Tech Exploration Lab
Where real-world problems meet emerging tech and become real innovation and ventures.

Our Work

Our Work

Applied innovation and ventures: from real problems to market.

The Tech Exploration Lab is where real-world problems meet emerging technology, and where the work of solving them leads somewhere. For industry partners, that means applied innovation that drives growth with frontier technology. For researchers and faculty, it means help assessing the commercial potential of promising research and finding a path to market. For students, it means the resources, networks and experience to build early-stage ventures.

This fall at the Lab

  • Badger BuildFest 2026: about 200 students built 48 projects in 24 hours across three tracks and six real-world challenges, with more than 30 mentors, judges and sponsors from Google, Xorbix, Strato VC, Kinetic, the Wisconsin School of Business, the UW School of Veterinary Medicine and DoIT Academic Technology.
  • The Art of the Break and the first Exploration Brief: 27 students stress-tested their own AI agents, judged by a Staff Software Engineer from Meta. The findings became Break It Before Your Customers Do, the Lab’s first brief for business leaders on how AI agents really fail.
  • The Four-Week Sprint: a Problem Drop of real challenges from DoIT, Xorbix, the School of Veterinary Medicine and the Lab’s Digital Health Challenge, with teams testing their ideas with real users each week.
  • The Venture Pathway: nearly 40 teams across Explore/Discover, Venture Build and Founder Lab.
  • Applied Industry Innovation: about 15 industry challenges, company projects and frontier tech experiments with partners including American Design, Crystal Farms, Holos and Xorbix.

How the work happens

The Lab brings ideas to life through recurring programs, sprints and events, each designed to connect students with real problems, industry partners, alumni and emerging technology.

Recurring programs and events

  • Four-Week Sprint (each semester): starts with a Problem Drop of real challenges from industry and campus partners. Students bring their own idea or pick one of the problems, test it with real users each week and share what they learned. Many teams keep building toward Demo Night.
  • Build Nights (weekly): every Thursday, co-hosted with Transcend. A guest speaker, often a founder, investor or alum, opens the evening, followed by open project time with mentors.
  • Badger BuildFest (each fall): the Lab’s venture-building hackathon challenges students to go beyond building and think like founders: defining markets, testing assumptions and laying out a credible path forward. Teams compete across tracks and sponsor challenges, with mentors and judges from across the innovation ecosystem.
  • Founder Lab SF (January and June): Founder Lab teams travel to San Francisco for investor feedback sessions, meetings with venture firms and angel networks including Sand Hill Angels, and a reception with UW alumni founders and investors in the Bay Area.
  • Demo Night (each semester): the Lab’s student showcase, where student ventures, industry projects and research-to-market work come together, with judges visiting every station and cash prizes.

Industry and partner events

  • Databricks Real-World Workflows Challenge (Fall 2026): at BuildFest, Xorbix challenged teams to build AI agents on Databricks that read, decide, act and improve, with a hands-on workshop and Xorbix engineers on site both days.
  • The Art of the Break (Fall 2026): an agentic stress test in which teams tried to break their own AI agents and documented what failed, feeding the Lab’s first Exploration Brief.
  • Xorbix Technologies Hackathon (March 2026): student teams tackled a real-world AI and data problem, generating fresh ideas and early prototypes in just a few hours.
  • Douglas D. Bradley Digital Health Challenge (annual): a challenge reimagining technology for health, bringing together students, clinicians and innovators at the intersection of AI and health care. The 2026–27 challenge kicked off September 30 and leads to a spring competition.
  • Google AI Startup School (Summer 2025): in partnership with Google, nearly 60 UW–Madison students took part in live online training on agentic tools, in-Lab workshops and a closing hackathon judged by Google representatives.

What we’re building

A snapshot of the work in motion: cross-disciplinary teams tackling meaningful problems across health, security, productivity, sustainability and more, with industry partners, alumni and campus researchers. These examples come from BuildFest and the Lab’s Explore/Discover, Venture Build, Founder Lab, Applied Industry Innovation and Research Translation programs.

Health & Wellness

Student teams have consistently taken on some of healthcare’s most pressing challenges, from clinical training and caregiver burnout to neurological monitoring, women’s health and the cost of care.

