Today at South Valley Regional Airport about 70 legislators, federal and state officials, investors, and media gathered at a Skyshare hangar for a look at the Razorback — Hypercraft's new autonomous ground vehicle platform — and the counter-drone payload Fortem Technologies is building for it.

The event, hosted by Provo-based Hypercraft in partnership with Base Case, 47G, and Fortem Technologies, paired a technical presentation with a "state of autonomy in defense" panel and a live vehicle demonstration. It's the most public step yet for Hypercraft's shift from a broad hybrid-and-electric powertrain supplier, as covered by TechBuzz in June of 2025, into a dedicated defense platform company — a pivot formalized in December when the board named Brian Bowers, a former Maersk executive who joined Hypercraft as president in 2024, as chief executive officer. Founder Jake Hawksworth moved into the role of executive chairman and chief product officer.

West Jordan sets the stage

West Jordan Mayor Dirk Burton welcomed the audience, noting the city's growing footprint in advanced manufacturing and its roughly 600 football fields' worth of vacant industrial land in the city's southwest quadrant — an implicit pitch to the room's investors and site-selection watchers. Councilmember Kent Shelton also attended, alongside Jim Grover, West Jordan Economic Development Director, who helped organize the event.

Rep. Candice Pierucci, R-Herriman, the Utah House majority whip who represents Riverton and Herriman, followed with remarks tying Hypercraft and Fortem to the state's broader aerospace and defense buildout. Citing figures she attributed to state economic data, Pierucci said Utah's aerospace and defense employment has grown 23.4% over the past five years, industry wages are up 31%, the sector now accounts for 19.2% of Utah's GDP, and Utah ranks first nationally in five-year aerospace and defense growth at 62%.

A software-defined platform, not just a vehicle

Jake Hawksworth, Executive Chairman and Co-founder of Hypercraft, framed Hypercraft's pitch around a shift already visible in Ukraine and the Middle East: ground operations remain, in his telling, the most dangerous domain in modern conflict, and militaries are moving away from vehicles engineered around protecting a human crew toward unmanned platforms engineered around completing a mission.

The Razorback is Hypercraft's answer — a medium-class, high-speed unmanned ground vehicle built on what the company calls "Carbon Architecture," an in-house computing and software stack designed to host third-party autonomy and payload software on a single unified system. Specifications shared at the briefing:

• Power export: roughly 38 kilowatts, which Hawksworth said is well above the 1–3 kilowatts typical of current military vehicle platforms and necessary to run power-hungry payloads like radar systems
• Range: 280 miles with payload, drawing on the company's diesel-electric hybrid architecture — a range-extended EV design in which a diesel engine charges a battery pack that drives electric motors at each wheel
• Payload capacity: up to 2,400 pounds
• Top speed: 60 mph, rated to allow the vehicle to travel in convoy alongside manned vehicles
• Autonomy: SAE Level 4, drive-by-wire, with the ability to run silently on battery power alone for stealth operation
• Front-to-back and side-to-side symmetry, intended to simplify manufacturing and reduce cost

Hypercraft frames the Razorback's mission platform as three stacked layers rather than a single product: Hypercraft's own vehicle platform layer handles mobility, power, the software stack, high-performance computing, and GPS/GPS-denied positioning; Forterra's autonomy and orchestration layer sits above that, handling the autonomous system, mission orchestration, and communications; and Fortem's payload and systems layer sits on top, covering logistics payloads, sensors and effectors, and "software as a payload." Hypercraft describes its broader partner ecosystem — beyond Forterra and Fortem — as including Alien Control Systems, Hoverfly, SDF, AEON, Ghost Robotics, and Stratom.

Fortem's FireThorn payload and the DHS backdrop

Adam Robertson, Fortem's Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer walked the room through a use case built specifically for the Razorback: a counter-drone interceptor Fortem calls FireThorn, purpose-built against Shahed-136-style one-way attack drones and the Geran-family variants Russia now produces domestically based on that Iranian design.

FireThorn is a distinct product from the company's better-known F700 DroneHunter® (a net-capture interceptor drone). FireThorn instead carries a warhead. Specs shown at the briefing:

• Detection: Fortem's radar panels can pick up a small, Group 1-class hobbyist drone from about 4 km out and a larger Group 2/3-class threat from 8–12 km
• FireThorn interceptor: 8.8 kg gross takeoff weight, AESA radar seeker, top speed of 144 km/h (40 m/s), 4 km engagement range
• Guidance/kill mechanism: radar terminal guidance with a proximity fuse and a 1.8 kg warhead, designed to intercept targets flying up to 180 km/h at altitudes of 50–1,000 meters

On the Razorback, the sequence Robertson described runs: the vehicle's onboard radar detects a threat, FireThorn launches from the Razorback (stationary or in motion), and the interceptor's own radar seeker takes over for terminal guidance and detonation.

Robertson shared a fuller picture of Fortem itself: founded in April 2016 with more than $100 million in venture capital raised to date, headquartered in Lindon (a roughly 51,500-square-foot facility, and soon to expand) with a secondary Eagle Mountain test site, about 150 employees holding 66 technical degrees among them, and a customer list that includes DHS, the Army, Navy, USMC, AFRL, DARPA, and DTRA alongside commercial and international partners like Toshiba, Hanwha, CACI, and Parsons.

Robertson also mentioned that Fortem was awarded a Department of Homeland Security contract earlier in the week worth roughly $1 billion, a reference to the five-year DHS counter-drone IDIQ that TechBuzz reported in detail on August 4, in which Fortem was named the only small business among seven prime contractors. He told the room the contract covers DHS components including Customs and Border Protection, TSA, the Coast Guard, and the U.S. Secret Service, and referenced a text message he'd received from a Coast Guard contact tied to World Cup security operations as an example of Fortem's technology already in active federal use.

The retired general's pitch: platforms that adapt to warfare, not the other way around

Retired Brig. Gen. Paul Peters, who served roughly 27 years in Army Special Forces and was most recently deputy commanding general of 1st Special Forces Command, an organization of about 23,000 soldiers, gave the briefing's clearest framing of why the Pentagon might want a vehicle like the Razorback at all.

Peters argued that legacy defense acquisition assumed a vehicle platform would serve for 40 or 50 years, built around a fixed mission, pointing to the C-130, which entered service in the 1960s and remains in the fleet today. That model, he said, doesn't fit a battlefield now reshaped in a matter of weeks by drone warfare in Ukraine, the Middle East, and elsewhere. His framing: "the platform has to adapt to warfare," not the reverse. Hypercraft's open, flexible, software-defined, and modular approach is built for exactly that kind of continuous adaptation.

Five missions, one platform

Hypercraft laid out five specific mission sets the company has designed and built the Razorback for, beyond the counter-drone pairing with Fortem:

• Counter-UAS: operating alongside convoys or forward bases, the Razorback carries kinetic effectors or RF jammers and can intercept drone swarms while running high-power radar and target-tracking systems, without pulling a separate support vehicle off mission to do it
• ISR: pushed ahead of friendly lines into contested or uncharted territory to establish a silent observation post, using optical, thermal, and ground-penetrating radar sensors to feed real-time targeting data back to command without risking a human scout
• Export power: used as a silent, mobile power station that plugs directly into tactical tents, command centers, or field medical units, replacing loud, vulnerable towed generators and battery banks during extended field operations
• Comms & EW: deployed as a mesh network node and electronic warfare platform, using its onboard power to bridge communications over difficult terrain and support satellite uplinks or high-bandwidth radio masts
• Contested logistics: running autonomous resupply and casualty evacuation through high-risk corridors, including transporting ammunition, fuel, and medical gear through anti-access/area-denial zones, or doubling as an unmanned evacuation platform for wounded soldiers.

Why now: Utah's piece of a $1 trillion-plus defense budget

Brian Bowers, CEO of Hypercraft, described "the moment for the Utah defense ecosystem" and put hard numbers behind it in his closing remarks. The FY2027 NDAA carries an authorized budget of $1.14 trillion, and Bowers argued Utah is positioned to capture a larger share of it as defense spending expands beyond the air domain, where the state's aerospace base is already strong, into ground autonomy.

Bowers posed the question directly to the room: how much of that $1.14 trillion finds its way to Utah, versus the traditional defense spending centers of Texas, California, Washington state, and Alabama?

On unmanned ground vehicles specifically, the same slide cited a projected $45 billion in UGV market growth over the next decade, noted that less than 1% of ground vehicles currently in operation are autonomous, putting the category in "early adoption," and pointed to Ukraine as evidence adoption is already underway, projecting that Ukraine will purchase 50,000 UGVs in 2026. Bowers said Hypercraft intends to compete for that growth both through Razorback vehicle sales and by licensing its underlying Carbon Architecture across other companies' UGV programs.

47G President and CEO Aaron Starks closed the event, tying Hypercraft's trajectory back to the broader ecosystem 47G has spent roughly four years building around Hill Air Force Base, Camp Williams, Dugway Proving Ground, and the state's roughly 600 companies holding defense contracts. Starks, who spent time earlier in his career at Fortem before leading 47G, argued that the defense industrial base's real gap isn't weapons platforms like the F-35, but the supply chains behind them, and that Utah's density of aerospace and defense companies is what lets a young company like Hypercraft plug into partners like Fortem and Base Case "just down the street."

Base Case's ruggedized 4-screen set-up

Base Case, the Draper-based portable workstation maker TechBuzz first covered in March 2025 as a crowdfunded suitcase-turned-dual-monitor setup, also had a table at Friday's briefing. This time Founder and CEO Arthur Jessop showed the company's latest innovation, a double-stack four-screen version built for its now-dominant customer base of military and law enforcement buyers. It can be converted back to the dual-screen version and collapsed back into a carry-on size rollerboard in a matter of seconds, as he demonstrated for TechBuzz.

Jessop said the company has sold over 3,000 units since that first TechBuzz article and has refined nearly every feature of the product in the time since. Where early Base Case units came in a range of colors, including brighter options, Jessop said black and white are now the most popular finishes — he calls the white version the "storm trooper" model, his favorite. The company continues to develop new configurations to suit federal and defense customers, which Jessop said now make up the bulk of Base Case's business.

What's next

Friday's briefing ended with a live demonstration of the Razorback on a dirt field outside the hangar, in front of the roughly 70-person crowd. The vehicle ran through its paces on both power modes — silent on battery power alone, then with its hybrid diesel engine engaged — and showed off crab-walking, instant braking, and rapid acceleration, giving attendees a direct look at the maneuverability and stealth capability Hawksworth and Peters had described inside the the hangar.

Learn more at hypercraftusa.com.

A hybrid-electric aircraft completed a demonstration flight between Salt Lake City International Airport and Cedar City Regional Airport Thursday, marking the first public flight under Utah's FAA-backed uFLY initiative and moving the state's advanced air mobility program from planning into real-world operations.

The aircraft, operated by Long Beach, California-based Ampaire, departed Salt Lake City and landed in Cedar City as part of the Utah Department of Transportation's (UDOT) effort to evaluate emerging aviation technologies under everyday operating conditions. State officials said the demonstration is the first of several planned flights designed to help integrate advanced aircraft into the National Airspace System.

The flight represents a significant milestone for uFLY, a public-private partnership led by UDOT after the Federal Aviation Administration selected Utah earlier this year to lead one of eight national Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing Integration Pilot Program (eIPP) partnerships. The initiative brings together five western states, industry partners and research institutions to evaluate how next-generation aircraft can safely operate in diverse environments, from mountain airports to rural communities.

Unlike fully electric aircraft, Ampaire's hybrid-electric airplane combines conventional aviation engines with electric propulsion. The approach reduces fuel consumption and emissions while allowing the aircraft to use existing airports and infrastructure, making the technology more practical for regional flights today.

"Our hybrids operate across meaningful distances, varied terrain and existing airports without waiting for new infrastructure," Ampaire Co-founder and CEO Kevin Noertker said in a statement. "The propulsion system changes; the regional aviation system does not have to."

According to Ampaire, its hybrid-electric aircraft have accumulated more than 35,000 flight miles during testing, demonstrating the maturity of the technology for regional aviation applications.

Cache Valley technology plays a role

The demonstration also highlights the role of Utah's aerospace ecosystem.

Ampaire's aircraft use battery technology developed by Logan, Utah-based EP Systems, whose battery systems provide supplemental electric power while allowing the aircraft to maintain the range required for regional operations.

From planning to flight operations

TechBuzz first reported on Utah's selection to lead the FAA-backed uFLY initiative in March, when the state was chosen to head one of eight national advanced air mobility pilot partnerships; Thursday's demonstration flight marks the program's first major public operational milestone.

UDOT officials say the program will evaluate how advanced aircraft could improve transportation options for rural communities while supporting emergency response, economic development and future commercial aviation services.

"Today's flight marks the start of an important effort to test advanced aircraft in real-world conditions," said Matt Maass, director of UDOT Aeronautics. "Each demonstration helps us better understand how these technologies can safely connect communities and demonstrates why Utah is leading the way in advanced air mobility."

Future demonstrations are expected to evaluate additional aircraft and operational scenarios while collecting data that will help inform infrastructure planning, regulatory policy and future deployment of advanced air mobility technologies.

Why Cedar City?

The 255 mile route between Salt Lake City and Cedar City demonstrates the potential of hybrid-electric aircraft to connect communities separated by long highway travel times and varied terrain. Southern Utah also provides high-elevation airports, desert environments and changing weather conditions that make the region an attractive testing ground for emerging aviation technologies.

