HITLAB's Innovation World Cup brought 1,277 applicants and a $96K prize pool to Utah Valley University. A retired Army officer's maternal health startup won the pitch competition. A team of builders took home the hackathon bounty.

Four speakers at StartFest 2026 in Draper, Utah, converged on a single theme: in the AI era, the differentiator is not the tool. It is the human — empathetic, prepared, and self-aware.

Scaling.com (Lehi, UT) published a national study of 1,000 business owners. It found that 59% mistake activity for growth, with founders themselves identified as the primary barrier to scaling.

HydroBlok’s direct-to-stud HB One Backer CI simplifies wall assemblies, reducing labor, curing time, and construction layers while improving straightness, insulation performance, jobsite efficiency, safety, and contractor workflow outcomes.

Vasion (St. George, UT) has launched Intelligent Print Automation (IPA), a cloud-native platform designed to prevent enterprise documents from becoming unmanaged “dark data” by routing information into compliant, AI-ready business workflows.

Utah's Spaceport Exploration Committee has formally advanced two candidate sites — Delta and Green River — into detailed feasibility study, marking the most significant step yet toward a licensed commercial spaceport in the Intermountain West.

Students and startups competed for $96,000 at UVU's two-day HITLAB World Cup Innovation Pitchday & Hackathon, producing working AI prototypes in digital identity, data governance, and maternal health that Utah's chief privacy officer says will directly inform state legislation.

UVU's Emerging Tech Policy Lab and Gary R. Herbert Institute for Public Policy released research showing AI-generated deepfakes influence voter opinion as effectively as real media, with no demographic group able to reliably detect synthetic content.