With Two New Competitions, XPRIZE Tackles Water Scarcity and Women’s Safety

The Water Abundance XPRIZE and Anu & Naveen Jain Women’s Safety
XPRIZE Launch in India

NEW DELHI–(BUSINESS WIRE)–At a United Nations Day reception today in New Delhi, Marcus Shingles,
CEO of XPRIZE, and Zenia Tata, executive director of Global Expansion at
XPRIZE, announced the launch of two new competitions: the Water
Abundance XPRIZE and the Anu & Naveen Jain Women’s Safety XPRIZE.

Aimed at sparking breakthrough solutions to two urgent grand challenges,
the US$1.75M Water Abundance XPRIZE sponsored by Tata Group and
Australian Aid aims to alleviate the global water crisis with
energy-efficient technologies that will harvest fresh water from thin
air. The Water Abundance XPRIZE challenges teams from around the world
to revolutionize access to fresh water by creating a device that
extracts a minimum of 2,000 liters of water per day from the atmosphere
using 100% renewable energy, at a cost of no more than 2 cents per
liter. The two-year competition includes five months for team
registration, seven months for initial solution development and twelve
months to complete rounds of testing and judging by expert panels.

The US$1M Women’s Safety XPRIZE sponsored by Anu and Naveen Jain will
leverage technology to empower communities with a transformative
solution that ensures women’s safety. The winning team’s solution will
autonomously and inconspicuously trigger an emergency alert and transmit
information to a network of community responders, all within 90 seconds
and at an annual cost of US$40 or less. The 20-month competition
includes four months for team registration, six months for initial
solution development and ten months to develop and test final solutions
for judging by expert panels.

Teams for both the competitions will be judged based on the standards
they set in their plans, as well as the performance and scalability of
their solutions.

Following are statements from XPRIZE and sponsors of both
competitions:

Zenia
Tata, executive director, Global Expansion, XPRIZE, said,
“The launch of these two new XPRIZEs in India puts us on an unstoppable
path for grand impact. India is becoming a leading global innovation
hub, and that itself speaks volumes of the caliber of innovators and
entrepreneurs this country hosts. We want to cultivate this spirit and
encourage exponential breakthroughs that will positively transform the
lives of a billion people.”

Sponsor of the Women’s Safety XPRIZE, Anu Jain shared,
“Ensuring women are safe is the foundation for economic prosperity and
safer communities. When governments fail to keep their people safe,
community members and entrepreneurs share a collective responsibility to
rapidly respond to those threats. With the power of technology, the
Women’s Safety XPRIZE will help arm communities in an unprecedented way.”

Co-sponsoring the Water Abundance XPRIZE, Dr. Gopichand Katragadda,
CTO, TATA Group, said, “Water is a precious resource. We need
to remind ourselves that only 2.5 percent of all the water on the Earth
is fresh water. Globally, we are dealing with the twin problem of
scarcity and distribution of usable water. We are excited to mobilize
the brightest minds to help generate solutions through the Water
Abundance XPRIZE. We are confident that the outcomes driven by XPRIZE
will provide innovative fresh water access options.”

“More than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered with water and
yet water scarcity is an increasingly urgent issue,” added Chris
Elstoft, Australian Government, co-sponsor of the Water Abundance XPRIZE.
“Transforming scarcity into abundance is a significant challenge. We
believe that the answer lies within the crowd. The Water Abundance
XPRIZE will leverage both technology and crowd-sourcing to drive global
impact.”

XPRIZE, the world’s leader in designing and managing incentive
competitions to solve humanity’s grand challenges, launched these
competitions in India to cultivate a wider, more diverse innovation
ecosystem while also encourage problem solvers to directly address dire
problems close to home.

For more information on the Water Abundance XPRIZE, visit water.xprize.org.

For more information on the Anu & Naveen Jain Women’s Safety XPRIZE,
visit safety.xprize.org.

About XPRIZE

XPRIZE is the global leader in designing and implementing innovative
competition models to solve the world’s grandest challenges. XPRIZE
utilizes a unique combination of gamification, crowd-sourcing, incentive
prize theory, and exponential technologies as a formula to make 10x (vs.
10%) impact in the grand challenge domains facing our world. XPRIZE’s
philosophy is that — under the right circumstances — igniting rapid
experimentation from a variety of diverse lenses is the most efficient
and effective method to driving exponential impact and solutions to
grand challenges. Active competitions include the $30M Google Lunar
XPRIZE, the $20M NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, the $15M Global Learning
XPRIZE, the $10M Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, the $7M Shell Ocean
Discovery XPRIZE, the $7M Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE
and the $5M IBM Watson AI XPRIZE. For more information, visit www.xprize.org.

About Tata Group

Founded by Jamsetji Tata in 1868, the Tata group is a global enterprise,
headquartered in India, comprising over 100 independent operating
companies. The group operates in more than 100 countries across six
continents, with a mission ‘To improve the quality of life of the
communities they serve globally, through long-term stakeholder value
creation based on Leadership with Trust.’ There are 29 publicly listed
Tata enterprises with a combined market capitalization of about $116
billion (as of March 31, 2016). Tata companies with significant scale
include Tata Steel, Tata Motors, Tata Consultancy Services, Tata Power,
Tata Chemicals, Tata Global Beverages, Tata Teleservices, Titan, Tata
Communication and Indian Hotels.

About Australian Aid

The world has changed — and our aid program is changing too. Today, many
developing countries are growing rapidly, with aid representing an
increasingly small proportion of development finance. To be effective in
this new context, the Australian Aid program is becoming more innovative
and catalytic, leveraging other drivers for development, such as private
sector investment and domestic finance. We are recasting our aid program
in light of this new development paradigm. For more information, you can
visit: http://dfat.gov.au/aid/pages/australias-aid-program.aspx.

About Anu Jain

Anu Jain is an entrepreneur with a deep commitment to philanthropy. She
currently heads Community Relations at iNome and is the primary driver
for employee involvement in charitable community giving. Anu plays an
active role in social initiatives in her local community as well, as a
Board member of Bellevue LifeSpring, an organization dedicated to
serving underprivileged families in the Bellevue, WA, area.
Additionally, she serves on the Advisory Board of Pratham, a non-profit
entity dedicated to improving the quality and access of education across
India, which has impacted over 5.7 million children since its inception.

About Naveen Jain

Naveen Jain is an entrepreneur and philanthropist driven to solve the
world’s biggest challenges through innovation. He is the founder of Moon
Express, World Innovation Institute, iNome, TalentWise, Intelius,
Infospace, in addition to serving as an advisor to the UK Longitude
Prize and as a member of the Explorer club. He is also a regular
contributor to Forbes, WSJ, INC and Huffington Post. As a board trustee
and vision circle member at the XPRIZE Foundation, he is focused on
finding entrepreneurial solutions that address global challenges in
health, education, poverty, agriculture, and access to clean water.

Contacts

XPRIZE
Eric Desatnik, 310-741-4892
eric@xprize.org
or
Jackie
Wei, 310-741-4918
jackie.wei@xprize.org
or
The
PRactice
Aanchal Agarwal, 9717440834
aanchal@the-practice.net
or
Susan
Joseph, 9900029191
susan@the-practice.net