Urban Future Lab announces finalists for 2024 Urban Future Prize competition
The NYU Tandon School of Engineering climate-focused incubator will announce two winners, including the first ever climate adaptation focused prize.
NYU Tandon School of Engineering’s Urban Future Lab (UFL) has selected nine startup companies from 317 applications to compete for its two flagship awards at this year’s Urban Future Summit in October. The finalists will pitch their businesses to a panel of judges, who will award one winner each in the Future Resilience Prize and the Future Solutions Prize tracks.
The competition is possible through support from The New York Community Trust and MUFG Bank.
Coming out of the symbiotic relationship between NYU Tandon research — specifically the Sustainable Engineering Initiative (SEI) — this year the annual competition will include the Future Resilience Prize which explicitly focuses on climate adaptation and resilience.
Most funding to date has gone to address climate mitigation (e.g. decreasing emissions), but very little funding has gone to innovations that support the adaptation side of the climate crisis. According to UN estimates, the climate adaptation financing gap is as high as $366B annually.
“We received a record number of applications, which I believe shows a growing interest and urgency from innovators to help solve the climate crisis,” said Austin Evarts, Director of the ACRE Incubator. “We are thrilled to be running a first-of-its-kind prize track focused on climate adaptation this year, the Future Resilience Prize. Climate adaptation has been underfunded for far too long. Through this prize track we hope to shine a spotlight on climate adaptation innovations that will have a positive impact on the vulnerable communities most adversely impacted by climate change.”
“The Sustainable Engineering Initiative emphasizes four pillars to combat climate change and environmental issues: Avoidance, Remediation, Mitigation and Adaptation, the last of which is being highlighted this year for the first time through the Future Resilience Prize,” said NYU Tandon's Vice Dean for Research Linda Ng Boyle. "By bridging the entrepreneurial activities with our research foci, we are synergistically taking on climate change and the issues affecting our planet."
Since 2017, the Urban Future Prize Competition has given visionary entrepreneurs a platform to advance new technologies and approaches that can help decarbonize the economy and make society more sustainable. Every year, it attracts applications from various market-ready startups innovating across renewable energy, environmental justice, buildings, circular economy, transportation, electricity, and manufacturing.
After a rigorous selection process, UFL has chosen the following finalists:
Future Resilience Prize: Focused on innovative climate adaptation and resilience solutions, the winner of this prize track will be identified based on its impact on vulnerable communities.
- Aquaria Technologies builds resilient water infrastructure for cities by harvesting air. Using solar-powered boxes, they produce up to 500,000 gallons of water daily from the sky. Vulnerable communities most at risk from climate change struggle to restore their water supply because of limited capital and geography. Aquaria can provide immediate access to clean water to these communities.
- Blip Energy's plug-and-play smart battery gives modern households backup power and lower electric bills. One in seven American households is living in energy poverty, foregoing essential purchases to afford energy bills. Blip is a low cost solution designed to work in any home because they believe everyone deserves affordable, reliable power.
- Faura helps assess the risk of properties in natural disaster zones (wildfires, hurricanes, floods, etc) to help insurance policyholders mitigate their risk and better inform underwriters. Faura helps homeowners qualify for better and cheaper insurance by making their properties more climate resilient.
- Frontline Gig is an AI-driven talent intelligence platform for blue-collar work in climate. Like the “Uber for green jobs”, Frontline Gig is a workforce development platform specifically for underserved communities who want more flexible apprenticeships in the green economy.
- Kind Designs creates 3D-printed living seawalls that protect coastal cities from flooding and rising sea levels. They aim to democratize seawalls, making them affordable to the 507 coastal communities globally that are at risk of needing to migrate inland.
Future Solutions Prize: Acknowledging that the climate issue requires cross-disciplinary solutions, another winner will be chosen from our climate sector agnostic track.
- DaisyChain Energy is a turn-key solar, electrification and decarbonization solution for multi-unit residential buildings.
- Drive Powerline uses GenerativeAI and neural networks to offer an advanced co-pilot for operation of battery portfolios, and an enhanced auto-pilot for end-to-end automatic operation of battery portfolios in power markets.
- Adena Power is an energy storage provider using U.S. raw materials and manufacturing to deliver sodium batteries to utilities at grid scale.
- Helix Earth Technologies is a NASA-based technology that eliminates >50% of the energy used by commercial air conditioners.
On October 24, 2024, the competition culminates with the Urban Future Summit in New York City. The Urban Future Summit will showcase the competition finalists, award two winners with $50K, and gather UFL’s premier climate technology ecosystem of innovators, nonprofits, investors, corporates, government and nonprofits. All winners of the competition, and several of the finalists, will join the ACRE Incubator where UFL supports them with mentorship, fundraising, hiring, commercial pilots, and design.
Members of this year’s jury are Nneka Kibuule, Principal, Aligned Climate Capital, Katie MacDonald, Co-Founder, Tailwind, Shawn Xu, Partner, Lowercarbon Capital, and Anastasia Istratova, Principal Climate Tech, Fifth Wall.
NYU Tandon launched SEI in 2022, to tackle the interconnected challenges of climate change, environmental hazards, and resource management in urban centers. SEI unites more than 20 faculty members whose collective research aims to mitigate climate impacts and develop innovative solutions for a more resilient planet.
About the Urban Future Lab at NYU Tandon School of Engineering
The Urban Future Lab (UFL) at NYU Tandon School of Engineering is an incubator for best-in-class climatetech startups with a focus on clean energy and sustainable urban infrastructure solutions.
A cornerstone of NYU Tandon's Sustainable Engineering Initiative (SEI), the UFL advances SEI's mission to develop new engineering strategies to avoid, mitigate, and remediate emissions responsible for climate change and environmental contamination, and to introduce novel ways to evaluate the impact of and adapt to these environmental challenges.
The UFL is home to four programs that support innovators on their journey to scale up and commercialize their businesses: ACRE is New York's longest-running climatetech incubator; Carbon to Value Initiative and Offshore Wind Innovation Hub bring innovative technologies and solutions to industry leaders; and the Innovate UK Global Incubator Programme supports entry in the U.S. for U.K.-based climatetech startups that can effectively grow and support the clean-growth goals of New York State. UFL also offers Clean Start, an advanced certificate from NYU for people seeking a transition into the climatetech sector.
Since 2009, UFL has supported 170+ startups with an industry-leading 88% company survival rate, raised $2.5B+ in venture capital, project finance, and grants, created 4,100+ jobs, and facilitated 100+ events with 2,000+ attendees per year.
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