Startup Events in Salt Lake City

The Hard Tech Week Hackathon puts builders up against live challenges from Utah’s hard tech ecosystem. Each sponsor brings a real business problem, defines what winning looks like, and puts a cash bounty behind it. HOW IT WORKS Kickoff: Monday, October 26, 4:00 to 5:00 PM. Teams get their challenge briefs, meet the sponsor companies, and start building. Build: You have 48 hours, from the end of kickoff until judging. Judging: Wednesday, October 28, 5:00 to 6:00 PM. Each team presents its solution one-on-one to the sponsor judges. Register for judging Winners: Thursday, October 29. Finalists are notified after judging, and winners are announced on the main stage at Zero Gravity Summit. TEAMS Compete on your own or as a team. We recommend up to three people per team, and teams can have no more than five. BOUNTIES $10,000 from Nucleus $5,000 from Torus The challenge briefs will be released at kickoff. WHO SHOULD ATTEND Engineers, developers, designers, founders, and students who want to solve real problems for companies building at the frontier. Register now to secure your spot. Hosted by 47G, Utah Tech Week, and Nucleus. Venue provided by Aernata. Thank you to the sponsors that have supported 47G and Utah Tech Week in putting Hard Tech Week on: OTW Safety, Nucleus, Silicon Slopes, University of Utah, Torus, Traeger, Drip Swag, Gunderson Dettmer, Tanner, Snowflake, Kickstart, Aernata, US Health

We have liftoff! Join us for the official Hard Tech Week Opening Party for an evening of good food, good company, and Utah's hard tech community. Hosted by Traeger and sponsored by OTW Safety, this opening celebration kicks off a week of incredible events. Theme: Space Cowboy. Long before it was a hard tech hub, Utah was frontier territory, settled by people willing to bet on the unknown. That same willingness now drives the hard tech ecosystem, led by the trailblazers and innovators building what's next. Dress the part if you're up for it: hats, boots, spacesuits, and anything that leans into the theme are welcome and encouraged, but not required. Thank you to the sponsors that have supported 47G and Utah Tech Week in putting Hard Tech Week on: OTW Safety, Nucleus, Silicon Slopes, University of Utah, Torus, Traeger, Drip Swag, Gunderson Dettmer, Tanner, Snowflake, Kickstart, Aernata, US Health

Please arrive 10-15 minutes early. We’ll start the panel promptly at 3:00 PM. Panel description follows the location details below. Location: Foundry43 (formerly Industry SLC) Address: 650 S 500 W, Salt Lake City, UT 84101 The venue was previously known as Industry SLC and has recently been renamed Foundry43. Please use the full street address above for navigation, as some maps may still show the old venue name or an incorrect address. Join us for a panel discussion exploring what it takes to deploy robots into the real world, using Blue Collar Robotics and its work in grocery automation as a case study. Bringing together perspectives from robotics entrepreneurship, grocery retail operations, the investment community, and academia, the discussion will explore how to integrate autonomous robotic labor into existing industries whose growth is bottlenecked by labor shortages. Additionally, the panel will highlight Utah's growing hard-tech ecosystem, including the pivotal role of university partnerships and state-supported initiatives.

Join us in celebrating the women shaping Utah’s aerospace and defense ecosystem. RAM and 47G invite you to the Women in Aerospace Dinner, an evening honoring the trailblazers, innovators, and rising leaders driving the industry forward. Connect with peers from across the field and hear from our special guest speaker, MITRE Vice President Kerry Buckley! More details to come.

Join SLC Motion Meetup for an evening with designers and motion graphics artists, swapping ideas, sharing stories, and easing back into the groove of motion meetups. The Gantry team will share how personal projects have pushed us to experiment, grow as artists, and bring new ideas back into our client work, with a little behind-the-scenes look at the process along the way. You can also join the Discord to stay up to date - linktr.ee/gantry.tv Come hang out, talk shop, and celebrate making stuff for the fun of it.

Agent Substrate Day The community gathering for engineers building infrastructure for AI agents on Kubernetes - brought to you by Google, Solo.io and the Agent Substrate Community. The CFP is now closed. The full schedule will be announced soon! Is Sandbox enough? Is a pod the right deployment format for AI agents? Join us at Agent Substrate Day to interact with project maintainers and early adopters of Agent Substrate on Monday, November 9th in Salt Lake City. Hosted by the maintainers and core contributors behind Agent Substrate, this event is built by the community, for the community. Expect deep technical talks and direct access to Agent Substrate maintainers, contributors, and the broader community. What to expect: Single track — one room, one schedule, nothing to miss Talks from teams running agentic workloads on Kubernetes in production Time with Agent Substrate and kagent maintainers An update on project direction and roadmap Join us on Tuesday night after KubeCrawl + CloudNativeFest to keep the party going! Register Now: Agent Substrate Community Party - November 10, 2026

