Presented by Nucleus, the 2026 Innovation Awards honor the innovative companies and individuals who are reshaping entire industries with technologies and approaches that turn long-accepted limitations into solved problems.
Nominees were evaluated by the following judging committee:
Jimmy Choi | CEO | Bridge
Kelvyn Cullimore | CEO | BioUtah
Dylan Doty | Director | Nucleus Grow
Reuben Holdaway | Principal | Convoi Ventures
Alex Lawrence | CEO & Co-Founder | The EV Group
Rachelle Morris | Managing Director | Stalwart Ventures
Alexis Nelson | Patent Attorney | Silicon Slopes IP
Kyrsten Woolstenhulme | Director of Innovation Management | University of Utah TLO
Medtech Devices & Diagnostics
1st: Foldax → TRIA Heart Valve
By replacing animal tissue with engineered biomaterials, Foldax’s TRIA™ is the world’s first polymeric surgical heart valve — designed to deliver the durability of mechanical valves without the lifelong anticoagulation they require.
2nd: Bloom Surgical → SWICS
Like a windshield wiper for surgical scopes, SWICS (Scope Wiper & Irrigation Cleaning System) lets surgeons clean a fogged or blood-occluded lens with the press of a button during minimally invasive surgery, eliminating the roughly six full scope removals per hour that disrupt workflow and lengthen procedures.
3rd: Lumea → BxBoard®
Prostate biopsy specimens often arrive at the lab coiled, folded or clumped from formalin jars. Lumea’s BxBoard replaces those jars with a flat-fixation collection device that preserves tissue orientation, reduces core fragmentation by up to 35% and cuts formalin usage by 92.5% per case.
Biotech & Therapeutics
1st: Seek Labs → Sequence Ablation Therapeutics (SAT)
Seek Labs is developing Sequence Ablation Therapeutics, a CRISPR-based approach that uses its proprietary AI engine, BioSeeker™, to identify and cut the genetic instructions that viruses rely on to replicate — targeting multiple weak points at once to make it harder for a virus to mutate around the treatment.
2nd: Intactis Bio → Biohybrid Processing Unit
To address the surging energy and infrastructure demands of AI, Intactis Bio is building the world’s first rack-mountable AI accelerator that integrates living 3D human neural tissue with conventional silicon. It is designed to reduce compute costs by 90% and energy consumption by 95% at exascale by enabling continuous learning during inference.
3rd: Rebel Medicine Inc. → Alevatrix™
Roughly 80% of surgical patients receive opioid prescriptions after surgery. Alevatrix™ is a non-opioid, long-acting local anesthetic designed to control pain through the first 96 hours post-surgery — requiring no cold storage and offering flexibility for both nerve blocks and direct site administration.
Honorable Mention: Vira Regen → OsteoVolt
Pioneering the field of electrogenetics, OsteoVolt is the first frontline noninvasive bioelectronic stimulator designed to accelerate bone fracture healing — with early preclinical data showing 50% faster recovery — by using patented electric stimulation waveforms to turn specific bone remodeling gene cascades on and off.
Digital Health, Wellness & Care Services
1st: Cove → Brain Reset Device
A non-invasive, neuroscience-based device, Cove’s Brain Reset Chair delivers gentle mechanical stimulation in a 10-minute session to support stress resilience, relaxation, sleep quality and focus — offering a drug-free wellness option for homes, workplaces and healthcare settings.
2nd: Nu Skin → Prysm iO™
Where most wearables track external metrics like steps and heart rate, Prysm iO uses patent-pending Spectral Rai™ technology to perform over 100,000 hyperspectral absorption measurements in a 15-second finger scan, giving users a real-time score of their body’s antioxidant status.
3rd: Skriber → AI Medical Scribe
Clinical documentation is one of healthcare’s most persistent administrative burdens, and Skriber tackles it by turning messy, interrupt-driven, patient-clinician conversations into structured, specialty-aware clinical note drafts that providers can review and move into the electronic health record.
Honorable Mention: Vital Touch Virtual Patient Services → Remote Care Operating System
Rather than offering a standalone technology product, Vital Touch provides a fully managed remote-care operating system that combines connected devices, clinical staffing, patient onboarding, billing operations, compliance oversight and performance dashboards — giving healthcare practices a single operating partner to sustain remote patient monitoring and chronic care management programs.
