Four years after Seth Lytle walked away from a career at IBM to build a smarter way to serve wine, VinoBarrel is entering what its founder calls a defining stretch. "VinoBarrel is at an inflection point," Lytle said. "We're at the point where we're beginning to scale."

Innovation often occurs at the boundaries where disciplines meet. Given this, how can practitioners from different disciplines best collaborate to share ideas, ask new questions, and explore new solutions? From the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) Craft Lab to the SimTigrate Design Center in the Technology Square Research Building (TSRB) and beyond, Tech Square has a variety of organizations that are innovating at and between the boundaries of science, art, and technology.

Build Day X Innovation Bootcamp hackathon was a true launchpad for Barsa Majidi. After participating in one of the winning teams, Majidi continued to build on the idea. The result for this Georgia teen? He founded SkinTight AI, an AI-powered skin cancer monitoring tool that helps people learn about the signs of skin cancer to watch for, raise awareness of how to protect their skin health, and connect with local dermatologists for an expert review.

In the Technology Square Research Building (TSRB) at the heart of Tech Square, the ATHENA Lab operates with a simple premise: research should not stop at theory. That mindset has defined the lab since 1998. Nearly three decades later, the lab has become a distinctive engine, producing world-leading hardware and addressing global grand challenges that move quickly from concepts to physical systems.

At 16, Sankalp Joshi is building an international sourcing and distribution company on a simple bet: the more boring the business, the better the opportunity. What started with a clothing brand in Manila now moves goods across the Philippines, India and the United States.

The work happens more than 200 miles from Tech Square, but its roots run straight through Atlanta. Along coastal Georgia's marshes and waterfronts, Georgia Tech researchers are helping communities read the water, plan for it and push back against it. They call the effort the Coastal Equity and Resilience Hub, or CEAR Hub.

For faith-based organizations, technology succeeds when it deepens connection rather than replacing it. Jamshed Patel makes the case for building capacity around the communities these tools are meant to serve.

Tech Square had the pleasure of closing out Atlanta Tech Week this year with Midtown Day. All of 5th Street and Tech Square became a buzzing hive of people from all over the Atlanta ecosystem joining in discussions, idea exchanges, panels, and more. Our team captured some of that action.

With over a decade of experience bringing together computer science and marketing technology, Zach Batastini, the Georgia founder of Derail Logic, knew firsthand about the challenges of navigating multiple marketing systems to manage websites, campaigns, and analytics. “Most small mom and pop businesses don’t have the tools or budget for larger marketing campaigns. I built MartechAI to support the growth of businesses that might not have large marketing budgets,” said Batastini.

The best salespeople carry a read on a deal that no CRM can see, a gut sense of whether it is alive or already lost long before the pipeline stage updates. Rishi Patel kept walking out of calls knowing exactly which deals were dead, then opening his CRM to find them all marked 70 percent likely to close by the reps. That gap gnawed at him for years before he did anything about it. Today, it is the founding premise of RevSage.

Small businesses make up 99.9% of US companies and drive 43.5% of the national GDP. Yet modern analytics tools have largely passed them by. Today 68% of Google searches end without a click, and more than half surface AI overviews. For a small business, that means the traffic numbers owners see may look nothing like the customers they actually reach. Few can afford to guess wrong. Teclaz answers the question every owner asks: who is my traffic?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has dominated headlines over the past few years. Advances in foundation models, increasingly powerful computing hardware, and rapid improvements in AI capabilities have fueled excitement about the future of technology. Yet while much of the conversation about technology focuses on computation, a quieter transformation is taking place in parallel: energy storage is becoming one of the defining technologies of the coming decade.

For years, Katie Begando bought the same running shoes without trying them on. But during her half marathon training, a redesigned model left her frustrated. After reading blogs and trying multiple pairs, she realized she just wanted to talk to someone like herself, who shares her needs and preferences. That frustration led to the creation of Bluubird.

Kavya Mohankumar and Pranavi Gogineni’s startup journey started on an evening bus ride as college students. As they talked, a bigger question emerged: What do you see yourself doing in the future? Today, they are co-founders and CEOs of Kintic, which provides training data for humanoid robots. But Kintic wasn’t what they originally set out to build. Their first stop? Three pivots.

While Esco Eats built its reputation on a single dessert, their World Famous Apple Cobbler PIE, the company’s CEO and co-founder, Anita Lamb, sees the pie as a means rather than an end. “It’s an experience and a tool to engage people and build community. The pie is a vehicle.”