Prominent Washington, D.C.-spun incubator 1776 will bring a little bit of the Capital's creativity to Boston on Wednesday.
Starting at 5:30 p.m., 1776 will move into the Seaport's District Hall to host The Challenge Cup, a seven month-long global competition to identify and celebrate the startups taking bites off of big challenges. Selected teams are set to tackle said challenges within four primary sectors: Healthcare, Education, Energy and a category dubbed, "Smart Cities," or making cities safer, more convenient and more sustainable in public-facing arenas like transportation and government services.
“Challenge Cup looks to take the revolution that has taken place in consumer web and bring it to more antiquated and institutional public sector arenas,” said Evan Burfield, Co-founder of 1776, in a statement from October.
The Hub is only one stop on the incubator's 16 city innovation-inspired tour. As part of The Challenge Cup, representatives from 1776 have already paid visits to Chicago, Moscow, Berlin, London, Los Angeles and New York. Boston marks the final stop in the Cup's travels for 2013. (Save the best for last, anyone?)
The Challenge Cup will pick up once more in 2014, and continue its travels to other cities boasting burgeoning innovation ecosystems around the world.
Here's how it works, according to the incubator's own description:
In each of the 16 cities, one winner will be selected in each of the four categories to compete in a week-long festival in May 2014 in Washington, D.C. The festival will bring together 64 winning startups from around the world—along with corporate partners, investors, policymakers and media—to crown the winner of the Challenge Cup. The top eight finalists will all receive an investment from 1776.
To be accepted into The Challenge Cup, companies must be less than three years old, have less than $3 million (USD) in revenue to date, have a product or service already in the market with evidence of some level of traction, either with active users, enterprise customers or revenue and have raised less than $1.5 million (USD) in capital.
The event begins with light networking at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, followed by an hour of one minute pitches. Judges will then deliberate at 7:00 p.m. and select finalist startup teams (two from each of the aforementioned categories), who will present once more in greater detail to the panel. When 8:30 p.m. rolls around, Boston's winners will be announced.
BostInno's sister site, Washington D.C.-based InTheCapital, has stayed close to the news around 1776 and The Challenge Cup over the past couple of months. 1776 and The Challenge Cup held the D.C. event in the end of October, its judges crowning the following startups as the champs of the Capital's round: EdBacker, eduCanon, Ethical Electric, Sunnovations,Dorsata, ChronoKair, RideScout and TransitLabs.
But which eight Boston startups will join the likes of those companies – and dozens more – in Washington in May 2014?
Here's a list of our city's contenders, broken down into their respective categories:
Education: QuadWrangle, Teaching is Power, HourlyNerd, Angel Ed
Energy: Energy Harvesters, Dynamo, ecoVent Systems, EnMojo
Health: Verbal Applications, Maxwell Health, TalkSession
Smart Cities: PeopleHedge, Deliverish, Silverside Detectors, QPO, SomethingGUD
