Call For Applications: Urban Future Prize Competition 2024 (Up to $50,000 cash prizes)
The Urban Future Lab is pleased to announce, for the eighth consecutive year, the Urban Future Prize Competition, which seeks to find the brightest climate tech startups and, through the generous support of The New York Community Trust, MUFG Bank, and NYU Tandon School of Engineering, award two winners with $50,000 cash prizes.
These awardees will also receive admission into the ACRE Incubator, New York’s longest-running and most successful climate-tech program.
New this year, we will be running a prize track explicitly focused on climate adaptation and resilience, the Future Resilience Prize.
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.
With the Future Resilience Prize, this competition hopes to spotlight innovative climate adaptation and resilience solutions, catalyze more private investment into this space, and ensure a positive impact on vulnerable communities most adversely impacted by climate change.
New York’s forward-thinking state and city governments, thriving tech sector, and massive market make it one of the top startup climatetech economies in the world.
The city has become the ideal laboratory for creating sustainable solutions to the world’s most pressing climate challenges.
Competition Tracks
- Climate Sector-Agnostic: The Future Solutions Prize is our sector-agnostic prize track open to companies across all climate sectors.
- Climate Adaptation and Resilience: The Future Resilience Prize is focused on climate adaptation and resilience. We will be paying particular attention to your solution’s impact on vulnerable communities when evaluating this prize track.
Benefits of Participation
- Two non-dilutive prizes of $50K each will be awarded to two companies that embody the drive and mission needed to address the greatest challenge of our time.
- Acceptance and membership into New York City’s premier climate-tech incubator, with incubator-specific benefits and unmatched startup support.
- Ecosystem recognition, media opportunities, and access to introductions to key partners in the public and private sectors.
Deadline: May 1, 2024