Utah positions itself as an advanced aviation testbed

Utah has steadily expanded its role in advanced air mobility through initiatives led by UDOT, the Governor's Office of Economic Opportunity, industry partners and organizations such as 47G. The FAA's decision to designate Utah as one of eight national test sites places the state among a small group helping shape how advanced aircraft are integrated into the nation's aviation system.

Thursday's demonstration suggests that effort is beginning to transition from planning and policy discussions to operational testing.

The same day Weber County hosted its own community conversation about nuclear energy, a different kind of nuclear story was unfolding roughly 200 miles south. In Emery County, at the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab (USREL), the state has quietly agreed to explore something that doesn't yet exist anywhere in the Western Hemisphere: a lead-cooled test reactor.

Nuclea Energy USA Inc., a subsidiary of the Mississauga, Ontario-based Nuclea Energy Inc., announced on August 5 that it signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Utah Office of Energy Development (OED) on June 2 to explore siting a test reactor for its Morpheus microreactor at USREL. A day later, Nuclea announced a second, unrelated MOU — this one with New Mining Co., a Bitcoin mining infrastructure operator, to evaluate whether Nuclea's reactor technology could eventually power up to 100 MWe of behind-the-meter computing load.

Taken together, the two announcements mark a notable moment for Utah's energy ambitions: the state isn't just recruiting proven reactor designs anymore. It's positioning itself as the place where an unproven one gets tested first.

TechBuzz spoke with Nuclea CEO Josef Freundorfer to understand why Utah — and why lead.

A Coolant Nobody Else in North America Is Using

Most of the advanced reactor conversation happening in Utah right now involves either traditional light-water designs (Blue Castle, the AP1000) or molten salt technology, championed locally by BYU's Matt Memmott and his company AlphaTech. Nuclea's Morpheus reactor takes a third path entirely: liquid lead as a coolant, rather than water, gas, or salt.

"We've selected lead as a coolant rather than water or gas or molten salt," Freundorfer said. "There's many, many reasons why you would select lead... but the two main things that make lead a unique and a safe coolant for an advanced reactor comes down to the fact that lead as a coolant can operate at very high temperatures, significantly higher than any other coolant in the world, which then keeps the fuel itself safe."

The pitch centers on two properties. First, lead doesn't boil at reactor operating temperatures the way water can, which Freundorfer said removes one of the primary mechanisms behind historical fuel-damage accidents. Second, because lead operates at roughly atmospheric pressure rather than under the intense pressurization required by conventional reactors, there's little driving the coolant to escape the vessel even in an accident scenario.

"It's very unusual, and it's one of the key safety features associated with it," Freundorfer said. "The fuel is very safe and can operate to very high temperatures. And two, the coolant and everything in the reactor isn't trying to even escape... What's it trying to push out of the vessel, right?"

Freundorfer described the company's broader safety philosophy, one he distinguished from reactors that rely on layered mechanical and human-operated systems to maintain safety. "The majority of the safety comes from the inherent physics of what you've created, rather than systems that control physics," he said. "If nature is controlling what's happening and making sure everything's safe, that's far more reliable than having a whole variety of complex and redundant safety systems operating it."

Pressed on whether an unforeseen combination of failures, such the kind that preceded the Fukushima accident, could still catch the design off guard, Freundorfer acknowledged the honest answer is that testing is still ahead. "We're performing modeling and simulations to determine what the manner in which our reactor reacts to that, in order to supply to the regulators and really get that buy-in," he said. He noted a genuine trade-off unique to lead: because it freezes near room temperature, a leak could cause the reactor to partially seal itself — a "self-healing" property that also introduces new engineering and economic challenges around flow and long-term maintenance that the company is still working through.

Why Emery County, Specifically

Freundorfer was direct about why Nuclea chose Utah over other nuclear-friendly states like Texas, Idaho, or Wyoming: a regulatory and cultural environment he described as unusually open to new reactor concepts, paired with a specific lab — USREL — that he said can move faster than more established national labs.

"For being a state that in a way has not been involved in this long-term nuclear history, they have moved extremely fast with technical and safety rigor," he said, adding that in traditional nuclear jurisdictions, "you can oftentimes get boggled down in the education aspect... they're always going to want you to bend to their system rather than meet you halfway."

He pointed to a broader trade memorandum of understanding Governor Spencer Cox signed with Ontario Premier Doug Ford on June 29 at the Western Governors' Association meeting in Deer Valley as evidence of the relationship Utah has been building with Canadian nuclear developers specifically. The three-year cooperation framework, part of Ford's "Fortress North America" strategy to deepen trade ties with individual U.S. states, builds on nearly $7 billion in existing annual trade between Ontario and Utah and names advanced nuclear technologies, grid modernization, and energy storage among its priority sectors alongside critical minerals, defense manufacturing, and life sciences.

On USREL itself, Freundorfer said the lab's advantage isn't so much infrastructure Nuclea couldn't build elsewhere, but a demonstrated ability to move a novel reactor concept from regulatory engagement to physical construction without the bureaucratic disconnect he said larger labs often struggle with. "Being able to pick up the phone and talk to someone, whether at the lab, the regulator, or the state, quickly... I think is more optimal when you compare it to maybe some of the larger labs around."

What the Test Reactor Is Actually For

Freundorfer was careful not to get ahead of a siting process that's still in the MOU stage. He preferred not to commit to specific milestone dates, but he described the broad shape of what a Morpheus test reactor would need to demonstrate: reduced-scale operation of the reactor's control and chemistry systems, validation of lead-specific materials challenges, and testing of the ceramic fuel pin design Nuclea plans to use commercially. The reactor would likely run critical for about a year, generating the instrumented data needed to refine the commercial design before Nuclea pursues full NRC licensing.

"It'd be a really strong step to de-risk the commercial plant that we're developing," he said.

That de-risking, he added, is also what stands between Nuclea and its second Utah announcement — the New Mining MOU. Asked whether the Emery County test reactor is intended to directly supply New Mining's Bitcoin mining operations, Freundorfer said the connection is more indirect: the test reactor's job is to prove out Morpheus broadly enough that commercial customers, including but not limited to New Mining, are willing to sign binding agreements. "I would expect any commercial customer would want to see an operating Morpheus reactor before signing a purchase agreement," Freundorfer said, agreeing with the premise of the question. "It's all just trying to sequence everything in a row... relationships take time to build."

The New Mining MOU itself is non-binding and explicitly not a power purchase agreement; under its terms, Nuclea would provide engineering and regulatory advisory work while a separately contracted utility or nuclear operator would handle any eventual power generation and delivery.

Fuel, Regulators, and a Public Listing in Progress

Commercially, Morpheus is designed to run on standard ceramic fuel pins — the same fuel type used across most existing reactors — rather than newer, more exotic fuel forms some competitors are pursuing. Freundorfer said that choice is deliberate: it lets Nuclea plug into an existing global fuel supply chain rather than build one from scratch. On the regulatory side, he said the Emery County pilot will be run primarily in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy under its reactor pilot programs, with results feeding into eventual U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission review for commercial deployment. Nuclea has not yet formally opened NRC licensing discussions, though Freundorfer said the company is "on track" to do so.

The MOU announcements arrive amid a separate, and more conventional, corporate milestone. On July 30, Nuclea announced a definitive business combination agreement with Mangoceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: MGRX), a Dallas-based, Nasdaq-listed company, that would give Nuclea a path to a U.S. public listing. Under the terms disclosed in SEC filings, former Nuclea shareholders would hold approximately 96% of the combined company on a fully diluted basis, with a required concurrent private placement of at least $15 million funded into escrow. The deal still requires Mangoceuticals stockholder approval — because the share issuance exceeds Nasdaq's ownership-change threshold — along with U.S. and Canadian regulatory clearances before it closes. Separately, Mangoceuticals disclosed on August 4 that Nasdaq granted it a 180-day extension to regain compliance with the exchange's minimum bid price requirement, an unrelated listing matter the company said it continues to monitor.

A Second Data Point for Emery County

Nuclea's MOU adds a new name to a growing list of nuclear activity anchored in Emery County and its surrounding region, alongside the Blue Castle/Fulcrum Point project underway in Green River, as covered by TechBuzz. Freundorfer argued that jurisdictions willing to host first-of-a-kind demonstration reactors typically capture a disproportionate share of the resulting supply chain and manufacturing investment as a technology matures. He pointed to Utah's selection as a potential host for a Department of Energy nuclear fuel cycle innovation hub as a reason he expects that dynamic to play out here specifically.

Whether that bet pays off depends on a siting process, a licensing pathway, and a public listing that are all, as of this week, still in progress. But for a state betting heavily on nuclear as part of Operation Gigawatt, Nuclea's arrival adds a technology to Utah's portfolio that, by Freundorfer's own account, doesn't yet have a working precedent anywhere else on the continent.

Learn more at www.nuclea.energy.

In January, TechBuzz profiled Matt Memmott, CEO of American Fork-based AlphaTech Research Corp, as he promoted a compact, factory-built molten salt reactor design toward commercial reality. He argued this technology could sidestep the cost overruns and construction delays that have plagued conventional nuclear for decades. Seven months later, Memmott delivered the keynote at Weber County's community nuclear symposium in Ogden, making largely the same case, but to a different audience: not investors or regulators, but the residents of a county just beginning to ask what an advanced reactor might mean for their community.

The keynote followed two panels of industry executives and academics — coverage of which TechBuzz has reported separately — and served as the evening's public-education centerpiece: a physics-first primer on what nuclear power actually is, why it scares people, and why Memmott believes that fear is largely unfounded.

A Word-Association Experiment

Memmott opened not with slides, but with an audience exercise. He asked the crowd to silently think of the first thing that came to mind when he said a single word — then walked through a list: nuclear... nuclear waste... nuclear weapons... Pluto and Neptune... medical technology. By his account, this Weber County crowd skewed more informed than most audiences he addresses, with hands going up for the deep-space and medical associations as often as for waste and weapons. Nationally, he said, roughly 80% of people default to waste or weapons when they hear the word "nuclear" — a gap he attributed less to the physics itself than to how nuclear power was introduced to the public. "The way it was introduced was tragic," Memmott said. "Wartime destruction was an awful way to introduce this power to the public."

From there, he pivoted to the safety data he considers the industry's strongest, least-appreciated argument: a chart, compiled from studies dating to the early 2010s, that tracks annual deaths per terawatt-hour across major power sources, weighing accidents, mining, and disposal against each source's share of U.S. electricity generation. On the version Memmott presented, nuclear came in lowest at 0.04 deaths per terawatt-hour — behind wind at 0.15, solar at 0.83, hydro at 1.4, and natural gas at 4, with coal topping the list at 161. Nuclear supplies roughly 20% of U.S. electricity on that same chart, according to Memmott, with no direct emissions and what he described as a 343-day-a-year run rate — a reliability figure well above the intermittent output of wind or solar. He extended the argument to medicine, noting that the technetium-99 isotope used in roughly 20 million U.S. diagnostic procedures a year — including X-rays, cancer treatments, and PET and MRI diagnostics — exists only because of nuclear fission.

Radiation as Weightlifting

Asked repeatedly throughout the evening about safety, Memmott returned to an analogy he uses with his students: radiation exposure, he argued, behaves less like a binary poison and more like exercise. Small amounts of radiation damage cells in ways the body actively repairs and strengthens against, he said, while overwhelming exposure — like overwhelming physical strain — causes real and sometimes permanent harm. "If you really lift too much, you're in danger of serious injury or even death," Memmott said. "How does this correlate to radiation? Radiation has a very similar mechanism."

The theory Memmott is describing, radiation hormesis, holds that low doses of radiation may stimulate beneficial cellular repair responses rather than simply accumulating harm. It's a real and long-studied hypothesis, but a contested one: the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission continues to rely on the linear no-threshold model, which treats any radiation exposure as carrying proportional risk with no beneficial floor, and an NRC advisory committee reviewing hormesis-related petitions in 2015 concluded there wasn't compelling evidence to change that standard. Memmott didn't frame hormesis as settled science during his talk, but he leaned on it to make a broader point about thresholds: living near an operating nuclear plant, he said, exposes a person to radiation levels roughly 50 to 100 times below where measurable harm begins — lower, in most cases, than a single chest CT scan.

He also addressed the Fukushima accident directly, walking through the actual failure sequence — a reactor that shut down correctly during the earthquake, followed by a tsunami that disabled the diesel generators needed to keep cooling water circulating through the shutdown core. The lesson he drew wasn't that nuclear power failed, but that a foreseeable single point of failure went unaddressed. It's a distinction that also came up in Memmott's interview with TechBuzz following Nuclea Energy's own MOU with the state — a separate advanced reactor developer working through many of the same historical case studies from a different angle.

The Hardware: ARC Reactor Specs

Memmott put real numbers behind AlphaTech's design during the talk, branded internally as the BYU-AlphaTech "ARC" reactor. The unit is a 12 MWe molten salt reactor using fluoride salt as both fuel carrier and coolant, with AlphaTech targeting a cost of $0.02 per kilowatt-hour, a figure well below typical U.S. residential and industrial electricity rates. The design is engineered to run on either of two fuel pathways: roughly 10 tons of 5%-enriched uranium, or 12 tons of thorium, depending on which fuel cycle a given site or customer prefers.

