Ashoka & QBE Announce Winners of Urban Resilience Challenge

Over the past few months Citymart has been helping QBE and Ashoka Changemakers with their Urban Resilience challenge, which they developed as an opportunity for startups to win up to $75,000 for their tech solutions that addressed urban resilience.

Access the challenge here

On October 23 QBE North America Truett Tate announced the winners at a ceremony in Manhattan. Before that, I had a great afternoon as a juror evaluating the pitches of the 10 finalists.

Urban Resilience Champion: Drugviu

What excited me about first-prize winner Drugviu is that they are solving a problem widely ignored in the healthcare industry: Historically, clinical trials have left out communities of color. This injustice creates a serious health risk, as medications affect communities in different, even dangerous, ways. Drugviu has made significant progress to make medication safe and equitable by providing communities of color with accurate data and insights.

Kwaku Owusu presents Drugviu, a company that helps communities of color to access better medical data.

Urban Resilience Pioneer: BioCellection

Second-prize winner Miranda Wang co-founded BioCellection, a startup that recycles “unrecyclable” plastics, with her longtime friend, Jeanny Yao, after the two became passionate about the problem in eighth grade. Touring a waste transfer station in Canada, Miranda was inspired to create a science fair project using biotechnology to address the problem of plastic waste.

Miranda Wang presents BioCellection, a company that recycles previously unrecyclable plastics through a new chemical process.

The two continued working on their project — which used bacteria to break down plastic — in college, but realized that the idea could not be scaled. However, the chemistry used by the bacteria, they discovered, could be scaled.

Over several years, they invented a process, optimized it in a lab, and received validation from an engineering firm. Now a team of 11 based in Silicon Valley, “we intend to put [the prize] money towards scaling our technology,” Miranda said.

Demand for plastic recycling solutions has skyrocketed, due, in part, to fact that the U.S. no longer exports its plastic waste to China. Yet while many start-ups are innovating solutions, BioCellection’s unique molecular process puts the innovation in a separate category.

Parts of this post were first published by Ashoka