D.C. tech incubator 1776 is gearing up for this year's Challenge Festival, officially announcing the dates and some of the details of the competition. The pitching startups will come to D.C. from around the world for the chance to win $650,000 in prizes.
The weeklong celebration and competition will kick off on May 11 and run through May 16 in the District. Startups in the fields of education, energy, health and smart cities based in 16 cities in 11 countries will come to compete and meet business and government leaders and other prominent entrepreneurs while they are here.
“All over the globe, entrepreneurs are asking themselves why, with the power of today’s technology, do we still live with services built for the last century?” said 1776 co-founder Donna Harris in a statement. “The Challenge Festival will feature the world’s most promising startups who are changing the way we educate our children, consume energy, and access healthcare—and connect them with forward-looking business and industry leaders.”
The mix of panels, pitch sessions and classes will all lead to the big competition at the end of the festival, where the 70 companies will have limited time to pitch their companies to the judges. Last year, smart city startup Handup walked away as grand champion, earning a $150,000 investment. created a platform to donate directly to a neighborhood's homeless or other needy people. Chicago-based Cancer IQ won the healthcare category for its platform to personalize cancer care using data and proprietary algorithms to to help doctors identify possible treatments and even help detect those at high risk beforehand. The Berlin-based startup PlugSurfing won the energy category for building an app to aggregate all the different companies with electric vehicle charging stations to make paying for a charge quick and easy compared to the around 100 different IDs that might be needed to charge a car anywhere in Europe. And in the education category, local startup eduCanon won for its innovative online learning platform for interactive video lessons.
“From Austin to Amman and Boston to Berlin, we’ve traveled the globe over the past six months to find the world’s most audacious entrepreneurs working to develop groundbreaking solutions to big, intractable problems that affect us everyday,” said 1776 co-founder Evan Burfield in a statement. “The Challenge Festival is where it all comes together—with the top startups in the world coming to D.C. to spend a week connecting to the intellectual, social, and financial capital that will enable them to grow, scale and ultimately, excel.”
