whatever network components remain in Maverix’s name — grant-funded or not.
CooperReilly’s complaint says that once the sale closed, Maverix’s bankruptcy estate consists solely of a piece of real property in Parker, and asks the bankruptcy court to formally declare that Maverix has no ownership stake in the assets CooperReilly acquired. The complaint quotes Maverix as maintaining the opposite: that “the vast majority of what [the receiver holds] is Maverix LLC’s.” As of Sept. 22, Maverix had not filed a response to the complaint. Viath, Inc., which guaranteed the CooperReilly loan and separately objected to the sale before it was approved, is not an outside party — Colorado business filings list Lindauer himself as Viath’s registered agent, making him personally tied to the guaranty now at issue.
The dispute matters beyond the two companies fighting over it. If a state-subsidized fiber segment defaults into CooperReilly’s hands for lack of paperwork proving its funding source, it complicates the CBO’s stated plan to rebid the affected locations — the physical infrastructure the state expected to inherit or replace may not be entirely under Maverix’s, or the state’s, control to begin with.
A fast rise for a newer entrant
Maverix’s history with the state broadband office dates to at least 2021, when the company applied for funding but fell short of minimum requirements, according to archived state Broadband Deployment Board records. It came back in 2023 and landed its first HCSM grant, then added two more HCSM awards and the trio of CPF contracts in 2024 before winning the largest single allocation in the state’s BEAD program. The company built its business on microtrenching, a technique for laying fiber quickly and cheaply in sparsely populated terrain, which had made it an attractive partner for counties trying to close out last-mile gaps.
Maverix was founded in 2021 by David Lindauer and Tyler Bartholomew, after Lindauer, frustrated by a roughly $40,000 quote from Comcast to run internet to his rural Elbert County home, bought fiber himself and found enough interested neighbors to turn the project into a company. Lindauer serves as CEO, Bartholomew as president. An investor pitch deck titled “Compelling Returns on Deployment” lists Lindauer’s role on the executive team as “‘Mad Scientist’ & grant guru,” alongside network and database architecture and big-data applications; Bartholomew’s listed portfolio covers operations and software, SEO and internet marketing, and customer acquisition.
Warning signs before the whistleblowers
Problems with a Maverix contract surfaced well before state investigators got involved. The Town of Elizabeth contracted with Maverix in November 2023 for fiber service to Town Hall and the police department and for public Wi-Fi hotspots, on a seven-week schedule, after paying $73,930 up front for materials. According to a July 23, 2024 memo from Town Administrator Patrick Davidson, Maverix didn’t file its first line-location request until March 19, 2024 — weeks after the contracted Feb. 22 completion date — and missed a June 8 town event the Wi-Fi installation had been intended for. Fiber service to Town Hall and the police department was not turned over until July 10, 140 days behind schedule, with restoration work and technical documentation still outstanding. Elizabeth said it was withholding further right-of-way approvals until the dispute was resolved.
Two months after that memo, in September 2024, Garfield County commissioners voted 2-0 to send the Colorado Broadband Office a letter backing Maverix’s BEAD application, citing the company’s “excellent reputation.” Whether Elizabeth’s experience reached the officials who later evaluated that BEAD bid isn’t established in the public record — but the gap between one town’s documented frustration and another county’s endorsement, two months apart, is the kind of disconnect a statewide contractor-performance history might have caught.
What happens to the locations now
The CBO plans to rebid the affected locations, folding them back into the ongoing BEAD deployment process rather than leaving the towns without a path to service. Sarah Tuneberg, executive director of the Colorado Office of Information Technology, said the receivership proceedings limit what the state can do in the near term, but that connecting the unserved communities remains the objective.
The cancellation also lands amid broader turnover at CBO. Executive Director Brandy Reitter, who had led the office since February 2022 and helped steer Colorado’s nearly $1 billion in federal broadband funding, resigned abruptly on Sept. 15 — six days before the Maverix announcement — with Terry stepping in as interim director.
Residents or contractors with information about grant misuse can reach the Colorado Broadband Office’s fraud hotline at 303-764-7558.
