At Friday’s showcase, the University of Tennessee Research Park’s Spark Accelerator kicked off a cohort heavy on nuclear, critical minerals and advanced manufacturing, plus SparkShop, a new engineering track for the region’s hardest problems.
Nearly a hundred founders, investors, business leaders, and ecosystem builders fought second-week-of-classes traffic to pack a conference room at the Baker School for Public Policy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, on Friday, where the Spark Accelerator introduced the 13 companies in its fall 2026 cohort.
The lineup of startups leans hard into the physical: nuclear microreactors, lithium isotopes, critical minerals recovery, PFAS filtration and advanced manufacturing.