Challenges and Startup Support Archive

Welcome to the Challenges and Startup Support Archive

Below you will find brief descriptions highlighting past challenges and startup support activities organized by US Ignite. Scroll down or click on the segment you wish to jump to below:

Challenge Competitions Variety
Smart and Connected Communities & Pathways to Sustainable Success
META AR Developer Challenge
InnovateSLC Smart City Accelerator

Challenge Competitions Variety

Since 2016, US Ignite has collaborated with municipalities across the U.S. through tech-agnostic competitions that support start-ups and drive community engagement. By partnering with companies and federal agencies, US Ignite Challenge Competitions become a vehicle for the further development of meaningful smart community applications and services. Navigate through a subset of past challenges using the carousel below to see the variety of technologies, partners, and target participants!

The US Ignite Startup Accelerator competition challenged teams to create smart city applications using cloud infrastructure. With support from Amazon Web Services, winners received training from the Kauffman Foundation FastTrac program, and up to $50,000 in AWS credits.

US Ignite worked with the National Security Innovation Network to host a 5G pitch day day competition. Watch highlights from the four selected finalists –COMSovereign, GenXComm, Omnispace, and VRotors.

The West Lafayette (WL) Smart City Challenge tasks teams to develop a scalable IoT and/or software solution to improve safety for vulnerable road users in high-traffic corridors and intersections.

US Ignite supported the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in hosting a two-part prize challenge. The Chariot Challenge called on innovators to develop both a data appliance with smart city data streams for emergency scenarios, and an AR interface as an aid for first responders.

Pathways to Sustainable Success

US Ignite launched the Smart and Connected Communities & Pathways to Sustainable Success project intending to foster a nationwide ecosystem of smart city startups that succeed in generating community benefits, profitable revenue growth, and jobs.

Using a mix of support tools – everything from challenge competitions to formalized training and assessments – US Ignite helped launch over 100 high-technology startups. Navigate through select examples using the carousel below.

This robotics product, featured in a New York Times editorial, provides the poultry production industry with a solution that increases poultry quality and safety. Poultry Patrol helps with increased bird movement, deceased bird detection and removal, bed tilling, welfare quantification, and improved biosecurity.

Working to “democratize vehicle charging,” this EV Charging transaction platform offers a suite of cloud-based software applications to manage commercial charging for vehicles. This allows industry actors – like restaurants, carmakers, utilities – to become players without intermediaries.

A building analytics platform, PlanIT Impact, uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to offer architects, engineers, and property managers ways to maximize energy, stormwater, and water savings while reducing carbon impact.

META AR Developer Challenge

Funded by META, US Ignite awarded a $20,000 grant to three communities – Philadelphia, Raleigh/Town of Cary, and Long Beach – to host local Augmented Reality (AR) Developer Challenges. The local challenges aimed to help entrepreneurs and communities discover and leverage the possibilities of AR.

US Ignite worked with the grantees to offer their participating startups and small businesses support. These support mechanisms included mentoring, prototype and product development, and business strategizing. The META AR Developer Challenge delivered highly creative, resident-geared, and marketable AR applications. Explore some of the prize-winning AR apps developed using the carousel below.

inCitu takes proposed and upcoming development information from private and publicly available sources and transforms the data into a tangible 3D visualization, geofenced in augmented reality to their future build site, in real-world scale.

LiRA creates a voice for patients undergoing temporary or permanent voice loss based on their face and lip movements. The lip-reading technology uses machine learning to empower voiceless individuals in a video-to-speech platform that is easy to use and understand for everyone.

InnovateSLC Smart City Accelerator

US Ignite partnered with Kinnect Capital (formerly VentureCapital.Org), an expert accelerator, to deliver a smart city curriculum for local startups in Salt Lake City, Utah. The smart city accelerator curriculum aims to drive funding and commercialization success to local participating startups over this three-year program (2022-2025).

The startups selected to participate in the first cohort received technical assessments to gauge their readiness and business maturity. Additionally, they had an opportunity to pitch to investors and connect with them at a live-pitch event. Learn about the first cohorts’ startups using the carousel below.

Kado offers a management platform for universities and businesses that want to facilitate internships.

Kado has earned $275,000 in income since Jan 2022 and is working on an agreement with Sandbox for $5 million in revenue for the next 10 years.

The Poly platform helps organizations of all sizes and types manage and monitor user engagement.

Poly has been accepted into the Tech Stars Government Cohort in Washington, DC, and has received a $20,000 investment with an option for a $100,000 convertible note.

SRT brings easy-to-use centralized, cloud-based control for building management. SRT has raised $365,000 from friends and family and has $1 million in verbal commitments.

Powder Watts builds smart roofs using patented technology. Powder Watts can reduce heating costs by 80-90%. As of fall of 2022, it had raised $2.3 million from 23 investors.

This intelligent SAAS Platform, mobilizes the workforce by letting customers integrate and analyze all of their systems and align their resources to garner insights for effective and efficient action.