By the FL Innovation News editorial team · Innovation desk
TAMPA — Tampa Bay Tech Week has been awarded a grant through Hillsborough County’s Economic Development Innovation Initiative (EDi2) to expand 813 Tech Day, the organization’s signature community event, and to strengthen the county’s innovation economy.
The announcement was provided to FL Innovation News by Rosarium PR & Marketing on behalf of Tampa Bay Tech Week. The organization said the funding will go toward expanding 813 Tech Day, which it describes as a celebration of the region’s technology, entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem. The grant amount was not disclosed in the materials provided.
What EDi2 funds
EDi2 is run by Hillsborough County’s Economic Development Department and awards up to $500,000 a year in competitive grants aimed at strengthening the services and resources that support innovation startups, private investment and job creation. The county lists mentorship, access to capital, stakeholder collaboration, research commercialization and advocacy among the activities it backs, with particular emphasis on mentorship and capital access.
Programs like EDi2 are the connective tissue of a regional startup economy: they rarely write the headlines, but they underwrite the convenings, accelerators and mentor networks that founders actually use.
813 Tech Day, August 13
The 2026 edition of 813 Tech Day runs Thursday, Aug. 13, presented by Tampa Bay Tech Week with HyLo Innovation and W3RTech. The programming spans several Tampa venues — morning sessions at Cres Community, midday programming at Hotel Haya in Ybor City, and evening networking at The Sapphire Tampa.
The published agenda leans into the questions Florida operators are actually arguing about right now: a panel on AI and the workforce and how to stay competitive, a session on founder mental resilience and building without burning out, plus discussions on healthtech partnerships, cybersecurity in fintech, telecom and IT infrastructure resilience, and AI’s effect on manufacturing workforces.
Registration details are posted on the 813 Tech Day site.
Why it matters for Tampa Bay
Tampa Bay’s innovation economy has spent the last several years building the kind of density that turns a collection of startups into an ecosystem — coworking capacity, accelerator pipelines, recurring events that get the same people in the same room often enough for deals to happen. County-backed funding for a community-run event is a signal that local government is treating that density as economic infrastructure rather than as a nice-to-have.
FL Innovation News received this announcement directly from the organization’s public relations representative. No payment was made or received in connection with this article.
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