NYU Urban Future Lab Launches IoT Startup Competition

Think your startup is the bee’s knees? Then this is your day.

The Urban Future Lab, a hub for smart city, smart grid, and clean energy development at New York City’s NYU Tandon School of Engineering, has launched the Urban Future Competition during New York Energy Week 2016. It’s designed to draw leading cleantech startup companies to New York City. Startups with transformative business solutions for global urban energy and sustainability challenges will compete to pitch their solutions to a jury of investors, market partners, and successful entrepreneurs.

Prizes of $25,000 will be awarded to the top early-stage, startup companies in Smart Grid and Smart Cities categories:

One winner in the Smart Grid category: includes but is not limited to renewable energy, grid modernization, and distributed / microgrids.

One winner in the Smart Cities category: includes but is not limited to urban infrastructure and resiliency, transportation and transit, Internet of Things, sensor networks, and analytics.

Winners will also join the ACRE incubator, a New York City-based smart city and cleantech incubator housed at the NYU Urban Future Lab. They will meet with mentors from the strategic partners and sponsors including the Smart Grid teams at the largest utilities in New York.

“With the nation's largest municipal markets in energy, transit, water and waste, New York City offers a living lab for companies to deploy their sustainable urban technologies,” said Pat Sapinsley, Managing Director, cleantech initiatives, NYU Tandon School of Engineering. “New York's ambitious Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) initiative has created an unprecedented market opportunity for smart cities and cleantech startups to thrive. As ACRE is uniquely located in REV territory, it is a natural test bed for the innovative technologies and business models needed to realize New York's ambitious targets and to deploy market-based solutions at scale to make New York City – and cities around the world – smarter, more efficient, and more resilient for current and future urban dwellers.”