Beyond generation, Memmott said the reactor is also designed to process spent nuclear waste from other sources, recovering medical isotopes, rare earth elements, and precious metals in the process. It is the same "waste as revenue" argument TechBuzz covered in AlphaTech's January profile, now attached to a specific device rather than a general concept. The reactor is factory-fabricated and fully transportable, consistent with the truck-and-C-17-deliverable design Memmott described in January.

Notably, Memmott identified Orangeville, Utah, an Emery County town not far from the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab, as an active AlphaTech testing site. That puts three distinct advanced reactor technologies in various stages of testing or siting within the same county: AlphaTech's fluoride-salt ARC reactor in Orangeville, Valar Atomics' helium-cooled Ward 250 at USREL, and Nuclea Energy's proposed lead-cooled Morpheus test reactor, also planned for USREL under its recent MOU with the state, as recently covered by TechBuzz. Whether that reflects a deliberate regional cluster strategy from the state or simply reflects Emery County's existing energy-industry infrastructure and regulatory relationships, Emery County is emerging as the place where more than one unproven Western reactor technology is being tested first.

The Land-Use Argument

One of Memmott's more visually striking points concerned land. To generate a gigawatt of power using wind and the battery storage needed to smooth its intermittency, he estimated a facility would require roughly 99,000 acres. Solar could do it in about 3,000. Stacked microreactors, such as the kind AlphaTech is developing, could do it in seven, according to Memmott, assuming full compliance with existing NRC emergency-planning-zone regulations. He added that much of that footprint could be built underground, leaving the surface available for other use. "You'd just see this beautiful park that would be 70 degrees year-round because of the leftover heat," he said.

An Unexpected Utah Advantage: Water

Perhaps the most novel material in Memmott's keynote centered on water. Working with an oil-drilling contact, Memmott said his team identified what he described as massive deep saline aquifers roughly 15,000 feet beneath parts of Utah, remnants of ancient Lake Bonneville, isolated enough from surface water that using them wouldn't affect existing reservoirs or aquifers people currently depend on.

That specific claim is Memmott's own, and it doesn't precisely match the Bonneville-linked aquifer that University of Utah geoscientists have documented in peer-reviewed research this year. That academic work, published Scientific Reports (Nature.com), identified a large freshwater reservoir beneath the Great Salt Lake at roughly 10,000 to 13,000 feet — shallower than the depth Memmott cited, and freshwater rather than saline, though researchers there likewise suspect some of that water dates back to the Bonneville era.

Memmott's team modeled a hypothetical scenario using the leftover heat from 86 molten salt microreactors, after the reactors had already generated electricity, with the salt still around 450°C, to desalinate the deep water he described and supply growing communities like St. George and Las Vegas. The result, he said, was enough desalinated water to fill Lake Powell from bottom to top in about 14 months.

It's an intriguing though hypothetical figure rather than an actual funded project, but it illustrates the kind of secondary use case — industrial heat recovery, not just electricity — that Memmott's January profile also emphasized as central to AlphaTech's commercial thesis.

Answering the Renewables Question

During Q&A, an audience member pressed Memmott on what he called the "duck curve" problem. It is the dip and steep evening ramp in electricity demand created by heavy solar adoption, which has historically been difficult for baseload nuclear to accommodate. Memmott argued molten salt reactors are uniquely suited to closing that gap: because the reactor's core physics are temperature-dependent, the reaction naturally slows as the salt heats up and speeds up as it cools, allowing the reactor to track demand fluctuations within minutes without external control systems. He noted TerraPower's Natrium reactor — under development in Kemmerer, Wyoming, using a sodium coolant rather than molten salt — achieves a similar load-following effect through a separate molten-salt thermal storage system.

Asked about waste transport, specifically, the prospect of nuclear materials moving on Utah roads if the state becomes a manufacturing and processing hub, Memmott didn't dismiss the concern. He pointed instead to existing spent-fuel storage technology: reinforced concrete casks designed to survive train collisions, plane crashes, and other worst-case scenarios without breaching. Whether Utah chooses to become a waste-processing hub, he said, remains an open policy question the state doesn't have to answer to build reactors.

A separate audience question raised helium gas-cooled reactor technology, a design distinct from both Memmott's molten salt work and Nuclea's lead-cooled approach. Utah already has a company pursuing exactly that: Valar Atomics, whose helium-cooled, TRISO-fueled Ward 250 reactor reached criticality at the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab in Emery County earlier this year, becoming the first DOE-authorized advanced reactor built and operated outside the national laboratory system.

Five Years to Operational

AlphaTech's core commercial argument remains a compact, factory-built molten salt reactor, licensed at the production-facility level rather than reactor-by-reactor, aimed at data centers, industrial heat customers, and grid operators managing renewable intermittency. Where January's profile was aimed at TechBuzz's usual startup and investment readership, Wednesday's keynote was aimed at people who may soon be asked whether they want a reactor sited near their community — and Memmott, by his own account, is betting that a room armed with the same safety data he uses with his BYU students will reach a different conclusion than the "80% assume waste and weapons" crowd he says he usually faces.

Memmott closed by putting a date on that bet: he told the Ogden audience it's "possible to see operating reactors by the end of 2031," referring to AlphaTech's BYU-licensed micro molten salt reactor design. His closing slide summarized the pitch in absolute terms. He described micro-MSR technology as producing "no waste, weapons, or meltdown" which is language consistent with the Ogden presentation and yet goes further than the more qualified case AlphaTech has made elsewhere, including in TechBuzz's January profile, where the company's waste argument centered on reprocessing spent fuel into salable isotopes and materials rather than eliminating waste outright.

"I think we're going to have to build every source of power as quickly as possible," Memmott told the Ogden audience. "That includes nuclear, it includes advanced nuclear, it includes everything else."

Learn more at AlphaTech Research Corp.

Before a single reactor design is chosen, before a site is selected, before any commitment is made, Weber County wanted its residents to have the facts. That was the explicit premise of a community symposium held Wednesday evening at the Ogden Eccles Conference Center, adjacent to the historic Egyptian Theater on Washington Boulevard, where county leaders, state energy officials, and a roster of nuclear industry executives, regulators-turned-entrepreneurs, and university researchers gathered for what organizers described as one of the first events of its kind in the county.

"This workshop, just as a reminder, is about two things: education and asking questions. It's not about advocacy," Weber County Commissioner Gage Froerer told the crowd in his opening remarks. "There's no decisions that would be made by Weber County or probably anybody else in this room today. No projects are going to be discussed."

The distinction mattered. Weber County, like much of the Wasatch Front, is growing fast, and Froerer framed the county's mission in blunt terms: attainable housing and work opportunities for residents "and for their kids and grandkids, and probably even their great-grandkids." Both, he said, depend on reliable, affordable energy that the county doesn't yet have a clear plan for securing.

The symposium was organized in partnership with the Utah Office of Energy Development (OED) as part of a statewide grassroots outreach effort. Stephanie Russell, Weber County's economic development director, credited OED for bringing the opportunity to the county "a couple months ago," calling the event a chance for "open and honest, transparent dialogue with our community about a very serious topic."

Operation Gigawatt Comes to Ogden

Heather McShane, public information officer for OED, used her remarks to connect the evening back to Governor Spencer Cox's 2024 Operation Gigawatt initiative, which she framed as a response to demand growth the state's grid isn't built to absorb. More electric vehicles, more connected devices, and hotter summers are all pulling harder on the system, she said, and Utah is responding by diversifying rather than betting on a single technology.

"We're exploring adding more geothermal power. We're looking at added battery storage and nuclear energy to our already robust coal, oil, and gas industries," McShane said, adding that OED is carrying the same conversation to all 29 Utah counties and tribal nations. "We are not here to promote industry, but we have industry experts available because they are the ones who are best suited to answer your specific technology questions."

That expert bench, assembled by moderator Shannon Kang of Envoy Public Labs, the firm running OED's statewide public education campaign, made up the evening's first panel: Nuclear Energy Development Feasibility.

What Actually Makes a Site "Feasible"

Ethan Bates, founder and CEO of Cambrian Nuclear, opened by explaining what goes into deciding whether a community is even a candidate for advanced nuclear. Bates, who holds a PhD from MIT and previously worked at TerraPower and the nuclear waste-siting firm Deep Isolation, said the technical checklist is extensive and federally mandated: seismic data, FEMA floodplain maps, topography, and, increasingly, water availability, since many advanced reactor designs no longer require the massive cooling infrastructure conventional light-water reactors depend on.

"This is not a nice-to-have," Bates said. "This is a regulatory requirement. The NRC has applied this to reactors since the 1970s." His company, he said, is building tools to speed up and add transparency to a siting process that has traditionally been slow and consultant-driven.

John Battaglini, Westinghouse's Vice President of New Market Development & Sales for the Americas, gave the panel a global snapshot of the company's current pipeline: six operating AP1000 pressurized water reactors, 14 more under construction across China, Poland, and Bulgaria, and a U.S. push, tied to recent Department of Energy financing, to get ten new reactors under construction domestically by 2030. Westinghouse is also advancing its AP300 small modular reactor design toward regulatory approval and deploying its eVinci microreactor at U.S. military installations.

Battaglini was candid about the lessons Westinghouse carried out of its Vogtle project in Georgia, the first new U.S. reactor construction in decades. Starting construction before a design is fully complete, he said, is a mistake the industry has learned not to repeat, even when a design has cleared NRC review. "Our top execs have said that we were about 10% complete when we got that DCD," he said, referring to the NRC's Design Control Document. Equally important, he said, is bringing constructors and communities into the process early rather than negotiating site by site. "You really got to get all parties around the table at the same time... the technology provider, the constructor, the off-taker, the utility, the community."

Mike Squires of the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) offered the utility's-eye view, framing the evaluation of any new generation resource around three factors: physics, environmental risk, and cost. Utah's air-permitting constraints, he said, make emissions-free baseload power attractive on regulatory grounds alone, while nuclear's high capacity factor helps offset the volatility utilities see in summer spot-market pricing. "What you're trying to do is, at the end of the day, come up with a balanced portfolio," Squires said — pairing cheap solar with dispatchable resources like natural gas and, potentially, nuclear.

The Workforce Question, Twice

Chris Hayter, President, COO and Co-Founder and Hi Tech Solutions and Founder of Fulcrum Point Holdings, used his time to press a theme that would carry into the evening's second panel: Utah's nuclear ambitions are only as good as its trade and engineering pipeline. A Weber County resident of nearly two decades, a point that triggered applause from the audience, Hayter said workforce development was the subject of his very first conversation with Governor Cox on the topic.

Hayter pointed to Fulcrum Point's active projects as evidence of momentum, a revived Blue Castle project in Green River, recently covered by TechBuzz and originally proposed years earlier as a NuScale small modular reactor development, and a Box Elder County announcement to deliver small modular reactors to Brigham City, alongside a new workforce and manufacturing campus planned at Utah State University's Brigham City location, which he said is set for a formal reveal on August 24. He also raised nuclear fuel storage as an economic opportunity for the state, arguing Utah should compete to host the nation's spent fuel in preparation for future recycling technology. "It's a travesty we don't do it already, and we're ready to do that," he said.

Michelle Zietlow-Miller of GAIN (the Department of Energy's Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear) closed the panel by addressing public misconceptions head-on, citing the conflation of power-plant waste, which is solid or ceramic, with the liquid waste associated with Cold War-era weapons production. She also pointed attendees to the NRC's public meeting process as a concrete way to track and weigh in on licensing decisions, and noted that nuclear consistently ranks among the highest-paying industries by workforce size. "New nuclear. It's real. It's happening. It's safe, reliable, and it's financeable," she said in the panel's closing lightning round.

Building the Pipeline: From Eighth Grade to the PhD

The evening's second panel, moderated by Chris Roybal of the Northern Utah Economic Alliance, turned entirely to workforce development, and it made the case that Weber County is already ahead of most of the state on this front.

Chad Burchell of Ogden-Weber Technical College noted that Weber County has the highest rate of technical-education participation among Weber, Davis, Salt Lake, and Utah counties, and said the college's programs, from electricians to non-destructive testing, can train workers for nuclear-adjacent skilled trades in under a year. Dr. Ted Goodell, who oversees the University of Utah's on-campus research reactor (a 100-kilowatt unit he described as "huggable" in size), explained how the facility gives students hands-on experience most nuclear engineering programs can't offer, including a recent full core rebuild that relied on undergraduate labor.

Weber State University's Dr. An Ho, director of the school's Energy Engineering program, which he said is the only ABET-accredited program of its kind in Utah, connected nuclear generation to the demand side of the energy equation, pointing to waste-heat recovery and desalination as underappreciated applications. His colleague, nuclear engineering professor Dr. Ian Wilkinson, predicted the biggest shift over the next decade won't be in fundamental nuclear physics but in the operational playbooks needed to run new reactor types, such as molten salt and small modular designs, safely at scale, alongside continued refinement of the safety-culture practices the industry built after the incident at Three Mile Island.

Asked what they'd tell a high schooler curious about the field, the panelists were consistent: a PhD isn't required. Wilkinson noted that an NRC reactor-operator license only requires a high school diploma, and Goodell encouraged students to weigh their own strengths and interests — hands-on trade work versus analytical engineering — before choosing a path, adding that soft skills, not just technical mastery, determine who succeeds in the industry's team-based culture.

A County-by-County Model

No project was proposed at the event, and organizers were careful to say none was on the table. But the symposium offered a clear look at how Utah is trying to build public understanding ahead of the deals — county by county, panel by panel — before asking any community to weigh in on a specific site. With OED's tour continuing across the state's other 28 counties and tribal nations, Weber County's turn appears to be one early stop in a much longer conversation.