  • Hera (BuildFest 2026 winner) — Supports the pregnancy care journey, starting with matching women to the right specialist by insurance, cost and location.
  • HappyBill (BuildFest 2026 winner) — Helps people negotiate medical bills using public data on negotiated health care prices.
  • Phase (BuildFest 2026 winner) — Tracks symptoms like fatigue, pelvic pain and mood over time and turns them into insights women can bring to their doctor.
  • Lipedia (BuildFest 2026 winner) — A daily skin lab: a quick face scan scores skin health and an AI agent writes a personalized daily plan.
  • PersonaXR — A browser-based medical training platform using AI and immersive technology to simulate clinical exams, helping medical students improve readiness and pass rates.
  • The Invisible Patient — An AI companion for caregivers of Alzheimer’s and dementia patients that detects early signs of burnout through natural, empathetic conversation.
  • NeuroTrack — A mobile system that monitors subtle neurological changes in MS patients using daily tests and passive data, enabling earlier and more informed care.
  • Ally AI — An emotionally intelligent AI companion that adapts to users over time to reduce loneliness and support emotional well-being.
  • Hatti for Alzheimer’s — An AI-powered care companion that tracks routines, monitors wandering risks and coordinates communication across home care, assisted living and memory care.
  • Prescription Scanning App — An AI tool that helps ESL patients and older adults understand medications in plain language, with reminders and caregiver updates.
  • MadGlow — An AI-powered skincare assistant that delivers personalized routines, progress tracking and evidence-based product recommendations.
  • GuideMyPlate — A nutrition app that fights obesity through actionable steps rather than overwhelming data, helping users build sustainable habits.
  • MedCheck — An AI tool that brings transparency to medication perceptions, helping patients make more informed decisions.

Environment, Safety & Public Infrastructure

Some of the Lab’s most consequential work addresses problems with broad societal stakes, from wildfire prediction to accessibility and real-time awareness in public settings.

  • GoGo (BuildFest 2026 winner) — Indoor navigation built for people with disabilities, guiding them once they’re inside a building, where map apps stop helping.
  • EmberAI — An autonomous aerial sensing and prediction platform for wildfire management that streams real-time perimeter data and near-term spread forecasts to agencies, utilities, landowners and insurers.
  • EverOS — A real-time AI orchestration platform for venue operators and security teams that integrates video, audio and sensor data to detect and respond to incidents before they escalate, currently exploring pilots in defense and with police departments.
  • Ares — Gives air traffic controllers AI-driven predictive awareness to identify conflicts and prevent incidents before they occur.

AI Infrastructure, Security & Developer Tools

Some of the Lab’s most technically ambitious work is at the infrastructure layer: the reliability, testing and fairness tools that make AI systems trustworthy at scale.

  • Assay (BuildFest 2026 winner) — An AI agent manager that sits between agents and the people who review their work, with in-depth testing and a human-in-the-loop feedback system.
  • My Magic UW (Art of the Break winner) — A course assistant for UW–Madison students that cites course materials for every sentence, and a team that kept testing until its answers held up.
  • Cortexa — An AI memory observability layer that reduces hallucinations and improves reliability in agentic workflows by tracking how agents store and use information.
  • Fairlytics — Real-time bias monitoring for machine learning models, surfacing fairness issues as predictions are made.
  • Gantry — An agent orchestration tool within the IDE, helping developers structure and manage AI workflows.
  • ProTecht — An AI compliance automation platform that helps federal cloud providers find gaps in security documentation, reducing audit costs and speeding FedRAMP authorization.
  • TruChain — Uses blockchain to verify the authenticity of video from elected officials, creating immutable provenance and stopping deepfakes at the source.

Productivity, Learning & Business Tools

From company knowledge to the classroom, teams have built practical tools that reduce friction in everyday work and learning, many with clear paths to commercial use.

  • Jellyfish (BuildFest 2026 winner) — Answers questions from a company’s knowledge base with links to sources, and flags pages that go stale.
  • ChalkPal (BuildFest 2026 winner) — A voice-driven whiteboard: circle a spot, say “plot y equals sine of x,” and it draws it.
  • Ludify (BuildFest 2026 winner) — A 3D open-world learning game that turns a teacher’s own lessons into something students explore.
  • InventoryAutomate — A mobile-first AR and AI inventory system that cuts counting time by about 70% and improves accuracy for bars, restaurants and small operators.
  • MottoNote — An AI memory and recall layer that captures decision-making context across meetings, documents and conversations, turning scattered inputs into structured insights.
  • Lyntra — An AI academic planner that breaks assignments into step-by-step sessions and schedules them around students’ real commitments.
  • ScribeAI — Turns raw notes and prompts into structured, high-quality written content for professionals and teams.
  • BeaverAI — A Chrome extension that summarizes emails, identifies key tasks and manages recurring themes to reduce inbox overload.
  • Cosma — An on-device AI file manager that organizes and retrieves files by context rather than filename, keeping data private while reducing clutter.
  • Clear Cause — An AI tool that analyzes legal documents, highlights risk areas and explains contract language in plain terms for individuals and small businesses.
  • AI Trend Radar — A trend discovery platform that spots early signals across social platforms and delivers predictive trend models and recommendations for creators and agencies.
  • Carmonic — Makes drivers proactive about vehicle maintenance by surfacing early warnings and actionable insights.
  • BadgerFlix — Turns long lectures into short, personalized episodes to improve comprehension and engagement.

