The entrepreneurial quotient has made a quantum leap on the 17th floor of the Harbor Court building in downtown Honolulu.

Home to the headquarters of Tetris Online and several of Henk Rogers’ other ventures, the offices high above Honolulu Harbor now host a technology accelerator that is preparing to graduate its first cohort of eight startup companies and send them out into the real world.

Rogers founded Blue Startups in December with the stated goal of developing Hawaii into a nexus of entrepreneurial activity between Asia and the mainland. He hired local venture capital veteran Chenoa Farnsworth to run the program, which is modeled after Colorado-based TechStars, a mentorship-driven, seed-stage investment program operating in six U.S. cities and in London.

Blue Startups is a significant development in Hawaii’s quest to build a vibrant technology community at a time when the geographic location of companies is fast becoming irrelevant, Farnsworth said.

"It used to be New York City, Silicon Valley and Boston, but that has all changed. Geography means less and less in this game," Farnsworth said. "You can have a vibrant entrepreneurial community anywhere."

The inaugural cohort taking part in the 12-week program included six groups from Hawaii and two from California. Competition to get into the program was stiff. The companies that were selected had to beat out 130 applicants from all over the world, Farnsworth said.

Each company received $20,000 as an upfront investment and access to more than $100,000 in in-kind services, including workspace in the Tetris Online offices. In exchange, each company had to sign over a 6 percent stake to Blue Startups. That’s at the low end of the usual 5 percent to 10 percent required by most venture capital firms.

Each company also was paired up with a lead mentor to provide hands-on training and advice. Among the mentors are Jay Shidler, a local businessman who has founded five public companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange; Faruq Ahmad, a 20-year Silicon Valley veteran; and Robert Robinson, founder of the Hawai‘i Angels investor network.

The companies will be honored May 31 at a graduation ceremony of sorts called "Demo Day." The event will include a session in which the companies will make pitches for funding to venture capitalists.

The eight teams in the first Blue Startups group represent a wide array of business models in various stages of development.

One of the more advanced companies is Flo Water, a Kauai-based venture that already has landed investors from venture capital groups in Hawaii and California that want to back its reusable water bottle refill stations. The company, founded by 26-year-old Wyatt Taubman of Kilauea, has hired a veteran Silicon Valley CEO and soon will be moving its headquarters to San Francisco as part of its expansion into the California market.

The youthful Taubman has packed a lot into the past 2 1⁄2 years since he installed his first refill station at Island School on Kauai. In that time, he went from having his mother cosign a loan at Bank of Hawaii to pitching his concept before venture capitalists at Hawai‘i Angels and San Diego-based Tech Coast Angels, the largest angel investor network in the country.

Elyse Petersen, founder of an online marketplace that connects tea growers with tea drinkers, said the company has signed up 500 individual retail subscribers since launching the site in October. Tealet works with tea growers in Hawaii, China, Japan, India, Taiwan and Indonesia under a business model that allows the growers to retain a significantly higher percentage from the sale of their tea as opposed to using traditional wholesale and distribution methods.

Tea growers typically get to keep about 15 percent of what their tea sells for at the retail level. By going through Tealet, they keep about 40 percent of the sale price.

Pharmly is another Blue Startup participant with an online platform that brings together buyers and sellers. In this case, the product is pharmaceuticals.

Company founder Samantha Godfrey said she came up with the idea after working in the industry for 10 years and experiencing firsthand the dysfunction of the pharmaceutical distribution system.

The lack of pricing transparency in the secondary market for pharmaceuticals has contributed to shortages and wide price differences, Godfrey said. Pharmly attempts to solve that by using an online bidding platform that allows health care facilities to request bids from vendors for all pharmaceutical needs.