Jon Gruen was in Salt Lake City on July 29, on a panel about Utah's defense tech economy hosted by The Salt Lake Tribune, JPMorganChase, and the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, giving no sign that anything was imminent. The next morning, his phone told a different story: the Department of Homeland Security had selected Fortem Technologies as a prime contractor on its five-year Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems (C-UAS) indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract — a vehicle with a starting ceiling north of $1 billion.

"We literally didn't know," Gruen, Fortem's CEO, said in an interview with TechBuzz News. "The next day is when we found out."

Fortem was the only small business selected among seven companies on Track 1 of the contract, DHS's hardware, software, and ancillary-services lane. The award means every DHS component — Customs and Border Protection, the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, the Federal Protective Service, and others — can now issue task orders directly to the Lindon-based company for its DroneHunter® net-capture interceptors, TrueView® radars, and SkyDome® command-and-control software. Fortem's technology has been validated in operational deployments in Ukraine, the Middle East, and East Asia.

It's the latest, and largest, in a string of federal wins for Fortem over roughly the past year and a half: selection under the Pentagon's Replicator-2 initiative, an $18 million, three-year U.S. Army contract, a role protecting DHS-designated venues during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and a $25 million investment from Lockheed Martin announced in April.

"We've been waiting for this one for over six months," Gruen shared with TechBuzz. "It's great! We finally got it."

Gruen offered a rough, self-described "bottoms-up" estimate of what the $1.011 billion DHS contract could mean for Fortem specifically. He described current demand for DroneHunter, drone hangar, and radar products "approaching $100 million" over the next few years. However, he was explicit that Fortem doesn't yet have strong visibility into the actual number and the $100 million figure is a base-case estimate.

Beating out billion-dollar rivals

Fortem's competition on Track 1 wasn't small. Two of the other six awardees are now backed by public companies with deep pockets in the counter-drone space: Axon, which acquired airspace-security firm Dedrone in 2024, and Motorola Solutions, which agreed in June to acquire counter-drone company D-Fend Solutions for $1.5 billion.

"We're the only true small business on there," Gruen said of the group. "Those are multibillion-dollar corporations, obviously."

He credits Fortem's selection to a combination of product differentiation and a longer relationship with DHS than the specific contract announcement suggests. The company's DroneHunter interceptor uses a net-based capture system rather than kinetic destruction, paired with what Gruen described as small, lightweight sensor hardware. But the deeper factor, he said, is trust built over years of working directly with the agency.

"We've been working with DHS for five, six years — coming out of COVID in an accelerated way," Gruen said, "everything from writing mitigation regulations for U.S. airspace to getting the systems approved for use, and that's everyone from DHS testing to the FAA to Congress."

That relationship has included what Gruen called "emergent needs deployments," or in other words, being asked to bring equipment to protect specific events on short notice, then repeating that successfully enough times to build a track record. Fortem's approach of working alongside other counter-drone vendors, rather than positioning itself as a sole-source alternative, also played a role, he said. Beyond Lockheed Martin and Microsoft, named as exclusive subcontractors in DHS's announcement, Fortem has relationships with more than a dozen other companies in the counter-drone space it can pull in as needed, explained Gruen.

What Lockheed and Microsoft actually bring

The DHS announcement named Lockheed Martin and Microsoft as Fortem's subcontractors on the award, but didn't detail their roles. Gruen filled in some of those details in the interview.

Lockheed Martin's own materials confirm Microsoft's Azure cloud and AI stack is "foundational to the Sanctum ecosystem," with Azure IoT Hub ingesting sensor data from distributed sites, Azure Synapse and Azure AI Foundry powering real-time threat detection and multi-sensor tracking, and Azure Monitor underlying the unified interface operators use to manage the system.

"When we look at how we develop our software, how we host our software, how we network sites together, that's really Microsoft's bailiwick," Gruen said, describing Microsoft's "modern data architecture" for hosting and networking Fortem's software as a key component in the project.

Lockheed Martin's role builds directly on the $25 million investment TechBuzz reported in April, which centered on integrating Fortem's systems with Lockheed's Sanctum C-UAS mission management software — an integration Lockheed itself has publicly described as providing "persistent, layered airspace defense" combining Fortem's TrueView radar and DroneHunter interceptors with Sanctum's command layer. Gruen confirmed DHS components will have access to Sanctum under the new contract.

Beyond that confirmed integration, Gruen went further in the interview, saying Sanctum also connects to a Lockheed laser system he said DHS has expressed interest in, and to Golden Dome America, the national missile-defense initiative Lockheed is involved in.

A quiet World Cup

Fortem's systems were also in place at DHS-designated World Cup venues this summer. It was a deployment that, by Gruen's account, ended up being uneventful in the best possible way.

"When we're not used, it's oftentimes a good thing," Gruen said. "The DroneHunter didn't have to be used. That meant a drone didn't get close enough to the stadium that a nefarious drone response was necessary."

Fortem's radars and command-and-control software tracked drone activity around World Cup venues throughout the tournament, while electronic-warfare and RF-based systems from Fortem's partners helped identify where operators were flying from, information passed to law enforcement. No threat rose to the level that Fortem's interceptors needed to be deployed, he said.

Inside an IDIQ: what the contract structure actually means

The DHS award is structured as an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract, a term that shows up in nearly every federal contracting announcement but isn't always explained. Gruen broke it down in practical terms.

The "indefinite quantity" piece means DHS components can now request and buy systems as needs arise, without renegotiating pricing or terms each time. They are already locked in through the contract vehicle. The "indefinite delivery" piece, despite the name, doesn't mean an open-ended timeline; the contract runs five years. What it does mean is that individual components can commit to recurring purchases across that window rather than a single one-time buy.

"Secret Service can say, 'I'm going to need 20 systems a year for the next five years,'" Gruen said. "It's not like it's a one-time buy; indefinite delivery really just means it's constant buying for those five years."

He added that while the contract's starting ceiling is $1.011 billion, ceilings on this type of vehicle are commonly raised over the life of the contract, while the five-year duration and list of awardees rarely change once set.

Secret Service: first in line

Asked which DHS components are likely to move first, Gruen pointed to the Secret Service, which he said has had a pending requirement for Fortem's systems for some time.

"They've had pent-up demand because they use us everywhere POTUS goes, basically," Gruen said, listing recent deployments including the presidential inauguration, the National Christmas Tree lighting, the Masters golf tournament, and a recent UFC event. Fortem typically has staff on-site to support Secret Service agents operating the systems, he said, even though agents run the equipment themselves.

Scaling up in Lindon

The new contract adds to a production ramp already underway at Fortem's Lindon headquarters. Gruen said the company is already outgrowing the building it moved into during last year's facility expansion. Its landlord is adding roughly 15,000 additional square feet, but that buildout will take about a year to complete.

In the meantime, Fortem is shifting some functions — shipping, receiving, and production of components like integration boxes and drone hangars, though not the radars or DroneHunter interceptors themselves — to off-site facilities to free up capacity at its main plant. Gruen said he's also weighing a move to second and third manufacturing shifts, running production closer to 24/7.

Flight testing tied to the expanded workload is taking place at Cedar Valley Airport, on the west side of Utah County.

Fortem has grown headcount roughly 60% so far this year, according to Gruen, a trend he expects to continue as the new contract ramps up.

About Fortem Technologies

Fortem Technologies is privately held and headquartered in Lindon. The company is the only firm authorized to deploy a drone-on-drone kinetic interceptor in U.S. airspace, and its technology has been validated in operational deployments in Ukraine, the Middle East, and East Asia. Fortem is backed by Lockheed Martin, DCVC, Toshiba, AE Industrial Partners, AIM13, Signia Venture Partners, and other investors.

Learn more at fortemtech.com.

Matthew Dickerson was standing on the curb at San Francisco International Airport when the idea clicked. He'd just booked an Uber in seconds. There was no quote, no waiting, and no guesswork. It struck him that booking a home service was still stuck in the dark ages. What was missing, he thought, was a platform offering vetted vendors, standardized pricing, and a centralized data set for managing a property. He assumed something like it already existed. It didn't.

That realization became Tdooz, Inc., a St. George, Utah-based startup Dickerson describes as the "operating system for your home." He originally pitched it as the "Uber for home services," but now prefers a different comparison: where Uber mainly books one type of ride, DoorDash lets users book many different things through a single interface, closer, he says, to how Tdooz works.

Tdooz is free on the App Store and Google Play. For customers, booking takes 20 to 30 seconds based on square footage or another fixed input, with no in-person quote and no four-hour service window. There are no customer-facing reviews. Every vendor is already vetted, so the app sends the job to the first pro who claims it, and Tdooz holds vendor payment for 15 days after completion so customers can flag anything left undone.

"We are not a handyman app," Dickerson said, explaining that open-ended jobs like drywall repair create friction because the price can't be fixed in advance. "Variability in handyman and construction jobs leads to an incongruency of expectation, and therefore frustration." Tdooz instead focuses on quantifiable services, such as fixed square footage, room counts, window quantity, and booked without a quote and completed to a clear standard: done or not done.

For vendors, Tdooz provides a free CRM and a dedicated affiliate app. Jobs are broadcast by text and email the moment they're booked, and Dickerson says the average time to claim one is about a minute. Repeat bookings give first right of refusal to whoever did the job before, and there's no lock-in for either side.

The idea traces back to 2021, when Dickerson, struggling to find a good landscaper and window cleaner despite hours of searching, became convinced there had to be a better way. Angie, Thumbtack, and TaskRabbit had pieces of the idea, he found, but none solved it the way he'd imagined. By 2023, after selling his previous company, he decided to test the concept himself before raising money. He got licensed in pest control and general home services and spent a year working "undercover boss" — personally cleaning windows, spraying bugs, changing air filters, and cleaning trash cans without customers knowing he owned the platform being built around them. That year shaped Tdooz's narrow focus on fixed-scope, quantifiable jobs rather than open-ended handyman work.

Entrepreneurship, Dickerson says, was always in his blood, even though he grew up in a family that expected him to become a doctor or a lawyer. While attending undergrad at Arizona State, he ran an online shoe business out of his apartment before deciding on a "real job," attending law school at UNLV and graduating in 2005.

After graduation, a friend suggested he apply for a clerkship with a newly appointed 9th Circuit federal judge, but UNLV's postgraduate department declined to submit his application, saying he wasn't of a "high enough caliber." Dickerson called the judge's chambers directly. The judge, who didn't yet have a secretary, picked up the phone himself and invited him in that morning. After two hours of conversation that never touched on grades, the judge set his application atop a stack of others from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. A few hours later, the judge called back: "I really hate interviewing people; do you want the job?"

Dickerson clerked for the Ninth Circuit for two years. He says the way he landed the opportunity, through persistence and a direct approach rather than credentials alone, awakened his entrepreneurial instincts. "So much of life is just showing up, asking and then acting," he said.

Immediately afterward, Dickerson started an import-export company in Las Vegas supplying construction materials for casino and hotel projects. The 2007–2008 recession gutted his biggest clients' ability to pay, and at 29, he lost the business and moved back home to Arizona, where a lunch with a friend redirected his path again.

A friend working in construction pointed out that while the recession had gutted the building trade, there was opportunity in shade sails, the tensile fabric structures homeowners were installing as they improved houses they were stuck in. With no experience in manufacturing or sewing, Dickerson bought a used sewing machine off Craigslist and taught himself to sew, working in his garage in the Arizona heat. That machine became Tenshon, a Mesa, Arizona-based shade sail and canopy manufacturer that grew over 15 years into a company serving clients on every continent except Antarctica, including Apple, Google, Disney, SC Johnson, and Royal Caribbean, among others. Dickerson stepped back from Tenshon in 2021 to prepare it for sale, which closed in 2023. Tdooz is his eighth company.

Why Tdooz Isn't Worried About AI, Yet

Dickerson has heard the question — won't AI agents just book home services directly? Not yet, he argues: even the most advanced AI models today function as a smarter search engine, not something that can transact with a mom-and-pop window-washing company paid over Venmo. "AI can't scrape what AI can't see," Dickerson said, noting that almost none of that transactional data currently lives anywhere an AI agent could reach it.

That's the gap Dickerson wants Tdooz to fill, positioning it not just as a booking tool but as the data layer underneath one. Even Angie and Thumbtack, he argues, don't capture what happens inside a home once a vendor is hired, since those transactions largely happen off-platform.

Tdooz is being built as a longitudinal data layer — data collected over a long period of time — that Dickerson envisions as a repository for home-level and transactional data, eventually giving property owners, or their AI agents, one source of truth to reference and manage all aspects of home ownership. The goal, he says, is a future where a homeowner could ask which ceiling fan is in a guest room and get a real answer, plus the option to reorder it or book a vendor.

The Scale of the Home Service Industry

Dickerson estimates the U.S. home service industry at roughly $650 billion annually, a figure in the range of independent industry trackers. ServiceTitan recently put the sector's total addressable market at about $657 billion, while other research firms' estimates range considerably higher depending on methodology and what's included.

Dickerson estimates the average U.S. household spends about $4,000 a year on recurring home services, a figure he says climbs higher for Gen X and younger generations, though third-party surveys from Angi and BLS show a different generational spending pattern, with Millennials and Gen X currently leading overall home-project spending. His initial goal is to capture just 2% of that $4,000-a-year average, which he calculates would generate $10 billion in annual revenue.

