- Rogue Technologies, founded by Nate Roberts and Peter Hartvigsen, won the Nucleus challenge and its $10,000 bounty; Granite Tait won the Torus challenge and its $5,000 bounty.
- Hackathon projects ranged from a tool for planning around Utah's electricity demand to efforts in drone-motor manufacturing and AI-designed, 3D-printed products.
- The event gave emerging builders a chance to test ideas, meet collaborators and show how Utah talent could contribute to hard tech innovation.
Most people think they need a factory to start a drone-motor business. Joe Blash is starting with a custom-built machine that can wind motor coils in his garage.
Blash’s project was presented at the Hard Tech Hackathon, a three-day event held in Salt Lake City during Utah Hard Tech Week. The sponsors of the hackathon set different challenges — Nucleus Institute and Startup State invited builders to propose hard tech ideas in fields such as energy, AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, defense and aerospace, while Torus focused on the overlap between energy and AI.
Builders had until Wednesday, Oct. 28, to turn an idea into a working prototype, proof of concept or simulation.
For teams, the deadline meant more than just finishing a pitch. Judges looked for evidence that an idea had moved beyond the concept stage and could become real.
“As a state, we’ve really leaned into hackathons because we used to do pitch competitions, and anybody can tell a story,” Tyler Jennings, director of entrepreneurship and ecosystem development at the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity, told the Deseret News. “But rubber meets the road when you build something, and hackathons show what can be built in a short period of time.”
The winning projects received funding to help them move forward, while participants kept ownership of what they built. For Blash, winning the Nucleus bounty would pay for the next steps toward his long-term goal of building drone motors in Utah.
“My plan is to build them here in the United States with 100% sourced U.S. materials,” Blash told the Deseret News. “Currently, to my knowledge, there is no one who does this in America, but there is very high demand.”
The hackathon is designed to give builders like Blash a chance to show what they can make, connect with potential supporters and get resources to take an early idea further.
Jennings said the world needs more opportunities for people to create rather than just consume, and believes Utah is at the forefront of that shift.
“Utah is scrappy, and our culture is one of scrappy builders,” Jennings said. “We want to continue to put a light on those people and give them opportunities so Utah gains a continually stronger culture of doers and builders.”
A problem worth solving
A drone motor has to work in the physical world: its coils must wind consistently, its parts must fit together and it has to spin a propeller. That kind of engineering — technology tied to hardware, manufacturing or other major infrastructure — is generally referred to as “hard tech.” Hard tech can also include software that helps solve problems in systems such as the power grid.
The Torus challenge focused on just that. “Rush Hour for Electrons” asked how software could help manage grid congestion when electricity demand spikes, and “Compute Follows the Sun” asked how computing jobs could be routed to places and times with cheaper, cleaner power. Solutions to these problems would make power-hungry technology more adaptable to the energy system it depends on.
Juan Lizarazo, who has won three hackathons in a row and was a keynote speaker at the event, built a tool addressing Torus’ power grid challenge called DETOUR. Lizarazo’s software plans when a business’s energy-storage system should charge up while power is cheap and when to use that power while it’s expensive, based on forecasts for the next day.
The Torus challenge described the grid congestion problem but let builders decide for themselves what kind of tools might help solve it. According to Lizarazo, that freedom pushed him to think creatively.
“When it’s more open, you can take whatever path, but that means you have to be more creative to solve an actual real-world problem,” Lizarazo told the Deseret News.
While Lizarazo worked on the Torus challenge solo, many builders competed in the hackathon as teams. Isaac Tai, Keilyn Tai and Matt Liu participated together in the open-ended Nucleus challenge.
Their team successfully built a website called “Printerest” that lets users describe a custom item, then uses AI to turn that description into a design, 3D-print it and deliver the finished product to the user’s doorstep.
The Printerest site is live and already creates custom plastic products, but the team hopes to eventually move to metal, resin and wood items with more impact. Keilyn Tai hopes that one day, customers will even be able to get on the website and order products like a customized knee brace after surgery.
“We want someone to be able to use plain English to ask AI to do something, and then it will get shipped to their house,” Tai told the Deseret News. “It’s built for them.”
DETOUR and Printerest are just two examples of the innovative and unique solutions that were presented at this week’s hackathon. Tai believes that Utah’s Hard Tech Week and growing tech environment can be the “blueprint” for other states.