AI & Software Platforms
1st: SchoolAI
Now reaching more than one million classrooms across all 50 states, SchoolAI’s District Customization capability lets each school district input its own culture, priorities and Portrait of a Graduate so that every AI-powered teacher and student interaction on the platform reflects the community’s values rather than a one-size-fits-all model.
2nd: Lucidity Sciences → Lumawarp
Traditional AI demands ever-larger models with ever-more compute, but Lumawarp ML uses a novel geometric framework powered by partial differential equations to compress gigabyte-sized models down to kilobytes — delivering the same power and reliability at a fraction of the cost, time and energy.
3rd: Elnora AI Inc. → Elnora
Preclinical research teams spend weeks writing and iterating on lab protocols, and irreproducibility alone costs an estimated $28 billion a year in the U.S. Elnora turns a scientist’s goal into an executable, instrument-ready protocol in minutes by learning from every past experiment, including failures.
Honorable Mention: Guardrail Technologies → AI Traffic Light
As AI now writes a meaningful portion of code shipping into production, AI Traffic Light scans AI-generated code, verifies the identity of every human and entity behind its components, and returns a clear green, amber, or red signal before anything deploys — giving enterprises proof of control that existing security tools can’t provide.
Fintech, Insurtech & Proptech
1st: InsCipher → Excess & Surplus Lines Tax Compliance Suite
What was once a patchwork of spreadsheets, manual processes and specialized personnel is now automated end-to-end. InsCipher’s platform handles the entire surplus lines compliance lifecycle — from tax calculation and filing to payment processing and deadline management — processing more than $28 billion in premium in 2025 alone.
2nd: Altitude CRM → Altitude & Pathfinder
Financial advisors typically juggle six or seven disconnected tools, so Altitude embeds four decades of proven best practices into one platform where Pathfinder, its AI assistant, answers plain-language questions, preps meetings, captures follow-ups and surfaces hidden opportunities across an advisor’s book of business.
3rd: Fund Launch → Fund Launch AI
Launching an investment fund used to take six months and cost $100,000 or more. Fund Launch AI condenses that process into weeks by letting managers describe a fund in plain English while AI agents build and synchronize its strategy, economics, pitch materials, structure and draft legal documents.
Honorable Mention: Trucordia Insurance Services LLC → Trucordia Go
Through its AI-enabled virtual assistant Trudy, Trucordia Go helps consumers review existing coverage, spot gaps, uncover savings and receive custom recommendations in easy-to-understand language. Then, it seamlessly connects them with licensed insurance professionals for guidance.
Consumer Products & Lifestyle
1st: FrostByte Defense Technologies → FrostByte
Up to 30% of frostbite cases result in amputation, and current heated gloves lack the battery life for long missions. So, FrostByte is developing a lightweight glove liner that monitors tissue temperature and biometrics to autonomously trigger a gated emergency heating system, extending battery life by up to 50x the current standard.
2nd: Kiba → Outdoor Mapping App with Off-Grid Communication
The moment a group splits up on a trail, ski run or ridge without cell service, everyone goes blind to each other. Kiba solves that with a mesh-networked radio and mapping app that shares live locations, messages and waypoints instantly between group members with no towers, no satellites and no per-message fees.
3rd: Huckleberry Hiking → Cascade Tandem Hiker
Designed by a father for his daughter, the Cascade Tandem Hiker is a single-wheeled carrier that lets people with limited mobility access singletrack, switchbacks, sand and snow with the help of an able-bodied companion — making it the most affordable wheeled adaptive trail device on the market, now in use by nearly 2,000 families across 29 countries.
Honorable Mention: Troomi Wireless → Troomi Smart Browser
Parents can approve or block individual websites, YouTube channels and specific videos through the Troomi Smart Browser, giving children a safer way to explore the internet while eliminating exposure to social media, ads, comments, autoplay and unwanted recommendations.
Defense, Security & Aerospace Technology
1st: Fortem Technologies → SkyDome
SkyDome is an integrated, end-to-end drone defense system that combines TrueView radars, AI-powered command-and-control and DroneHunter interceptors that autonomously capture hostile drones mid-flight using patented net technology. It has already been deployed to defend the 2021 Olympics, the FIFA World Cup and sites across multiple continents.