Tdooz is currently in beta in Washington County, Utah, home to St. George, where Dickerson lives. It is a market of roughly 200,000 people he chose deliberately: small enough to surface problems before they'd hit a major metro, and older than his target customer base.

Phoenix, Arizona, is his top pick for the next launch, citing the metro area's nearly six million residents. With enough capital to launch five metros at once, he'd add Greater Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, and Dallas.

The platform is also evolving into what Dickerson calls the "Carfax report for the home," with a freemium tier letting homeowners store house plans, paint colors, appliance serial numbers, and warranty information all in one place. He's also building weather API integrations to flag service needs proactively, an idea sparked by a windstorm that tore through St. George, after which Tdooz could offer a window-cleaning discount that week. To address AI-driven job displacement, he plans to host Tdooz job fairs helping people start their own service businesses.

Personal Investment and Raising Capital

Dickerson bootstrapped roughly $500,000 of his own capital, plus contributions from friends and family, to build the customer app, a free CRM for vendors, an admin CMS, and an affiliate app. Tdooz is a Delaware C-corp, and he's now raising the company's first formal capital: a $3 million round via a SAFE.

At 48, with eight companies founded and a self-funded product already in market, Dickerson says he's not asking anyone to bet on an unproven idea. He's looking to raise a small amount of money to prove the model in a major metro, from investors or a family office who see the project's scope and potential.

A Problem This Size Won't Be Solved Alone

Dickerson doesn't pretend this is a small lift. Building the operating system for an entire industry, one that runs on relationships, trust, and cash handed to a neighbor down the street, is not a weekend project. "This is going to take a village," he said. "One company, one founder, one round of funding doesn't get this done. It's going to take other operators, other founders, even competitors, all pulling toward the same thing. I'm fine with that."

He's equally direct about the timing, pointing to the wave of job displacement he expects as AI reshapes white-collar work over the next decade, paired with a home service industry he believes will need more skilled hands, not fewer, to keep functioning. "There's a tidal wave of people coming who are going to need somewhere to land," Dickerson said. "I want Tdooz to be part of where they land."

"I am a firm believer that humanity can solve any problem it sets its mind to," Dickerson said. Home services is a solvable problem, he argues, one already proven out at scale by companies like Uber and DoorDash. "We're trying to build a safety net for an entire section of the economy that's about to pivot. It's going to take a lot of us to catch them. I want Tdooz to be one of the ones there."

Learn more at Tdooz.com.

Craig Cossairt was laid off in late 2024, in the middle of a wave of tech layoffs that made it hard to find a new job. Instead, he started building one. Bloom Dating, Inc. — a Delaware C-Corp Cossairt incorporated in March 2026 — is now a pre-seed company with a working iOS and Android app, several couples testing it in TestFlight, and a thesis he's betting a company on: the dating app industry is structurally misaligned with what its users actually want.

Cossairt describes Bloom Dating as a business-model flip. Most dating apps earn subscription revenue while you stay single, so when the app works, it loses a customer. Bloom is designed around the whole relationship journey: when two people become a couple, the app's "Dating Mode" closes and "Relationship Mode" activates, which includes shared date planning, couple prompts, and relationship activities.

Cossairt described Bloom as "the dating app that grows with you," and said it contrasts with other dating apps because the model aligns itself with the success of its users.

TechBuzz readers have crossed paths with Cossairt's work twice in recent months without necessarily connecting the dots. He and Valarie Adams won the Utah Data Governance Bounty at June's HITLAB x UVU hackathon, and Bloom Dating was named one of ten Utah finalists in the Startup World Cup regional competition at StartFEST, held June 23–24 at Draper's Loveland Living Planet Aquarium.

"For all of the dating apps, they make money based off of how long you stay using their apps," Cossairt said. "So it goes counter to their stated purpose." He pointed to Hinge's own tagline — designed to be deleted — as evidence of the tension. "No business is going to actively try and churn their user base."

Cossairt's company, Bloom, is his answer. It's a dating app that converts into a relationship app the moment a couple decides to commit — a bridge he says doesn't exist anywhere else in the industry.

A Bounty Win at UVU

Cossairt isn't new to Utah's startup and hackathon circuit. He and Valarie Adams won the Utah Data Governance Bounty at the HITLAB x UVU World Cup Innovation Pitchday & Hackathon, held June 17–18, 2026 at UVU's Smith Engineering Building in Orem. The two-day event drew more than 200 people competing for a share of $96,000 in prizes tied to problems posed by the state, including Utah's Office of Data Privacy.

Cossairt said he followed up with Stefan Harlan, a UVU associate dean he met at the event, sending detailed feedback afterward. Christopher Bramwell, Director of the Utah Office of Data Privacy, has since asked Cossairt and Adams to continue contributing to state-related work, a possibility Cossairt said he's still working out logistically.

Why a Dating App

Cossairt traces the idea back further than his layoff. He said he's held it since going through a divorce in 2018, while separately following AI's development for years. Once he had time and a mature-enough set of AI tools, he says, the barrier that had always slowed him down in a corporate product role — waiting on engineering — was gone.

"AI's capable enough to be kind of the CTO or lead developer," he said. "Over the course of a couple months, I went from nothing to a full prototype."

Cossairt frames the opportunity partly in demographic terms: he cited a marriage rate he says has decreased 42% from its 1970 level, down from 10.6 per 1,000 people in 1970 to 6.1 in 2023, according to CDC/NCHS data. He also said the median marriage age for men is about seven years older than in the past, according to US Census data, and a U.S. fertility rate he said is around 1.6 births per woman, according to NCHS data.

His conclusion: dating apps, as an industry, bear some responsibility for those trends because their business model rewards prolonging the search rather than ending it.

What Bloom Does Differently

On the dating side, Bloom includes standard swipe-and-match mechanics, but Cossairt has made a point of not paywalling features he says most competitors gate — including seeing who has liked you and setting matching preferences.

"You can't find people that you're actually interested in unless you pay them money," he said. "I think in doing so, they're making the app worse at its stated purpose."

Bloom also includes an AI-assisted date planner that reads both users' profiles to suggest a tailored date, then pulls in Google location data to recommend a specific venue and time — which can be sent to a match to accept, decline, or negotiate. A private-notes feature lets users log small details from conversations, like a favorite color or a sibling's name, so they aren't forgotten.

An anti-ghosting system tracks response times and signals to other users, more subtly, that someone tends to respond slowly — with in-app nudges if a user's responsiveness drops.

Cossairt sums up the pitch in a tagline: "the dating app that grows with you." The core differentiator, according to Cossairt, is that a couple can choose to convert their match from dating mode into relationship mode entirely. Once that happens, users retain the private notes and date-planning tools, but gain a shared photo album, shared calendar, and shared to-do-style lists. The app also tracks relationship milestones — first dates, anniversaries — and can prompt reminders ahead of key dates.

Bloom's relationship mode also includes "journeys," long-term shared activities a couple can track together. Cossairt gave examples like cooking through every recipe in a cookbook or visiting all 50 states. The app also includes "insights," an AI-generated summary of a couple's attachment style, communication style, and love languages, drawn from their chat history, journeys, and calendar. A curated library of relationship prompts, which Cossairt says now numbers in the several hundreds, is designed to help couples keep learning about each other over time.

Business Model

Bloom runs on a freemium model: free with ads, or $15 a month for premium, discounted to roughly $10 a month if paid annually, with an additional three-month tier. In relationship mode, only one partner in a couple needs to maintain a premium subscription for both to have access. Cossairt said he plans to add affiliate revenue tied to date-planning features, such as restaurant reservations, and potential partnerships with local businesses.

Launch Plans

Bloom has no set public launch date, but the app is now built and in App Store submission prep, according to Cossairt. He's building a waitlist at bloom.date and wants to reach roughly 500 to 1,000 users in the Wasatch Front before launching, to ensure enough density for the dating side of the app to function. Several couples are already testing the relationship-mode features through TestFlight. Bloom will launch Utah-first along the Wasatch Front before expanding elsewhere.

He said Bloom's decision to launch first in Utah isn't only personal. "I think the Utah market aligns with what the stated purpose of Bloom is," he said, citing what he described as the country's youngest population, highest marriage rate, and a culture of intentional dating, alongside the Wasatch Front's geographic density and concentration of universities.

A Crowded, Consolidated Industry

Cossairt is entering a market dominated by two companies. Match Group owns Tinder, Hinge, and several other apps; Bumble owns its namesake app as well as Badoo, one of the larger international dating platforms.

Asked about building solo with AI rather than an engineering team, Cossairt referenced a prediction from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that a solo-founder, billion-dollar company could emerge sometime in 2026. Amodei made that prediction at Anthropic's Code with Claude developer conference, attaching odds of roughly 70 to 80 percent and naming proprietary trading, developer tools, and automated customer service as the categories he considered most likely — not dating apps specifically, and as of his most recent public comments, the prediction had not yet materialized. Cossairt cited the broader premise as motivation rather than a claim that Bloom fits Amodei's named categories.

"I think we've gotten to the point now where it's possible," Cossairt said of building a company this way. "I think I'm proving that it's possible."

He described the tradeoffs candidly: long hours, and a crash course in marketing, legal, and finance alongside the product work he's more comfortable with. "The hardest day is always the next one," he said. "Now building is the easy part and the go-to-market part is the hard part."

Beyond Bloom

Bloom is Cossairt's primary focus, but not his only project. He's also built:

• Cozy Fables — custom bedtime stories starring a user's own child, which Cossairt describes as a weekend build for his nieces and nephews.
• Hestia — an open-source meal planner with an AI nutrition coach and inventory-aware grocery lists, shared publicly on GitHub for anyone willing to supply their own API keys.
• Trellis — a free starter GitHub project template drawn from what he learned building Bloom, aimed at founders new to AI-assisted "vibe-coding."

Learn more at bloom.date.

In the dead of night, in hundreds of silent buildings across 44 states, the perfect swing is being mastered—yet there isn't a single employee in sight. What began as a law student's secret late-night practice sessions in a lonely warehouse has evolved into a high-tech empire where doors unlock only with a digital whisper from a smartphone. This is Back Nine Golf, a 24/7 sanctuary where the game "never sleeps" and elite technology meets a completely automated future. It is a global phenomenon currently unfolding in the shadows of the traditional sports world, opening new locations at a blistering pace.

Back Nine was founded in St. George, Utah, in 2020 by local attorney Wil Bangerter. A self-described "golf nut," Wil was a law student at Brigham Young University (BYU) when the first seed was planted. With little free time, Wil could be found using a golf simulator in the back of a warehouse late at night—the only time he had to practice. After graduating and moving to St. George, Wil wanted a simulator of his own, and he realized starting his own business would help him pay for it while giving him the 24/7 access he craved. A win-win.

Wil originally started Back Nine Golf with two business partners, Tanner Atkin and Rudy Odorizzi. At first, Wil balanced Back Nine Golf while practicing law full-time, but it wasn't long before he realized he didn't have time for both, so he and his original business partners decided to sell.

As luck would have it, Brady Carlsen lived in the same neighborhood as Wil, and when he heard Wil was selling, he wanted in. A seasoned entrepreneur with 20 years of sales experience under his belt, Brady saw the opportunity in Back Nine Golf, especially in franchising. About eight months after Back Nine was started, Brady came in with a business partner and bought the company, while Wil stayed on as CEO. After Brady's partner departed to launch his own venture, Kaden Creager joined the team as a board member/owner—proving instrumental in scaling the business and building out its franchising operations.

Technology-Focused Golf Experience

Brady describes Back Nine as a place for golfers to come improve their game and get their golf fix without spending four hours on the course. It’s a high-tech, 24/7 indoor golf-simulation company that complements traditional outdoor golf. 

The company has a strategic partnership with Full Swing Golf, the technology trusted by PGA pros, including Tiger Woods, who is a part-owner. Members book tee times around the clock, then the simulators provide instant, personalized data on club path, face angle, and ball spin. What's more, a full 18-hole round can be wrapped up in just 45 to 60 minutes versus four hours—a huge time savings for the time-constrained golf lover.

"It's not a replacement for outdoor golf, it's a supplement," Brady said. Back Nine has the tagline "Where golf never sleeps" because members can golf at any time, whether it's during lunch, at 4 a.m., or after dark. All they have to do is book a tee time and show up. Many members end up developing an "addiction" as they sharpen their skills, rain or shine.

An Automated Franchise Model

Back Nine is a software company in the golf space that offers an exciting investment opportunity for individuals looking for a simplified franchise with few moving parts. For many passionate golfers, this franchise model is a dream come true. "Most people come to us because they don't want to deal with employees, and you can operate a Back Nine franchise without employees if you are a hands-on operator," said Brady. 

With most franchise businesses, the majority of overhead is payroll—that's a big piece of what Back Nine offers. Franchisees don't need to manage anyone other than themselves, and they aren't dealing with food or beverage costs; their biggest overhead is rent. 

According to Brady, the company set up Back Nine so it can be run remotely, through cameras, software, and partnerships that make it possible. For the avid golfer looking to break free from Corporate America, or a second-act career, it's easy to see the appeal of a Back Nine franchise. 

Brady said owners typically spend only 20 to 30 hours a week on business-related tasks, and the self-service setup—members book online and receive a text message with a link to unlock the building with their phones. Meaning, there's no on-site staff to schedule or manage, which Back Nine leadership says is usually the most difficult and expensive part of running a business.