KubeAuto Day North America is co-located with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2026 in Salt Lake City - a free, practitioner-led day on making Kubernetes smarter through automation, platform engineering, and FinOps. Join us right before the main KubeCon days kick off: real production stories from teams running Kubernetes at scale, deep dives into automation and cost optimization, a look at what AI-era workloads mean for your platform — plus great food, drinks, and a room full of people who actually run this stuff. ⚠️ Please note: Your KubeCon badge does not include KubeAuto Day. This is a separate community event with limited capacity. Free to attend, but separate registration on this page is required (approval basis). 🎤 Speakers ⭐ Kelsey Hightower — Technologist (Keynote) 🎙 Vishakha Sadhwani — Sr. Solutions Architect (AI Inference), NVIDIA 🎙 Bret Fisher — Course Instructor, YouTuber, Podcaster 🎙 Justin Garrison — Field CTO, Sidero Labs 🎙 Pablo Fredrikson — Principal Engineer, Bitso 🎙 Caleb Geene — Director, AI & Platform Engineering, Nylas 🎙 Daniel Oh — Senior Principal Developer Advocate, IBM 🎙 Caleb Geene — Director, AI & Platform Engineering, Nylas 🎙 Zilvinas Urbonas — VP of Engineering, Kimchi ✨ Why attend Learn how platform teams cut Kubernetes costs with autoscaling and live migration Hear practitioners from NVIDIA, Nylas, Bitso, IBM, Sidero Labs and the CNCF community Get ahead on AI inference, AI agents, and sustainable platform engineering on K8s Network with the cloud-native community the day before KubeCon starts Food, drinks, and coffee included throughout the day. 🍕🍻 Sponsors: AWS, Cast AI, kimchi.dev, flox.dev, Teleport Check out the full agenda here.

In this hands-on platform engineering workshop during KubeCon Salt Lake City you will build a small managed Kubernetes platform on your laptop: a management cluster hosting tenant control planes, workers joining from outside, the network plumbing between them and how to manage your custom addons. We'll explore: How a hosted control plane works: apiserver, controller-manager, scheduler and etcd as Pods in a management cluster. The network paths that make or break it: node to apiserver and apiserver to kubelet (why kubectl logs fails until a tunnel is in place). How to distribute your custom addons for the tenant Clusters. Operating it: how to safely deploy upgrades without disrupting the Control Plane, how to manage Nodes with Cluster API and how to observe your infrastructure. Your hosts Bring your laptop. This is a hands-on session with limited seats, so register early to save your spot.

Agent Substrate Community Party Come unwind with the people building the future of agentic infrastructure on Kubernetes. The Agent Substrate Community Party is an informal evening for maintainers, contributors, and anyone in the ecosystem to connect. Whether you’re coming to Agent Substrate Day, in town for KubeCon North America, or you're just deep in the world of AI agents and agentic infra, come say hi. When & Where: 7PM Tuesday, November 10, 2026 · Sky SLC · during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA. Brought to you by Google & Solo.io.

AI adoption is spiking, yet only 8% of teams report transformative ROI. Join fellow practitioners at KubeCon Salt Lake City for a slide-free panel and networking reception unpacking the new State of AI in Platform Engineering, Vol. 2 report. We’ll explore how to evolve your platform, what separates the teams getting real value from agents, and how humans and agents can safely ship software together. What we'll cover: Why platform limitations, not model capability, are the primary bottleneck to scaling enterprise AI. Adapting your Internal Developer Platform into an Agentic Engineering Platform so humans and AI agents can build software safely together. Moving beyond basic developer assistance to the stage where AI usage translates to increased engineering throughput. Agenda: 6:00 - 6:30 pm: welcome and networking 6:30 - 7:30 pm: panel discussion, Q&A 7:30 - 9:00 pm: networking with refreshments and snacks Your hosts Come for candid community insights and Q&A; stay for drinks, food, and peer networking. If you're attending KubeCon in Salt Lake City, this meetup is the perfect chance to connect with fellow practitioners. Don't miss it!

This event is for KubeCon attendees and local Kubernetes engineers (you won't be able to solve the challenges unless you are). Full details on savephippy.com. The Ultimate Cloud Native Escape Room Party! Phippy has been kidnapped again. The only way to save her? Solve cloud native challenges. Enlist in Linky and Pam's Investigative Team To join the investigation and secure your place at the ultimate Cloud Native Escape Room Party. Your first mission is to solve the initial challenge and earn your codeword. This clue is required for every aspiring Cluster Detective. Follow the instructions in the email you'll receive after registering. Space is limited, so register every team member to secure your slots and help solve the mystery. The Abduction Mystery Last KubeCon, Phippy made it out of the canals of Amsterdam, shaken but alive. That should have been the end of it, but it wasn't. The Unknown Controller is back, and this time the trail leads out past the salt flats west of Salt Lake City. Linky the Lobster and Pam, Teleport's detective, traced the signal and found the lair, but they can't leave their posts at HQ. So it's up to you to finish what Linky and Pam started (read the full story). Co-hosted by Buoyant, Teleport, Merge Forward, and Dash0, this event challenges you, Linky and Pam's investigative team, to use real Kubernetes, Linkerd, and Teleport skills to solve the mystery. Big thank you to our infrastructure sponsor Civo!

The "unofficial" KubeCon afterparty is back for its third year! Salt Lake City knows how to après. After day two of KubeCon, walk over to Keys on Main and slip into après mode for a mountain-inspired night with the cloud-native community. The dueling pianos will take center stage for an all-request show, so get your song requests in early and come ready to sing along. Between songs, grab dinner, catch up with familiar faces, and make some new connections. We’ll have great food, craft beer, cocktails, non-alcoholic options, and an après-ski photo booth bringing mountain lodge energy to downtown Salt Lake City. No skis required. Just bring your best song requests and your après spirit. Hosted by AWS, Cloudsmith, ClickHouse, Echo, Endor Labs, Sentry, and Tailscale. By registering, you agree that your registration information may be shared with the event sponsors for event-related follow-up and marketing communications. You may unsubscribe at any time. Photography and video may take place during the event. By attending, you acknowledge that images or footage featuring you may be used in event-related marketing and promotional materials.

TECHSPO Salt Lake City Technology Expo (Internet ~ Mobile ~ AdTech ~ MarTech ~ SaaS) - October 28 - 29, 2027 - Salt Lake City, UT