As we approach the halfway mark of 2026, let's look back at everything that happened last year in Tech Square. The latest edition of the TSQ ATL annual review, The Book, is out now, capturing the innovation, breakthroughs, and momentum that defined Technology Square in 2025.

After a whirlwind 72 hours of ideating, testing, and building, over 300 students gathered in the Biltmore Innovation Center for the Play with Purpose Sustainability Hackathon showcase. Teams arrived ready to pitch their solutions to real-world sustainability challenges. And the stakes of the friendly competition? Four FIFA World Cup match tickets and a guaranteed interview for the Cox Cleantech Residency.

“I didn’t start Unicoils to build 'just another hair brand.” I started it because women with textured hair—especially students like me—were doing everything right and still not seeing growth,” said Dajheonna Perry, Founder of Unicoils. Dajheonna is a Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business MBA alum, CREATE-X founder, and licensed cosmetologist growing Unicoils, a natural hair care brand focused on retention and scalp health.

After leading Georgia Tech through one of the most successful periods in its history, President Ángel Cabrera has been selected to serve as the next president and CEO of the Aspen Institute.

‍Startup ecosystems have traditionally been measured by how much funding has been raised, the number of exits, or planned initial public offerings, but these only tell part of a larger story. Consider instead “Network Impact Accounting” and how it provides a framework for measuring the economic value created through trusted relationships inside innovation ecosystems.

Mehul Jasti, a computer science sophomore at Georgia Tech, isn’t leaving his academic goals up to luck. Instead, he developed JustLmk, an application that lets you be the first to know when availability or restrictions change so you can sign up for the courses you need to graduate on time.

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.