Rapid Expansion

Back Nine sold its first franchise in Cedar City, Utah, in 2023.

According to company figures, the business has since expanded to more than 200 operating locations across 44 states and has sold approximately 560 franchise territories. Carlsen said the company is currently opening between 15 and 20 new franchise locations each month.

The company's headquarters in St. George has also grown. Back Nine says it now employs 74 full-time staff members, up from five employees a year ago.

Beyond the United States, Back Nine has opened locations in Canada and has signed a master franchise agreement for New Zealand. Company leaders also said additional expansion is planned in the United Kingdom and Australia.

Future Growth

Back Nine says it is continuing to expand its technology offerings beyond simulator access.

According to Carlsen, the company is working on new swing-analysis capabilities that use artificial intelligence to provide golfers with additional performance feedback. The company is also testing golf club fitting services, exploring retail golf equipment sales, developing an apparel brand called "No Lost Balls," and building a mobile application that would allow members to access simulator performance data while playing on outdoor courses.

As indoor golf continues to grow in popularity, Back Nine executives believe their automated operating model positions the company for continued franchise expansion. Whether that growth continues at its current pace will depend on franchise demand, execution, and broader market conditions.

Learn more at thebackninegolf.com.

Every summer, harmful algal blooms threaten recreation, wildlife, and public health on Utah Lake. But at Utah Valley University (UVU), Associate Professor of Chemistry Dr. Kevin Shurtleff and a dedicated team of student researchers are fighting back with patented filtration technology and synthetic biology.

Their goal isn't just to clean the water—it's to transform an ecological hazard into a sustainable resource.

The Microscopic Marvel: Understanding Cyanobacteria

Utah Lake is home to a vast ecosystem of microorganisms, including cyanobacteria, commonly known as blue-green algae. Despite their popular label, these organisms are actually a unique form of bacteria capable of photosynthesis, producing their own food using sunlight.

Cyanobacteria are remarkably adaptable, found in environments ranging from desert soil and Antarctic ice to sloth fur. In normal quantities, they play a crucial role in the environment:

• Oxygen Producers: They act like a massive field of oxygen-producing grass for the valley, contributing heavily to the natural oxygen cycle.
• Global Residents: Cyanobacteria thrive in warm, still lakes across the globe; Utah Lake is far from unique in hosting them.

What Triggers a Bloom?

Blooms occur when cyanobacteria multiply rapidly at unchecked rates. While scientists cannot pinpoint a single isolated trigger, four environmental factors interact to create optimal bloom conditions:

Nutrients (Hypereutrophic Conditions): Runoff carrying lawn and farm fertilizers, combined with river inputs, loads Utah Lake with excess nitrogen and phosphorus, feeding rapid bacterial growth.

Warm Temperatures: With an average depth of just 10 feet, Utah Lake's shallow waters warm quickly in the summer sun. Cyanobacteria thrive in temperatures above 75°F, outcompeting native algae.

Light Intensity: Sunlight is essential for growth, requiring a "Goldilocks zone"—neither too much high-intensity light nor total darkness.

Turbidity & Wind: Suspended sediment blocks sunlight, while strong winds churn the shallow lake, creating wave action that can temporarily suppress bloom expansion.

When these conditions align, dense, floating green mats accumulate near shorelines. In high concentrations, cyanobacteria produce cyanotoxins—most commonly microcystin (a liver toxin), neurotoxins, and protein-synthesis blockers. While these toxins are generally not absorbed through the skin, ingestion poses severe health risks to humans, pets, and wildlife.

UVU's Innovation: The Multipress Filtration Barge

Rather than relying on chemical treatments that could disrupt the lake's delicate biological balance, Dr. Shurtleff took a mechanical approach following a severe outbreak nearly a decade ago.

"When we had the big algae bloom in 2016, I started researching different methods for separating algae from water," said Dr. Kevin Shurtleff. "It's difficult because the algae are microscopic. In 2017, I tried seven different filtration methods. This filter press was the one that worked best."

The resulting technology is a custom 30+ foot algae-filtration barge equipped with a specialized system called the Multipress.

Instead of roaming open waters, the barge targets high-density zones where wind packs the algae against the shoreline:

"We only collect what's floating on the surface. They tend to get trapped here because the wind blows in this direction. It collects along that shore, so that's where we harvest... We suck it in through that floating boom," explained Dr. Shurtleff.

Daily Operations on the Water

Operating the barge is a rigorous summer routine led directly by UVU students gaining real-world field experience. Running five hours a day, five days a week, a two-student crew manages navigation and equipment operation. Students from diverse scientific fields—including biotechnology, physics, and chemistry—run the daily operations from May through August.

From Nuisance to Nutrient: Biofuel & Fertilizer

What sets UVU's approach apart is what happens after the algae is extracted. The filtration process yields dense blocks of material known as filter cakes—a mixture of cellulose and extracted biomass.

Instead of sending this waste to a landfill, the team closes the ecological loop:

Shurtleff explained, "We open the filter press, discharge the algae and cellulose, then take it to UVU's compost pile. The algae naturally contain nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon, making it an excellent soil amendment."

Looking ahead, Dr. Shurtleff sees an even bigger opportunity: energy production. Since the algae is mixed with cellulose, it could eventually become a biomass fuel. "Actually, most petroleum came from algae, not dinosaurs. Massive algae blooms settled to the bottom over millions of years and became oil and natural gas. That's how nature stores carbon."

A Multi-Pronged Attack and The Path Forward

Alongside the barge project, UVU students are also using synthetic biology through the international iGEM program to engineer beneficial algae that reduce excess nutrients feeding harmful blooms—effectively starving harmful cyanobacteria before massive blooms can start.

This experiential learning initiative delivers real scientific impact, but expanding its scope requires community investment.

The work continues each summer, but it depends on ongoing financial support. Operating the filtration program costs approximately $40,000 annually, and each barge costs more than $260,000 to build. UVU is seeking donors and partners to help expand these efforts and protect more of Utah Lake.

Continued financial support allows UVU to deploy additional barges, refine its synthetic biology solutions, and protect broader stretches of Utah Lake's public beaches and marinas.

To learn more about UVU’s lake restoration technology, view student research updates, or contribute directly to the filtration program fund, visit the Utah Valley University College of Science project hub:

UVU Restoring Utah Lake Initiative

Today a strange-looking, all-electric aircraft appeared at South Valley Regional Airport, part of a bid by California startup Jump Aero to convince Utah's communities that the future of emergency response might not be a helicopter — or an ambulance — at all.

Jump Aero founder and CEO Carl Dietrich brought the company's JA1 Pulse aircraft to the West Jordan airport, giving guests an up-close look at a novel vehicle designed to get a single paramedic to the scene of a rural emergency faster than any existing option.

A New Category of Aircraft, Built for One Job

Pulse is not meant to replace an ambulance or a medevac helicopter. It's designed to do neither. That, Dietrich told TechBuzz, is the point.

The aircraft carries a single pilot-paramedic and a load of stabilization gear: a heart monitor or AED, a trauma kit, an oxygen tank, and a mechanical CPR device capable of sustaining chest compressions for an hour or more. It does not transport patients. Instead, the pilot lands as close as possible to an emergency, stabilizes the patient on scene, and either stays with them until a ground ambulance arrives or accompanies them during transport, leaving the aircraft behind to be retrieved later.

The mission profile is built around what Dietrich calls the "golden minutes" of emergency response. This is the critical several-minute window in which restoring oxygen to the brain or stopping severe bleeding can be the difference between a full recovery and permanent injury or death. Because Pulse is fully electric, it can be airborne within roughly a minute of a call, without the multi-minute engine warm-up required by a conventional helicopter.

"If you're sitting there on the ground for three minutes waiting for your oil to warm up, those are minutes ticking away," Dietrich stated. "This is really designed to get a paramedic or an EMT to the scene of a rural emergency — a time-critical situation — and get professional help there."

The Numbers

According to Dietrich and figures the company has published, Pulse has a dash speed of 250 knots and can reach anywhere within roughly a 30-mile radius in under eight minutes. This is the response window many ambulance services are contractually held to. At slower cruise speeds optimized purely for range, the aircraft could travel significantly farther, but Dietrich said that's not the mission Jump Aero is designing for.

"This is all optimized for rapid response missions," he said. "If you need to go far, use a helicopter, or use somebody else's longer-range vehicle. This vehicle is optimized to do things a helicopter can't."

The aircraft's eight electric motors and tilting-propeller control system were developed and tested using a custom propulsion test stand, and Jump Aero has flown quarter-scale subscale prototypes to validate its flight controls, according to Dietrich. Full-scale flying prototypes are expected within roughly a year, contingent on funding, with fielded aircraft potentially following within a couple of years after that.

Dietrich estimated a purchase price in the range of $1.8 million to $2 million, a figure less than the roughly $2.4 million cost of the least expensive helicopter air ambulances on the market today, and well below the roughly $5 million cost of top-selling models, according to his figures. He argued the real cost advantage shows up when the aircraft's cost is spread across a coverage area: because a single pilot can reach roughly 2,800 square miles within an eight-minute response window, he said, the per-capita cost in a rural county can undercut a traditional ambulance crew even though the aircraft itself costs more.

Jump Aero, founded in 2019 and headquartered in Petaluma, California, with composite aircraft parts fabricated at co-founder Jeff Myjak's manufacturing facility in Chelsea, Massachusetts, has been in development for about seven years. A plaque mounted on the aircraft displayed in West Jordan credits a development team of roughly 30 engineers and staff alongside a list of outside development partners, including the Air Force's Air Force's AFWERX Agility Prime program, emergency-services firm Falck A/S, and several aerospace suppliers: Electro.Aero, Airmaster Propellers, Hartzell Propeller, EMRAX, NX Technologies, and Ultra Motion, among others.

The company's first-responder niche has drawn interest in part because it avoids the heavier FAA certification burden faced by air-taxi eVTOL developers, since Pulse carries no passengers. It's classified instead as what Dietrich described as a "mosaic" light sport aircraft, which requires manufacturer self-certification against FAA standards rather than a full agency certification process.

Why Utah

Dietrich said the pitch to Utah centers on the state's rural geography, where an ambulance response can run 30 to 45 minutes in some areas. Jump Aero has signed non-binding memoranda of understanding with the Utah Department of Transportation and with counterparts in Oregon, as well as with several tribal nations and county governments, according to Dietrich — agreements he described as general statements of support rather than purchase commitments.

"Governments don't put down deposits," he said. "That's one of our challenges as a startup." He said the West Jordan display, along with a recent stop at EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, is part of an effort to build public awareness and support ahead of a larger capital raise Jump Aero says it needs — on the order of $50 million — to finish development.

The Design

Jump Aero describes Pulse as a biplane-configuration "standing tail-sitter." The aircraft takes off and lands vertically on its tail, then tips forward into horizontal flight. Batteries are housed in outer wing pods, kept separate from the pilot compartment for weight distribution and crash-load reasons, and the design includes a large canopy window that gives the pilot an unusually expansive view of the landing zone, full flight-envelope protection, a ballistic airframe parachute, and, according to the company, no single point of failure that would be catastrophic. Four widely spaced landing legs with integrated heavy shock-absorbing springs (not pictured on the prototype) are built to handle landings on unimproved ground, a rural road, a driveway, a backyard, including slopes of up to 10 degrees, since Pulse is not expected to ever land on an actual helipad.

According to Jump Aero's published specifications, the aircraft carries a 330-pound (150 kg) payload of one pilot plus equipment, can be quietly airborne in under 60 seconds, and can reach any point within 50 km (about 31 miles) in under eight minutes. It's rated to hover at up to 2,900 meters (about 9,500 feet) density altitude even with a failed propulsor, and can hold an all-azimuth hover in winds up to 20 knots. Eight independent, cross-linkable 11 kWh batteries feed the aircraft's motors, and it recharges through a single high-voltage DC fast-charging port. It operates under day or night visual flight rules, with operational limits around wind and visibility similar to other light aircraft, though Dietrich said its higher wing loading gives it somewhat more margin than a typical light aircraft of comparable size.

Learn more at Jumpaero.com.

Obra has launched two connected products aimed at opposite ends of the same broken hiring pipeline: Obra Jobs for candidates, and Obra Hire for the recruiters trying to find them.

The company's pitch starts with a diagnosis most hiring teams will recognize. Generative AI tools have made it trivially easy to mass-produce polished, tailored-looking job applications, and inbound volume has surged as a result. Recruiters, in turn, have leaned harder on AI-driven screening to keep up. The result, in co-founder Allen Liao's telling, is two automated systems working against each other, with neither the job seeker nor the hiring manager coming out ahead.

"It's AI feeding AI, and it's a non-winning game for anyone," Liao told TechBuzz.

Liao pointed to research from Gartner, which found in a July 2025 report that one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake by 2028.

Obra: An AI Hiring Platform Built for Both Sides of the Job Market

Obra approaches hiring from an unusual premise: instead of making employers wait for applicants and job seekers endlessly chase openings, its AI platform actively connects both sides of the hiring process.

The company offers two complementary products. Obra Jobs is designed for job seekers, while Obra Hire helps recruiters and hiring managers identify qualified candidates through AI-powered search.

Obra Jobs: Letting the Right Job Find You

Obra's origins were rooted in the job seeker's experience. Liao said the company's founding conversations with Co-Founder Paul Ahlstrom centered on a simple observation: the traditional hiring process often treats candidates poorly, leaving them to submit applications into a "black hole" with little or no feedback. Long before generative AI became mainstream, Obra set out to build a platform that worked in the opposite direction.

