Then and Now: Collins influenced NWA entrepreneurial scene
by January 6, 2026 5:24 pm 475 views
After two decades of helping cultivate Northwest Arkansas’s startup landscape, longtime ecosystem builder Jeannette Balleza Collins is charting a new chapter as director of strategic alliances at Fayetteville-based Zenwork Inc.
A fixture in the region’s entrepreneurial expansion, Collins co-founded both DeadFred Genealogy Photo Archive and Bentonville’s Grit Studios, an innovation company to facilitate access and connections for high-impact, later-stage companies. Collins served as managing director of the ARK Challenge technology accelerator program, was a founding team member at Startup Junkie and co-founded Tonic Regional Funds. A member of The CEO Forums, she also advised the Fayetteville Innovation Council.
In 2019 she became entrepreneurial development director for the Northwest Arkansas Council and then worked for national nonprofit Right to Start, focusing on entrepreneurship as a civic priority. She continues to serve as its ambassador for Arkansas. Collins joined Zenwork in January 2025.
Named to the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal’s Forty Under 40 class in 2008, Collins has seen her efforts multiplied over the past 20 years, resulting in a robust entrepreneurial ecosystem in Northwest Arkansas and a full circle moment for her. The startup infrastructure she worked to establish is now robust enough for her to step back and focus on scaling corporate innovation in the fintech sector, she said.
“We launched these things with an idea that it was messy, and we course-corrected and then 10 to 15 years later seeing that long tail of impact that’s been very rewarding because that’s part of ecosystem building,” she said. “You want to build programs and values that live beyond your immediate sphere of influence. I’ve been fortunate to meet and collaborate with independent thinkers, brave souls and audacious builders over the past 20 years. As the entrepreneurial ecosystem here continues to grow and to diversify with new generations of leaders, I feel deep gratitude that there’s more entrepreneurial support and scaffolding to help businesses.”
Collins’ success comes from bringing different people to the table. “Immense curiosity, incremental improvement and trust is the way I work at partnerships,” she said. “It underscores the saying, ‘when you’re alone you can go faster, but you can go further when you’re together.’ And so, I’ve never been afraid of the messiness that comes from interpersonal relationships, collaboration and brain differences.”
Calling herself a “neurodivergent whole brainer,” Collins said her ability to have “floodlight focus” instead of “flashlight focus” enables her to “take information from different places in my environment and retain it to have creative, divergent thinking. That serves me in my career because it helps with problem-solving and with thinking outside the box and coming up with innovative solutions.”
In her role at Zenwork, Collins focuses on ecosystem-led growth and expansion efforts via partnerships. Zenwork is a private equity-backed provider of digital tax compliance and regulatory reporting software, founded by Sanjeev Singh. The company’s flagship product is Zenwork Tax 1099, an IRS-authorized e-filing platform that simplifies compliance and is used by 1 million businesses annually. The organization recently added 990 forms for nonprofits and released agentic AI (artificial intelligence) technology.
“What I was doing for the region, I’m now applying to the fintech and the regulatory tech sector,” she said. “I’m applying my different learnings to this space, and it’s exciting because it’s with agentic AI solutions, that’s really disrupting the finance and accounting space.”
Collins’ parents, Filipino immigrants who had successful careers in Little Rock, are her inspiration. She graduated with an English major and art minor from Hendrix College, moving to Northwest Arkansas after graduation.
Collins is a strategic adviser for ROYBI World, founding board member of Spring Creek Food Hub, board member for Arkansas Food Innovation Center, Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange (CACHE); TheatreSquared, Entrepreneurship for All Northwest Arkansas, Ark Angel Alliance and board president for Southern Capital Project.
Collins is motivated by her two children, Cashel, 10, and Josephine, 8. She enjoys container gardening and mending.