On May 21, Georgia Tech's CREATE-X program filled the Georgian Ballroom of the Biltmore Innovation Center with energy as 26 newly launched startups showed off what they do. The room also began to fill with the investors, founders, and students eager to meet them.

Nestled at the heart of Tech Square beneath the SQ5 building in Midtown, the TSQ Clubhouse has been woven into the neighborhood's innovation story since its early days as The Garage. What began as a coworking hub and startup home has evolved into one of the district's most versatile event and activation spaces, hosting everything from Atlanta Tech Week programming and corporate events to student showcases and research panels. For anyone looking for a flexible venue embedded inside one of the Southeast's most active innovation ecosystems, the TSQ Clubhouse is a natural fit.

Veronica Apecena never expected to launch a retail business. And now, Apecena is the owner of Joyful Jarra, a refillery providing non-toxic, low-waste, and a variety of locally sourced home and body products to Atlantans. More than just a place to bring your collection of favorite jars (jarra in Spanish) and refill them with sustainable alternatives for yourself and your home, Joyful Jarra is also dedicated to closing the large employment gap experienced by people with developmental disability and neurodivergent labels by creating jobs and training opportunities.

Last week, the American Marketing Association's Atlanta chapter filled the College Football Hall of Fame for Celebrating the Global Games, an evening that doubled as a reckoning for what Atlanta has built as a sports city and where it's headed.

Georgia Tech researchers and community advocates with Propel ATL are attaching temperature and air quality sensors to their backpacks and bikes to get on-the-ground data that will show where the city is hottest. The goal of the Neutralizing Onerous Heat Effects on Active Transportation (NO-HEAT) Initiative, led by Dr. Rounaq Basu, is to mitigate the negative impact of extreme heat by providing city planners with actionable data to make design changes to make cities cooler where they are needed most, and by empowering people to find the coolest walking and biking routes as they move around the city.

Most people haven't realized smartphones can be part of clinical workflow. For Sixuan Wu, a PhD student in computer science and researcher at TSRB, that assumption is exactly the problem. It is also the starting point for a project reimagining how blood analysis can be done.

Last week, members of the Tech Square community gathered for a secret meeting of the minds. A new event series called Brains in the Bar convened to spark conversation about artificial intelligence. The question that both inspired the gathering and earned attendees their invitation: "Where would you choose a human over perfectly accurate AI?"

Buildings, lights, streets, and sidewalks. The built environment is the designed spaces that we live in, work from, and travel through. Seung Jae Lieu’s research at Georgia Tech focuses on the built environment, and specifically, where it is possible to walk from one place to another, known as walkability. Lieu developed the “Harmony of Amenities” metric to explore why people choose to walk or drive, even when an area has nearby amenities.

Every image you see online has already been shaped before it reaches you. It is filtered, ranked, and delivered through systems that decide what deserves attention. Hyunha Lim’s work starts there, inside that flow of images, and then pulls them out of circulation.

In a typical smart home, intelligence comes at a cost. Cameras track movement. Sensors require batteries. Devices connect through fragmented systems that demand constant maintenance. TSRB researcher and PhD candidate Yibo Fu is exploring a different model. One where everyday objects quietly signal their use without electronics, cameras, or friction added to daily life.

In the middle of Tech Square at TSRB, a smartphone sits snug inside what looks like a slightly oversized case. A small cuvette of urine slides into place. The flashlight kicks on. A few seconds later, the screen displays something that a dipstick (or even a trained eye) simply cannot produce: a precise, quantitative number.

A simple observation on Georgia Tech’s campus led Joseph Lee to rethink how people enter sales. AGORA turns everyday communication into a scalable, low-barrier training ground for building one of the workforce’s most valuable skills.

Ever wonder what light and shade sounds like? Or what would it be like to dance with artificial intelligence? Celebrating a semester of creativity, exploration, and interdisciplinary research, graduate students and professors from Georgia Tech’s Digital Media Program shared their latest creative innovations at the annual Digital Media Demo Day on Thursday, April 23, 2026, at the Tech Square Research Building.

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In Tech Square, startups and Fortune 500 companies work within blocks of each other. But proximity alone does not guarantee collaboration. That gap is where Engage operates.

Studio B is growing.

Following its initial launch, Phase II of the coworking and office space located on the 11th floor of the Biltmore Innovation Center is now complete. The expansion responds to early demand from founders, operators, and small teams looking for a flexible entry point into the Tech Square ecosystem.