2nd: Spotter Global → GAX500-3D
Unauthorized drone incursions are grounding firefighting aircraft, disrupting airports and breaching military installations — and the GAX500-3D is the world’s first Compact Holographic 3D radar, delivering 100% volumetric coverage with 18 Hz full-volume scanning and 50-target tracking in a low-power, rapidly deployable form factor.
3rd: Hypercraft → Razorback Unmanned Ground Vehicle
Where most existing military UGVs are slow, short-range tracked vehicles, Razorback is a diesel hybrid-electric unmanned ground vehicle that travels up to 60 mph, carries 2,400 lbs, offers 280 miles of loaded range and runs on Hypercraft’s software-defined Carbon architecture for rapid integration of new sensors, autonomy and third-party capabilities.
Honorable Mention: XRDNA → Mission Fabric™
Defense and aerospace teams rely on mission systems built by different vendors with incompatible identifiers and permissions. Mission Fabric creates a common operational layer that connects people, sensors, AI and digital twins through shared identity, context and authority — enabling faster coordination and accountable AI governance without replacing existing systems.
Cleantech, Energy, Agtech & Sustainability
1st: Torus → Torus Station
Electricity demand is climbing faster than new power lines and plants can be built. So, the Utah-built Torus Station — combining flywheel storage, battery storage, control software and built-in security in one package — charges when local lines have capacity and gives power back during peak hours, freeing up room on the grid we’ve already paid for.
2nd: InnoSys Inc. → WHERE
Industrial waste heat has long been treated as an unavoidable loss, but InnoSys’s WHERE™ (Waste Heat Energy Recovery to Electricity) is a solid-state technology that captures that thermal energy and converts it directly into usable electricity — improving efficiency, reducing operating costs and lowering emissions.
3rd: Utah FORGE
Enhanced geothermal systems have been a concept for over 50 years, but as the world’s only full-scale field laboratory dedicated to EGS, Utah FORGE has moved the idea from concept to reality by de-risking the tools and advancing the technologies needed to generate 24/7, low-emission electricity from the earth’s heat virtually anywhere.
Honorable Mention: Utah State University → Dehydration through Atmospheric Water Harvesting under Vacuum
Food dehydration is one of the most energy-intensive processes in the food industry, and this innovation adapts atmospheric water harvesting technology to dehydrate food and biological materials nonthermally and largely electricity-free — using calcium chloride solutions under vacuum to remove up to 94% of water from fruits in less than 24 hours.
Industrial Manufacturing, Materials & Construction Tech
1st: i5 Technologies Inc. → Reconfigurable Antenna Array Technology
Legacy phased array antennas are prohibitively power-hungry and expensive for next-generation wireless systems. To contrast, i5’s reconfigurable antenna array technology enables a single antenna to dynamically change its radiation pattern shape, polarization, and frequency band, delivering 6-10 dB higher array gain while reducing the size, cost, and power consumption needed for 6G infrastructure.
2nd: HydroBlok → HB One Backer CI
For decades, the building industry answered tougher energy codes by adding layers to exterior walls. HB One Backer CI does the opposite, consolidating sheathing, water barrier, continuous insulation, lath and scratch coat into a single panel up to 75% lighter than traditional cement board. In 2026, it passed testing for direct-to-stud installation across roughly 80% of exterior wall surfaces.
3rd: Blue Collar Robotics → In-Store Grocery Picking Robot
Online grocery picking inside stores remains costly and labor-intensive. In response, Blue Collar Robotics deploys a robot that batch-picks multiple orders in a single pass through existing supermarket aisles, using AI-assisted human teleoperation and a robotics-as-a-service model priced like labor to make e-grocery fulfillment profitable without building specialized facilities.
Honorable Mention: Hyde Park West Telecommunications → HOO-nah
Remote mining, energy, military and aerospace operations often lack reliable connectivity, and the HOO-nah system provides preconfigured, multi-patented solutions that dynamically switch between cellular providers, satellite networks and fiber to deliver secure, real-time communication, video teleconferencing and IoT/sensor integration in the most challenging terrains.
