UCSC’s presence in the world of entrepreneurship expands day by day. Most recently they have been propelled forward by two students, onto the world stage.

Enterprise AI apps rest on a hidden stack of specialized layers — foundation models, orchestration frameworks, vector databases, voice infrastructure, and security tools. Mastering this ecosystem isn't optional; it's the engineering competency that separates teams who win contracts from those who don't.

Join Santa Cruz Works on April 14 at 8 a.m. for breakfast at Spanner’s Santa Cruz headquarters. Tour the studio, see prototypes, hear technical stories, and connect with innovators. Free for Members and Partners, $10 general admission.

Cabrillo’s April 16 job fair brings local talent to 50+ employers, internships, free resume help, and new careers.

Looking to expand your team? Make sure you aren’t making these hiring mistakes.

Santa Cruz Launchpad is an annual event that combines a student startup competition with a community career fair, all under one roof! This year’s event takes place at the Cocoanut Grove at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk on Wednesday, May 13, 2026.

Every cohort, there’s a wave of applications that comes in right before the deadline. It makes sense. Founders are busy, timing is never perfect, and applying to an accelerator rarely feels urgent compared to building the company itself.

But when you look closely at the founders who get the most out of programs like Santa Cruz Accelerates, a pattern shows up. They tend to engage early, well before any deadline pressure kicks in, and that timing changes the experience in ways that are easy to underestimate.

For a long time, founders would come out of accelerators with generous packages from Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform, and that support meaningfully extended their runway. Infrastructure was expensive, and anything that reduced that burden gave you more time to figure things out.

That logic still holds, but the center of gravity has shifted.

More and more early-stage companies are building products where the primary cost is not infrastructure in the traditional sense. It is model usage. Every meaningful interaction with your product might call an API, generate tokens, or run inference on a system you do not control. The more successful your product becomes, the more that cost scales with usage.

Over the past year, I’ve spent a lot of time talking with founders who are seeing something that doesn’t quite line up with their expectations. Their product is still good. In many cases it is better than it was a year ago. Customers still rely on it. And yet, deals are slower, expansions are harder, and in some cases seats are quietly disappearing.

It’s easy to interpret that as a signal that something is breaking in SaaS. That the model is weakening or that demand is softening.

What I’m seeing points to something much simpler and much more structural. The budget hasn’t grown, but the priority has changed.

SFIG is launching UCSC’s first student-run investment fund, expanding finance access through a nonprofit endowment, industry partnerships, certifications, research tools, and real-world investing experience.

A look at how JR Parrish reduced ongoing trespassing and property damage at 550 Water St by switching to Bandit Systems’ remote monitoring. The shift highlights what changed, how incidents declined over time, and what it meant for safety, daily operations, and costs at the property.

Subsense is a modular brain interface built on two classes of functional nanoparticles and a wearable wireless device. Together, they form a bidirectional bridge between neural activity and computation.

UC Santa Cruz is broadening access to hands-on career experience for humanities students after receiving a $2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation in support of its Employing Humanities initiative.

Cora is closing the "Friction Gap" by using AI to translate human signals - like hesitations and navigational loops - into immediate growth from existing site traffic. Cora will be presenting at Santa Cruz Works New Tech on April 1st.

Since 2012, Teen Kitchen Project has taught teens to cook, then put those skills to work feeding seriously ill neighbors who can’t feed themselves. Their work keeps the Santa Cruz community healthy and fulfilled.

The 2026 LIFT Summit will bring together leaders across industry, government, education, and community organizations to help move advanced air mobility from vision to real-world deployment. Taking place March 31–April 1 in Monterey, the event will focus on the partnerships, infrastructure, workforce, and policy needed to shape the future of low-altitude aviation.

Cora helps businesses identify the hidden friction points on their websites that cause visitors to drop off before converting. By pairing behavior data with production-ready code and impact tracking, the company aims to turn lost opportunities into measurable growth.

Hi, I'm an organoid! With the help of Autoculture by Open Culture Science, I can help reshape the lab's landscape and create a living preview of the human body.

Join Santa Cruz Works New Tech on April 1 at Chaminade for networking, live music, food, fast-paced startup presentations, and a rare appearance by Steve Jobs on the 50th anniversary of Apple Computer.

The 2026 LIFT Summit will bring together leaders across industry, government, education, and community organizations to help move advanced air mobility from vision to real-world deployment. Taking place March 31–April 1 in Monterey, the event will focus on the partnerships, infrastructure, workforce, and policy needed to shape the future of low-altitude aviation.