Judges Selected Swae as one of 25 winners (amongst hundreds of applicants) competing for the Walton Family Foundation and The Center for Advancing Innovation’s 2020 Scale Challenge
Last week, Swae was selected as one of 25 winners of The Center for Advancing Innovation (CAI) International SCALE — Supply Chain and Logistics Enterprises — Challenge.
Supported by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation, SCALE is an open innovation contest to innovate the supply chain and logistics industry sector by launching 20+ high-tech startups advancing breakthrough inventions in advanced materials, artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous vehicles, drones, robotics, 3D printing, machine learning, augmented reality and virtual reality. CAI and a 15-member committee of industry experts and investors selected the 25 inventions amongst several hundred applicants.
The SCALE Challenge was orchestrated by CAI, a 501(c)3 non-profit that launched 300+ startups since 2014. CAI partners with 120+ research institutes — including the National Institutes of Health, NASA, universities, and hospitals that cumulatively have more than 175,000 inventions combined.
The category of the win was in Innovation Excellence, and Swae was amongst other startups like Demeter (automated disease detection in crops using drones and deep learning), AmorSui (smart antimicrobial workwear to help hospitals prevent infections using IoT enabled garments), and many more startups that could be absolute game-changers in the world.
“We’re thrilled to be selected amongst 25 other resilient founders, who are not letting COVID-19 or other existential issues detract them from bringing their solutions to the world. We feel really fortunate to have benefitted from this challenge and the high-quality programming and stewardship provided by Rosemarie Truman and Codie Locke from the CAI. Without them, such realities would not exist and startups like us would certainly not get these kinds of transformative opportunities,” says CEO, Soushiant Zanganehpour.
Swae is not specifically meant to disrupt supply chains necessarily, but the impact that our solutions have on larger organizational decision making are transformative. The possibility of bringing Swae’s solutions to an organization like Walmart can have unknown positive impacts and can be remarkable use cases for us and them.
“While SCALE is the largest challenge CAI has ever orchestrated, the Challenge is a first of a kind in two important dimensions. First, it’s one where CAI systematically joined high-tech startup teams with entrepreneurs to cultivate the ‘art spirit.’ Second, SCALE represents the most significant challenge to disrupt supply chains across multiple dimensions, the food supply chain, fashion supply chain and more.”
Winners of the challenge are put forward to pitch to a hand-selected group of investors for early-stage funding at an exclusive, invite-only Investor Forum, planned for September 2020.
To learn more about the SCALE challenge, please click here. To see the list of winners including Swae and the other elite, gamechanger startups, please click here.
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