In late April we applied to take part in the QBE AcceliCITY Resilience Challenge, a six-month long global accelerator offered by Leading Cities, an exceptional nonprofit and global leader dedicated to making cities more resilient and sustainable. Each year, their Resilience Challenge helps startups with promising innovations move to real world deployments in urban centers intent to make their smart and sustainable aspirations a reality.
Although the winner of the challenge receives $175,000 in equity-free funding and the opportunity to pilot their solution, the challenge is far more than a competition – it is an opportunity to learn from experts, gain certification in Public-Private Partnerships, meet leaders at municipalities that are looking for solutions, and connect with a growing and passionate global community intent to make cities smarter, more resilient and more sustainable – all while providing residents with a better quality of life.
In a news release on this year’s Top 100 Resilience Solutions, Leading Cities President and CEO Michael Lake put the importance of this year’s challenge in context. “Communities are not short on innovation,” he said. “They are short on trusted ways to find it, evaluate it, and adopt it with confidence. AcceliCITY helps cities discover solutions they can believe in, helps startups become partners governments can trust, and helps resilience move from ambition to action before communities pay the price for inaction.”
Data of course is the lifeblood of many of these projects. Whether it is to enable smart meters, sensors and cameras, or to manage in real time utilities, traffic flows, emergency services, law enforcement, public transit and even the ingress of highly-variable sources of renewable energy like solar and wind to limit the need for fossil fuels, data must be moved reliably, quickly and securely. This includes everything from machine communications to file, block, video and SCADA data.
At Atombeam, we see a significant opportunity to contribute to such worthy municipal projects. In February we announced our partnership with Trilliant, the lauded provider of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) communications networks and grid-edge data platforms that let utilities and smart cities modernize their grids at scale – something our Neurpac solution directly compliments.
Our participation in the QBE AcceliCITY Resilience Challenge expands on that vision and our strong belief that we have an exceptional opportunity to help cities become smarter and more sustainable, not just as a result of the initiatives we participate in, but also quite literally in how they are deployed. Most municipalities are under immense pressure to conserve bandwidth, get as much as possible out of existing legacy infrastructure, and avoid large capital projects – the creation of new infrastructure and the expansion of data centers being two that typically break the bank.
By making data 75% smaller and inherently more secure, and increasing available bandwidth by 4x or more in any network, Neurpac can profoundly impact not only the costs associated with these projects, but also accelerate their implementation. And therein lies the key: these are important projects with goals that need to be realized as soon as possible.
That is why we are so pleased that Neurpac was named among the Top 100 Resilience Solutions among this year’s more than 950 applicants from 77 countries. Being included in such an exceptional group of innovators is a significant honor. Even better though is the knowledge that we will meet and engage with numerous municipal leaders in the coming months – and most importantly learn how we can help make their endeavors for smart and sustainable cities a reality.
We are grateful for the Leading Cities team for the opportunity to progress in the challenge with such an impressive cohort. For more information see Leading Cities’ news release.