“I think we can show the rest of the United States that you don’t necessarily have to be in these big cities to be able to solve big problems and have big ideas,” Tai said. “We’ve seen a lot of creative responses to real Utah problems ... if you have a problem and you need it solved, hold a hackathon.”
2 days to win it all
Two days is a tight deadline for turning an idea into something judges can see working. At Monday’s kickoff, participants received their challenges; by Wednesday evening, they had to present a prototype, proof of concept or simulation.
Nate Roberts and Peter Hartvigsen co-founded Rogue Technologies and worked on a project improving the design of a reactor that turns natural gas into jet fuel. The team’s success depended on laying a good groundwork and then “figuring it out” as they went.
“It was a really condensed time, so we had to be very strict in what we were working on and not let scope creep get in,” Hartvigsen told the Deseret News. “I think we did a good job of being disciplined.”
Engineers normally test reactor designs with computer simulations that take anywhere from several hours to several days. Roberts and Hartvigsen tackled this problem by training a custom AI model on simulation results that allows engineers to try many more designs in significantly less time.
The team ultimately created a product that ran 51 times faster than regular simulations, and if developed further, could be thousands of times faster on more complicated problems.
While their method was used to simulate turning natural gas into jet fuel, the technology could help hard tech companies in energy, chemicals, aerospace and defense sectors as well.
Rogue Technologies’ solution stood out to the judges, and the team was named winner of the Nucleus challenge and its $10,000 bounty on Thursday. The judges’ announcement caught Roberts and Hartvigsen, who were both “running on empty,” by surprise.
“I looked at Peter, and then I kind of looked around and I was like, ‘Oh, I think he just said that we won,’” Roberts told the Deseret News.
“I was surprised and excited and a little shocked,” Hartvigsen agreed. “I felt good about our presentation and what we accomplished, but there were definitely a lot of other good projects.”
Granite Tait, who graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in chemical engineering, won the Torus challenge and its bounty of $5,000 and had a similar feeling.
“I was not expecting it at all,” Tait told the Deseret News. “It was a total surprise. Total, total surprise.”
Tait built software that helps keep power grids from getting overloaded at peak times by moving the computing work to data centers in places where the power grid has room to spare at that moment.
Spreading the computing load evenly flattens the spikes, which could cut costs and reduce reliance on backup plans and would be used by cloud providers, data center operators and AI companies running big jobs that don’t have to happen in one specific place or at one specific time.
Tait’s system differed from competitors working on the same challenge by making decisions in real time rather than relying on forecasts built from historical data.
“I want to say I didn’t think of anything new or novel. It was just the standard approach I would have taken any day of the week,” Tait said. “Everyone thinks that everyone thinks like them, but everyone else’s first thought was something different. That’s what hackathons are all about.”
Beyond the prize
Winning gave Hartvigsen, Roberts, and Tait funding and momentum to keep building, but all three walked away feeling that the atmosphere at the hackathon is what impacted them the most.
“I could just sense a desire in the Utah tech scene culture that everyone wants to raise the bar, and everyone is super willing to help,” Roberts said. “It creates a high-density place for talent and just good people. I think it raises the bar for the entire state to get things done.”
Hartvigsen was impressed by the ingenuity and creativity each hackathon participant demonstrated, calling the talent pool at the event and throughout Utah “insane.”
“I really believe we can build world-changing technology here,” Hartvigsen said. “Stuff like this is important just to have a culture of innovation in Utah.”
Even as they competed, builders shared ideas, learned from one another and saw how different approaches could spark new thinking.
“There’s definitely a one plus one equals three kind of situation that goes on when people get together,” Tait said. “This is where innovation happens.”
Tait said this kind of exchange depends on making the event welcoming to people who may be new to building or have only early ideas. He sees hackathons as a place to share ideas, learn from others and start making something, regardless of previous experience.
“Anyone and everyone who has an idea can do stuff. There is no entry fee. There are no barriers here,” Tait said. “Come one, come all to come learn and grow and be inspired ... as corny as it sounds, I think it’s just the truest thing I can say.”
The Hard Tech Hackathon ended with the teams’ demos, but the bigger test comes next: whether projects built in a couple days can get the support and resources they need to become lasting solutions in Utah.