Social, Community & Experience

Several teams have taken on how people connect, discover and engage in the real world, using emerging technology to drive genuine human interaction.

  • BluWorld — A social platform that helps users discover local events and rewards real-world participation through games and local business partnerships.
  • StyleSwap — Lets college students share closets digitally to borrow clothes, reduce waste and save money.
  • UniBud — An AI-powered student guide that personalizes milestones, surfaces relevant events and resources, and gives advisors real-time engagement insights.
  • ClearMove — Protects renters by turning leases, checklists and move-in photos into organized, shareable evidence for disputes.
  • TimeMyGate — A pre-flight planner that tells travelers exactly when to leave for the airport based on real-time conditions.
  • SeaPay — A blockchain payment platform that lets hotels and lodging providers accept cryptocurrency, reducing fees and expanding options for global travelers.
  • Grow Together — An app that finds when friends are free, suggests places to go and grows a virtual garden when they spend real time together.

Blockchain & Decentralized Technology

A growing cluster of Lab projects explores how blockchain and decentralized infrastructure can bring trust, transparency and new models of exchange to everyday problems.

  • CredentialHub — A decentralized professional verification platform on Solana, making credentials tamper-proof and instantly verifiable.
  • Phanta — AI-powered, blockchain-native portfolio management with real-time on-chain insights and group investment tools.
  • UniMarket — A blockchain-powered marketplace for verified students to trade textbooks, gear and services with trust and minimal fees.
  • BadgerTutor — A peer tutoring platform that uses blockchain to build trust and transparency between tutors and students.
  • BadgerBadges — A blockchain-based achievement system that turns real UW–Madison experiences into verifiable digital badges.
  • Cool Router — A decentralized oracle network that brings real-time AI directly to Solana smart contracts.

Campus & Research Translation

A growing area of Lab work bridges university research and real-world application, helping faculty and researchers assess the commercial potential of promising work and find a path to market.

  • School of Veterinary Medicine Translation Tool — A real-time AI translation tool improving communication between English-speaking veterinarians and Spanish-speaking dairy farm workers, developed with the UW School of Veterinary Medicine.
  • Cost-of-Care Conversation (Brundage Lab, School of Veterinary Medicine) — A BuildFest 2026 challenge on helping pet owners make informed decisions when cost is a barrier. Winners included Isthmus Care, a shared exam-room screen that sorts a vet estimate into essential, soon and nice-to-have, fitted to the owner’s budget, and Vigilant Health Compass, which lets owners compare real Wisconsin clinic prices before a visit.
  • ARHat+ — Built on UW–Madison research, a smartphone LiDAR and AR tool that quickly identifies home safety risks and aging-in-place modifications, simplifying documentation for care professionals and connecting with health records and insurance systems.
  • RAAS (Robotics-as-a-Service) — A platform that gives university robotics researchers a structured path from lab to market, reducing technical fragmentation and speeding up development.
  • AI Research Assistant — An AI model designed to streamline workflows for academic researchers across synthesis, analysis and discovery.
  • Chatbot for Entrepreneurs — A conversational AI tool helping small business owners and entrepreneurs make more confident planning decisions.

Industry Challenges & Projects

Beyond student-initiated projects, the Lab runs structured challenges and projects with industry partners, including American Design, Crystal Farms, Holos and Xorbix. Companies get fresh thinking on frontier problems, and students get experience on real business challenges. Recent challenge areas include:

  • Health & Wellness: delivering personalized experiences with AI
  • Manufacturing: using AI to optimize trade programs and retailer partnerships
  • Retail: engaging shoppers overwhelmed by choice, online and in store
  • AgTech: improving producer productivity in horticulture with AI
  • Real Estate: using AR and AI to improve trust and safety in short-term rentals
  • Consumer Goods: AI-powered customer experiences that build engagement and loyalty
  • Education & Training: using VR and AI to lower cost and widen access to enterprise training
  • Enterprise AI workflows: agents on Databricks that process forms, invoices and company knowledge

Interested in bringing a challenge to the Lab, exploring a research translation opportunity or supporting student innovation? Contact us →

About the Tech Exploration Lab

The Lab is led by the Wisconsin School of Business in collaboration with the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. We connect students, industry partners, researchers and alumni around real problems, applied AI and emerging technology.