That philosophy became the foundation for Obra Jobs, whose guiding principle is that the right job shouldn't be something you chase—the right opportunity should find you.

The experience begins with a WorkWallet, a centralized career profile that users own. Rather than repeatedly rebuilding resumes and profiles across different job boards, candidates store their resume, work history, certifications, documents, and competencies in one place. The WorkWallet becomes the foundation for Obra's AI to understand a candidate's experience, skills, and career goals.

From there, the platform delivers personalized job recommendations drawn from more than 3 million job listings. Unlike traditional job boards, Obra also provides individualized feedback through a gap analysis that compares a candidate's qualifications against specific positions, identifies the most valuable skills for their target role, and suggests concrete ways to strengthen their candidacy.

The platform also includes an AI career coach that helps users map career progression. Liao offered the example of a junior accountant asking how to become a senior accountant, with the system recommending skills, experience, and learning opportunities needed to reach that goal. Obra says these recommendations are informed by data drawn from millions of job postings and candidate profiles, which the company uses to build its own proprietary competency and skills taxonomy.

Perhaps the platform's most appreciated feature is also its simplest: a built-in application tracker that shows users where every job application stands—much like a pizza delivery tracker—helping eliminate one of the biggest frustrations of modern job hunting: never knowing whether an application has disappeared into the hiring void.

Obra Hire: AI-Powered Recruiting Through Active Search

On the employer side, Obra Hire replaces the traditional "post-and-wait" recruiting model with AI-driven talent discovery.

Behind that plain-language search, the platform splits criteria into two categories: Must-Haves, which every returned candidate is required to meet, such as years of experience or specific schools attended, and Nice-to-Haves, which don't exclude candidates but push stronger matches higher in the ranking, such as industry background or named competencies.

Once a recruiter identifies someone worth contacting, they spend a platform credit to unlock that candidate's full contact details — phone number, email address, LinkedIn profile, and resume — and reach out directly rather than waiting for an application. Recruiters begin how they naturally think: by writing a plain-language prompt, pasting a job description, or even uploading the resume of someone who represents an ideal candidate. The platform then searches Obra's recruiting database of approximately 800 million professional profiles to identify potential matches.

Rather than relying on rigid keyword searches, recruiters refine results by separating requirements into Must-Haves, which determine who qualifies for consideration, and Nice-to-Haves, which influence ranking. For example, a software engineering search might require React and Node.js experience while treating large language model (LLM) experience as a preferred qualification.

The result is not simply a list of resumes, but an AI-ranked shortlist accompanied by explanations describing why each candidate appears to be a strong fit based on their experience, skills, and career history.

Recruiters can review candidate profiles before deciding whether to spend platform credits to unlock contact information such as email addresses, phone numbers, LinkedIn profiles, and resumes. This allows hiring teams to evaluate fit before paying to initiate outreach.

Obra Hire also supports collaborative recruiting through role-based projects, shared candidate shortlists, recruiter notes, and applicant tracking system (ATS) integrations available on higher-tier plans.

According to Liao, the platform is intentionally designed to demonstrate value before asking employers to subscribe. Recruiters who register using a company email address receive free monthly search credits, unlimited candidate searching, and the ability to evaluate potential matches before upgrading. Paid plans increase the number of contact credits while adding team collaboration features and ATS integrations for larger recruiting organizations. Liao said Obra Hire currently integrates with more than 85 ATS platforms.

Pricing

The Obra Hire pricing model is built to show value before asking teams to pay, according to Liao:

• Free — a monthly allotment of credits, unlimited search, and full visibility into candidate quality before upgrading.
• Personal ($109/month) — up to 500 contact credits per month, unlimited search, and additional premium features aimed at solo recruiters or hiring managers handling occasional searches.
• Scale ($169 per license/month) — 1,200 credits per license, team accounts that retain purchased candidate data as staff join or leave, and integration with existing applicant tracking systems.

The Trust Argument

Liao's central claim is that Obra's differentiation isn't the AI matching itself — most competitors have some version of that — but the underlying data and the trust it's built on.

He described three tiers of data behind Obra's candidate pool: first-party data from job seekers actively using the Obra platform, described as the highest quality; opt-in data shared through exclusive partnerships with nonprofit and educational institutions; and third-party open data providers, which Liao characterized as lower quality but table stakes for the market. Liao said the company prioritizes surfacing candidates from the first two tiers.

Asked how Obra verifies that candidates are real people rather than automated or fraudulent applicants, including bad-faith actors using fabricated identities to gain access to company systems or equipment, Liao said Obra leans on behavioral and engagement data rather than document-based verification alone. The platform tracks usage patterns over time, on the theory that sustained, consistent human engagement is difficult for automated systems to fake convincingly.

"The human decision stays within human, and AI should facilitate and make things better in its own way, but never replace a human decision when it comes to things that affect someone's life," Liao said.

“I’m a huge fan of what Obra is building—when we take better care of job seekers, we create a healthier, more effective hiring ecosystem for everyone. Employers quickly connect with higher-quality, better-matched talent.” - Heidi Barnett, President, iSolved Talent Acquisition

Learn more at obra.co.

Somewhere in the federal reporters, a judge once looked at two earlier opinions and declared, in effect, that the second had quietly overruled the first, without ever citing it by name. No footnote. No "cf." No signal a traditional citator could latch onto. For the lawyer relying on the earlier opinion, the ground had shifted, and nothing in Westlaw or LexisNexis would have told them so.

That kind of silent conflict, known in legal circles as a sub silentio reversal, is the gap Filevine says its newest product is built to close. The Salt Lake City-based legal technology company has released LOIS Legal Research, an AI-native citator and authority-validation tool built into its Legal Operating Intelligence System, or LOIS, console. In early internal testing, Filevine says the tool caught sub silentio conflicts nearly every time, cases where the two dominant legal research platforms largely came up empty.

"Citators tell you about the case. Lawyers cite the holding. LOIS Legal Research closes that gap," said Ryan Anderson, Filevine's co-founder and CEO. "AI is changing how lawyers research the law. LOIS Legal Research is built so that AI can be trusted to tell them whether the law still holds."

The product lets attorneys highlight a specific passage or holding in a case, rather than the opinion as a whole, and returns a structured memo detailing how later courts have treated that exact proposition, including a table of authorities and a treatment signal.

A duopoly forty years in the making

Westlaw and LexisNexis have gone largely unchallenged as the dominant legal research platforms for decades, an entrenchment John Rizner, Filevine's product manager and the architect of LOIS Legal Research's underlying approach, traces to two structural advantages. Shepard's Citations, the citation-tracking system whose earliest volumes date to the 1870s, relied on attorney editors manually tracing how each new opinion engaged with the cases it cited — a labor-intensive process that rewarded incumbents with decades of head start. Bloomberg Law attempted to break into the market in past years but has not displaced the two dominant players.

The second advantage was structural: the companies publishing court opinions were often the same companies performing the citation analysis, making the underlying data itself difficult for a newcomer to access at scale.

Rizner said two recent shifts changed the calculus. Advances in natural language processing and large language models made it possible to analyze opinions at a level of nuance previously reserved for human editors, while open-source legal databases — including the Free Law Project's CourtListener and Harvard Law School's Case Law Access Project — made centuries of U.S. opinion data broadly available for the first time.

Two nets in the water

Traditional citators work almost entirely off citation graphs: opinion A cites opinion B, which cites opinion C, and a researcher follows that chain outward. Michael Anderson, Filevine's chief product officer, compared that approach to a music-recommendation algorithm that suggests songs based on what listeners with similar habits have played — useful, but blind to connections outside the established pattern.

LOIS Legal Research runs a second, parallel pathway alongside the citation graph: a semantic-similarity search that surfaces later opinions engaging with the same legal proposition even when those opinions never cite the original case at all. Rizner described the combination as two fishing nets cast into the same water — one catching citational relationships, the other catching conceptual ones — with the results from both passed to a large language model for a final structured analysis.

"We might catch fish in that first net. We might catch fish in the second net," Rizner said. "It might be the case that fish caught in the second net aren't caught in the first net, and vice versa."

Anderson said the company has already found entire pockets of relevant case law invisible to existing citators simply because no explicit citation link exists in the underlying documents, despite clear substantive overlap between the opinions.

The scale involved in that process is considerable. Rizner said a single completed analysis for one user can involve tens of thousands of individual large language model calls, a function of sifting through opinion corpuses that run into the millions — CourtListener's alone numbers in the eight-to-nine-million range, he said — while maintaining confidence in the result.

Early numbers, with caveats

Filevine is in the middle of building a formal benchmark spanning all fifty states and federal jurisdictions, drawing methodological inspiration from prior academic research by legal scholars Susan Nevelow Mart (Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado Law School) and Paul Hellyer (Reference Librarian, William & Mary Law School), whose work documented meaningful divergence between Westlaw's and LexisNexis's results for identical citation queries. That full benchmark is expected to be released publicly later this summer.

In smaller internal studies conducted ahead of that release, Filevine said it identified cases in which a later court explicitly found that one earlier opinion had overruled another, then tested whether Westlaw and LexisNexis caught those relationships. Rizner said the two platforms did not always agree with each other on standard overruling relationships, and where they did align, Filevine's own tool recorded roughly 94% recall.

The more notable figure involves the subset of those relationships in which the overruling opinion never mentioned the earlier one at all — the sub silentio cases. On that subset, Rizner said Filevine's dual-pathway approach found the correct relationship nearly 99–100% of the time in early, small-scale testing, while the existing citators struggled to surface almost any of them.

Those figures come from internal, limited-scale testing rather than the broader forthcoming benchmark. Filevine will release a whitepaper later in 2026 on the company's findings.

Guarding against a hallucination problem of the industry's own making

The release of an AI-native legal research tool arrives at a moment when courts have increasingly sanctioned attorneys for citing fabricated or misstated case law generated by AI tools, the backdrop Filevine says shaped some of its product roadmap. Anderson said customer feedback since the tool's initial rollout has centered on ensuring users can distinguish a verified opinion, whose text can be opened and read directly within the platform, from one the system cannot fully verify.

Anderson said a significant feature release addressing that distinction directly is expected within days of the interview, adding features intended to flag or restrict a citation the system cannot verify against the underlying opinion text.

Filevine frames LOIS Legal Research as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, Westlaw and LexisNexis subscriptions many firms already maintain, a "trust layer" meant to catch relationships those established workflows may miss.

Who it's built for

Rizner and Anderson said the tool is aimed broadly at litigators, from solo practitioners without dedicated legal research budgets to the largest firms' most specialized appellate teams. Anderson said early users have reported the tool would have changed their approach to cases handled earlier this year had it been available at the time.

The tool can be used on a standalone basis or integrated with a firm's existing case data already stored in Filevine's platform, which the company said deepens the semantic relevance of results by giving the system additional case-specific context.

Anderson said Filevine intends to extend the same dual-pathway approach beyond legal opinions and into statutes and regulations, and pointed to transactional law as a further target — specifically, helping attorneys working on initial debt offerings identify prevailing market-clearing terms across comparable deals.

Rizner said one of the more unexpected early adoption patterns has been how quickly users gravitated toward conversational, plain-language queries rather than the Boolean search conventions long standard in legal research training.

"We're seeing within LOIS a lot of folks searching for the legal research they care about in a very conversational way," Rizner said, adding that the shift surprised him given how deeply Boolean search techniques are ingrained in traditional legal education.

What's next

Filevine has discussed LOIS Legal Research at industry trade shows since its limited release to early customers, though the company has not yet presented it at LEX Summit, its annual user conference.

LOIS arrived roughly a year after Filevine closed a combined $400 million in funding across two rounds, led first by Insight Partners and later by Accel and Halo Fund, a raise that pushed the company into Utah unicorn status, as TechBuzz previously reported, and gave it substantial resources to expand its legal AI product line.

This year's LEX Summit is scheduled for October 26-29, 2026 at the Marriott Marquis San Diego Marina. It will feature a series of major company and product announcements, executive keynotes, and customer panels that will share insight on how lawtech, and LOIS in particular, is changing their practices.

Firms interested in LOIS can request access or schedule a demonstration through Filevine's website.

Provo, Utah — July 27, 2026

During a preliminary hearing in a Utah courtroom earlier this month, a judge confronted a question that courts, businesses and consumers will increasingly face:

How do you know a digital file is what it claims to be?

The question emerged during proceedings involving Tyler Robinson, the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University. Prosecutors presented surveillance footage showing Robinson’s movements before and after the shooting, but defense attorneys challenged an edited compilation created from multiple campus surveillance cameras.

The video included enhancements designed to help viewers interpret the footage, including digital zooms and visual markers highlighting individuals and events. Defense attorneys argued that the compilation was not the original evidence and questioned whether the investigator presenting it could fully verify the extent of the modifications.

State District Judge Tony Graf sustained the objection and required prosecutors to provide the original, unaltered footage before proceeding. The issue was not whether the video was fake. It was whether the court could confidently understand what changes had been made to the original evidence.

For Mike Nelson, VP, Field CTO for DigiCert, the hearing illustrates a challenge extending far beyond one courtroom.

"The judge in the Tyler Robinson case brought up a really important question: How do I know what edits were made to the video that's being presented as evidence?" Nelson told Techbuzz in a recent interview. "How do I know the extent of the modifications that have been made?" Nelson said the judge's request was reasonable: provide the original video so the court could establish confidence in what it was seeing. "The judge said, 'Can you provide the original video so that I can see it? Because I feel like that is going to give me the confidence that I can trust the video.'"

