Fuel Showcase to Highlight 8 HealthTech Ventures, Guest Speaker Scott Hambuchen of First Orion, AWSOM
Fuel Accelerator's 2026 HealthTech Showcase Day will open on Wednesday, May 13, with remarks from Scott Hambuchen, chief executive of First Orion and a member of the board of the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine, before eight founders take the stage to pitch the work of the program's most recent ten-week cohort.
The event will be held inside an airplane hangar at Thaden Field, the downtown Bentonville airfield named for aviator Louise Thaden. Doors will open in the late afternoon. Registration is now live, and seating is limited.
Hambuchen's roles at First Orion and on the board of AWSOM place him at the center of relevancy within the conversations for the HealthTech demo day in 2026. First Orion is the Arkansas-grown technology company that solved one of telecom's least glamorous and most consequential problems and built a branded-calling and mobile identity platform now used by mobile carriers and enterprise customers across the country. The same neighborhood of problems sits squarely in front of healthcare today: identity, intent, and consent in high-stakes communication. He's spent more than three decades on the technical and operational discipline behind solving the problems at the intersection of health care and telecommunications.
His career runs through 18 years at Acxiom, a tour as President of Gryphon Networks in Boston, a two-year assignment building First Orion's expansion in Dubai, and an appointment to the company's board in 2024 ahead of stepping into the chief executive role. He is a Conway, Arkansas native and a University of Arkansas Industrial Engineering graduate, and he is also part of the leadership architecture being built around the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine — the new, mission-driven medical school whose campus is reshaping how the region thinks about clinical training, whole-person care, and research-driven practice.
The cohort itself was selected from hundreds of applicants, run through Fuel's no-cost, no-equity ten-week program at The Collaborative in Bentonville, and pointed at substantive engagements and enterprise readiness rather than pitch-deck polish and performative entrepreneurship. Eight founders will pitch:
A team that captured a CES Innovation Award and an Edison Award in the same cycle — a rare double recognition that signals both technical novelty and judged real-world impact.
A founder with hundreds of units already deployed inside an Arkansas VA hospital, treating PTSD and anxiety without drugs — the kind of clinical evidence base most early HealthTech companies are years away from generating.
Two Y Combinator companies in the cohort: one auditing hospital records in real time, and one rebuilding revenue cycle management with AI from the ground up. Both are taking aim at categories where the dominant incumbents were built before modern LLMs existed.
A voice biomarker platform validated through partnerships with Mayo Clinic and NYU Langone — a category where clinical-grade validation is the entire business model.
A mobile platform built to fill frontline healthcare roles in days, not weeks — pointed at the workforce gap operators consistently rank in their top three problems.
A governance layer letting employers route direct care and specialty bundles without replacing their existing health plans — a quietly important answer to the build-or-buy question self-funded employers keep asking.
On-demand virtual dental care, with new partnerships taking shape in the Arkansas market.
This is not a survey of HealthTech in 2026. It is a tightly curated cross-section of real solutions deployed to address real problems and opportunities — clinical evidence, enterprise traction, employer-side governance, workforce, and the AI-native back office.
The event will take place inside Thaden Field in downtown Bentonville, the closest and almost boutique tarmac to Walmart Home Office, Tyson, JB Hunt, and the Walton-led civic and clinical institutions reshaping the region, which makes wheels-down to opening remarks a genuinely short walk for founders, operators, and investors flying in. The hangar architecture also fits what an accelerator demo day actually is: the moment a cohort takes off.
The Fuel HealthTech Showcase event is made possible with the Arkansas Economic Development Commission and the Walton Family Foundation, the long-standing public and philanthropic partners whose support has shaped Fuel since its earliest cohorts. AEDC's support helped launch the program in 2018, and continues in 2026 by way of two of the twelve grants issued statewide through their accelerator grant program, making the program one of the only accelerators in the state to receive two awards this year. The Walton Family Foundation's 2026 commitment is its largest single-year investment in Fuel since its support began in 2022.
Across eleven previous cohorts, Fuel Accelerator alumni have collectively raised more than $260 million, signed more than 150 enterprise pilots and contracts, and opened dozens of local offices in Northwest Arkansas, including 12 headquarters relocations — two of those in the program's most recent fall cohort.
Wednesday, May 13, 2026, in downtown Bentonville, Arkansas inside the airplane hangar of Thaden Field. Opening remarks from Scott Hambuchen, chief executive of First Orion and Alice L. Walton School of Medicine board member. Eight HealthTech founders pitching what they have built across ten weeks of enterprise-grade work.
Don't miss this. Register for Fuel HealthTech Showcase Day 2026 →