After watching wildfire smoke close their only road home in 2017, brothers Michael and Jeff Baxter left aerospace careers at Boeing and SpaceX to build Dragonfly, an unmanned aircraft designed to make aerial firefighting safer, cheaper and possible at night.

At a Beehive Energy Alliance gathering in Salt Lake City, Utah officials and investors described a state well-positioned to attract energy capital — but warned that workforce shortages, not funding or ideas, may be the real constraint on delivery.

Francisco Partners will acquire Utah-based Weave Communications in a $650 million all-cash buyout at $7.40 per share. The deal expands Francisco Partners' vertical healthcare SaaS portfolio while offering public shareholders a 34% premium.

LVT's 2026 Public Safety & Privacy Benchmark, backed by a Harris Poll of 2,089 U.S. adults, finds Americans trust visible AI cameras more than armed guards, support behavior-detection technology, but draw a firm bipartisan line against tracking at civic events.

Implementing Ideas marked 20 years in business with a ribbon-cutting open house at its new Orem facility, featuring remarks from CEO David Zoppetti, 47G's Gerritt Vander Linden, and keynote speaker Johnny Ferry of the Utah Manufacturers Association.

The University of Utah and XPRIZE are exploring incentive competitions as a model for tackling Utah challenges, including Great Salt Lake restoration, minerals, climate innovation, healthspan, and research commercialization, connecting researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, industry and government.

UVU's Kahlert Institute for Applied AI trained faculty to build custom AI tools this summer. Across six profiles, a pattern emerges: instructors engineering restraint into AI, and shifting from teaching AI use to teaching AI management.

Utah’s $5 million AI Moonshot program will fund research addressing challenges in mental health, water, healthcare and autonomous systems, with university-sponsored proposals due October 15.