The hearing was not a debate over artificial intelligence. The footage was not alleged to be AI-generated or fabricated. But it highlighted a problem that AI is accelerating: the growing difficulty of determining whether digital content is authentic, what changes have been made, and who made them.

The trust problem behind the AI revolution

Nelson argues that artificial intelligence is often blamed for a problem that existed long before generative AI became mainstream. "It's not an AI problem, in my opinion," Nelson said. "It's a trust problem. And trust problems can be solved."

Digital images, videos and documents have always been edited. News organizations edit interviews. Consumers enhance photographs. Businesses modify documents and presentations. The issue is not whether editing occurs. The issue is whether the history of those changes is transparent.

"The message isn't that you can't edit video," Nelson said. "The message has to be there needs to be a chain of trust of those edits." That chain should answer basic questions:

What edits were made?
Who made them?
When were they made?
Were additional changes made afterward?

"Videos and photos are always going to be edited," Nelson said. "But consumers and now judges, doctors, insurance providers—there are so many situations where people are going to want verification that images have authenticity."

A digital file needs a history

For much of human history, authenticity was tied to physical objects. A signed document carried meaning because a signature could be examined. Evidence could be stored and tracked through a chain of custody. A photograph represented a moment captured by a physical device.

Digital technology changed that relationship. A digital file can be copied perfectly. A modified image can look identical to an original. A video can be enhanced, cropped, filtered or altered without obvious signs.

Metadata such as timestamps, GPS information and camera settings provide some context, but they do not tell the complete story. Nelson points out that existing metadata systems often stop at the moment of capture. "If I go edit the photo on my iPhone, it still will say that image was captured at that time and in that location," he said. "And it does not track the changes." That missing piece—the record of what happened after capture—is where digital provenance becomes important.

Creating a chain of custody for digital content

One emerging solution is a standard called C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity), a framework designed to establish the origin and history of digital content.

The standard is being developed by a coalition of technology companies, camera manufacturers and software organizations to create a verifiable record of how digital content was created and modified.

Nelson compares it to a digital chain of custody. "When an image is captured, it is digitally signed with a digital certificate and a digital signature," he said. From there, modifications can be recorded. "If it is modified, it would be signed again and it would say it was modified by this person at this date, and these are the changes that were made."

In a courtroom scenario like the Utah hearing, a judge could potentially see not only the original footage but also a verified record of every modification. "The judge would be able to go in and say, 'The state of Utah made a modification on this date. They added a green circle here. They added a red circle here. They zoomed the video in,'" Nelson said. The technology does not prevent editing. It makes editing transparent.

Why now?

Digital provenance has existed as a concept for years. But adoption often follows a familiar pattern: organizations invest heavily only after the consequences become impossible to ignore.

Nelson said the industry is reaching that point. "We typically spend money where there's either significant pain or where there's significant opportunity," he said. "In this space, there really hasn't been a ton of pain yet."

That is changing.

Deepfake videos, synthetic voices and AI-generated images are creating uncertainty across politics, media, business and personal life. "We're now starting to hit a pain threshold where it matters," Nelson said. He points to situations ranging from elections and misinformation to personal harm caused by maliciously altered images. "If there's a photo of your child floating around, how do you know that it has integrity?" Nelson asked. "If there's a video of you doing something, how can you prove that it wasn't you doing it?"

Building trust into the next generation of technology

DigiCert's role in this emerging ecosystem builds on the company's existing work with digital certificates, cryptographic identity and authentication.

The company is working with device manufacturers to enable digital signatures at the point of capture, allowing images and videos to carry verifiable records of authenticity. But technology alone is not enough. Adoption requires manufacturers, software companies, governments, businesses and consumers to recognize the importance of digital provenance. Nelson believes the industry is entering a period where trust must become a deliberate feature of technology rather than an assumption. "We've deployed technology very rapidly and the trust model is not quite there yet," Nelson said. "We're playing catch-up."

The same pattern has appeared repeatedly throughout technology history. Innovation moves quickly. Safeguards often follow after problems emerge. The challenge now is building those safeguards before digital trust becomes a crisis. The Utah courtroom dispute offered a glimpse of that future. Judge Graf was not questioning whether digital evidence should be used. He was asking a more fundamental question:

Can we prove where it came from and what happened to it along the way?

In an increasingly digital world, that may become one of the most important questions we ask.

Holladay, Utah — July 24, 2026

Utah's tech ecosystem has spent two decades proving it can build valuable companies. On Thursday, a small group of the state's leading founders gathered at the Holladay Kiln, opened in February 2026, to ask a harder question: what is Silicon Slopes actually for, now that it has largely accomplished what it set out to do?

The Founder Circle lunch, co-convened by The Cynosure Group and Silicon Slopes, opened with remarks from Spencer Eccles and moved into a moderated conversation led by Clint Betts with Carine Clark, CEO of First Colony Mortgage (Pleasant Grove, Utah) and Executive Chair of Domo (American Fork, Utah); Brian Beutler, Founder and CEO of Alianza (Pleasant Grove, Utah); Ryan Westwood, Chairman and CEO of Fullcast (Lehi, Utah); and William I. Woodson, Managing Director of The Cynosure Group, whose new book, Silicon Slopes: The Making of Utah's Innovation Empire, edited by Clint Betts, traces the rise of Utah's innovation economy and was featured at the event and given to attendees.

A Family Story, and a Mantra

Spencer P. Eccles opened with the story of his great-great-grandfather David Eccles, who arrived in the United States from Scotland in 1863 at age 14 with his family of nine on the ship (and namesake of the family's company) Cynosure, part of a wave of immigrants aided by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Perpetual Emigration Fund. David Eccles went on to found or lead more than 50 businesses, often extending equity to employees by lending them money to buy stock, which they then paid down with dividends.

Eccles shared a passage from a biography of his ancestor, in which David Eccles warned a son never to work for money alone, but to work for the success of the business and let the money follow. It's a philosophy Eccles said still animates The Cynosure Group's approach today, one he summarized as "helping good people do great things." The firm, whose name comes from the ship that carried the Eccles family to America and means "north star," runs wealth advisory, institutional money management, real estate, sports, and growth equity and private equity funds.

Eccles recounted how he stepped in to lead Utah’s Governor’s Office of Economic Development in August 2009—just as Governor Gary Herbert succeeded Jon Huntsman. At that time the state was staring down the barrel of the Great Recession. While lawmakers were tempted to tap the brakes, Eccles saw an opportunity to keep their foot on the gas. Supported by a healthy rainy day fund, Utah was well-positioned to aggressively recruit companies out of California.

Eccles recruited private-sector talent like Chris Connolly to bolster the state's efforts, but pitched companies often voiced a fundamental missing piece: Utah didn't have a mature tech ecosystem. While low taxes, cheap power, and a business-friendly regulatory climate were compelling, out-of-state companies worried about talent liquidity—asking, "When my employees come here, where will they get their next job?"

At the time, early initiatives like the Utah Fund of Funds—pioneered by vSpring founder Paul Ahlstrom and Governor Mike Leavitt—were attempting to fill capital gaps, but the ecosystem was still finding its footing, prompting leaders to question how state-backed venture efforts should evolve. Around this time Eccles said he was asked to represent the governor at an early, pivotal investment round for a then-small relatively unknown Utah startup named Qualtrics. The audience laughed.

Start School

Lindsey Ivie, who leads partnerships for Silicon Slopes, gave an update on Start School, the nonprofit's free mentorship and resource program for founders. Since its February 2026 launch, Start School has drawn 450 applicant companies, organized into small "start squads" of four to six people, with weekly mentor sessions typically drawing 80 to 100 students. Sponsors, including Mountain America Credit Union, provide resources such as free checking accounts for participating founders.

Ivie also previewed two upcoming events: the Stack Summit in September, a new two-day conference focused on AI, data, and cybersecurity aimed at CIOs, CTOs, and CISOs, with day one at The Grid and day two at the Miller Campus; and the Slopes Cup golf tournament, pushed back to October 12, with sponsorship proceeds benefiting Start School.

The Historian's Question

Bill Woodson framed his remarks around the research behind his recently published book on Utah's innovation economy, Silicon Slopes: The Making of Utah's Innovation Empire, edited by Clint Betts. A three-year Utah resident who spent his career in Silicon Valley, Woodson said he was struck by how much Utah "punches above its weight" relative to other tech hubs, citing the state's high return on invested capital and unicorns-per-capita figures, including a ranking that places the University of Utah among the top producers of unicorn founders nationally.

Woodson traced that performance to Utah's settlement history, known for the self-reliance required of communities that dug their own canals and built their own schools and libraries after 1847. He argued these early efforts produced a culture oriented around purpose, community, and commitment.

He also posed the question that shaped the rest of the panel: Utah has proven skilled at building one-to-ten-billion-dollar companies and selling them. Should it instead try to build a hundred-billion-dollar company that stays?

Does Utah Need a Fortune 500 Company?

That question anchored the panel's central debate, and the group did not converge on an answer.

Beutler argued that healthy ecosystems, like healthy forests, need diversity rather than a handful of giants, and cautioned against measuring Utah's success purely against Silicon Valley's scale. He said Utah's relative youth as a tech hub — and a roughly 1-to-300 gap in cumulative enterprise value created compared with Silicon Valley — shouldn't obscure real opportunities to build more durable companies, provided founders find purpose beyond the financial outcome of a sale.

Westwood offered a more personal frame, describing the psychological toll of building a company over the 30- or 40-year timeline required to reach Fortune 500 revenue scale, and said most Utah entrepreneurs choose family stability over that level of sustained intensity — a tradeoff he characterized as reasonable rather than a failure of ambition.

Clark used Domo's recent transaction as a case study in navigating pressure on public SaaS companies. Domo announced on July 22 that it would sell substantially all of its operating assets to Progress Software Corporation (Bedford, Massachusetts) for $400 million in cash, while retaining more than $900 million in tax loss carryforwards in a separate, continuing public entity. Clark, who chairs Domo's board, described the structure as a clever way for founder and CEO Josh James to preserve value for shareholders while the company's platform continues under new ownership.

Clark described the story of her taking the helm of a mortgage company. When Corey Shelley, owner and chairman of First Colony Mortgage, asked her to take over as CEO in June 2024, her first instinct was a firm no. First Colony was a 42-year-old Pleasant Grove staple handling 70% of Utah’s mortgages, but its process was anchored in an archaic past. Clark had recently endured the agony of a marathon home-closing session, sitting before a mountain of physical paperwork, and wanted nothing to do with a paper-bound industry. "I want to buy a house on my phone," she told the audience. Shelley saw the same flaw as an opportunity, and challenged her to bring modern technology into a paper-heavy business that had never truly been disrupted.

Clark accepted the challenge, setting out to eliminate the industry’s friction without expanding the company's 500-person headcount. Driving that change wasn't easy: "Everybody wants disruption; they just don’t want you to change anything to do it," Clark observed, triggering knowing chuckles in the audience.

Yet by pushing past internal resistance and implementing AI-driven workflows, she transformed the company’s trajectory. First Colony leaped from generating roughly $1.3 billion a year to an astonishing $2 billion a month, making it the fastest-growing mortgage bank in the nation—even in a high-interest-rate market. Her story highlights a broader truth for modern entrepreneurs: the greatest growth isn't in flashy new tech gimmicks, but in having the stomach to overhaul the bloated, everyday legacy systems everyone else has accepted as unchangeable.

In another memorable moment, Clark predicted the biggest company to ever emerge from Utah won't be another conventional software platform—it will be Torus, the energy storage and management pioneer founded by serial entrepreneur Nate Walkingshaw. She mentioned Walkingshaw's track record that includes building Strava and Pluralsight, and said he is now transforming energy storage. By pairing commercial-grade energy storage—like the 80 kW battery bank Clark relies on for her own home—with an intelligent power management software stack, Torus is tapping into an unprecedented global demand across residential, commercial, and utility sectors. Clark said Walkingshaw’s vision for decentralized energy storage positions Torus well to capture what may be the largest wealth-generation cycle in history—and eventually become Utah’s next massive public market success.

Growth, and Who Gets Left Behind

The conversation shifted when Betts and others raised a tension underlying the entire discussion: national polling showing broad public skepticism of AI and data center growth, and a concern that most Utahns may not actually want the kind of rapid tech expansion the panel was discussing. Betts argued that any push toward "what's next" for Silicon Slopes needs to include non-tech Utahns in the conversation, rather than treating growth as self-evidently good.

Carine Clark pointed to more immediate civic concerns, arguing that the ecosystem's attention and resources should extend to addressing gaps in basic needs alongside its economic ambitions. Roughly one in five Utah children currently live in food-insecure households, according to Utah Food Bank, which reported in 2026 that 445,000 Utahns overall face food insecurity, an increase of nearly 100,000 people in a single year.

Connecting Silicon Slopes and Park City

As the event was about to wrap, an audience member asked how Silicon Slopes might better connect Utah County, Salt Lake City, and Park City's business communities. Westwood said he has casually compiled a list of 106 venture capitalists, private equity leaders, and CEOs who own second homes in Park City. He said this group has largely stayed disconnected from Silicon Slopes events because the properties function as retreats rather than working bases.

Silicon Slopes plans to run a Park City chapter event in August aimed at drawing that group in.

Learn more about it at siliconslopes.com.