Venture Challenge

The FY21 Venture Challenge (formerly known as the “i6 Challenge”) seeks to support entrepreneurship and accelerate company growth in communities, regions or combinations of regions through tech-enabled economic development initiatives. View the FY20 Venture Challenge grantees here.

The Venture Challenge awards grants to intermediary organizations like accelerators, universities, and non-profits supporting new business ventures that are...

scalable by nature,
challenging the status quo of established markets,
commercializing technologies,
furthering job creation within their businesses

The Venture Challenge invites organizations to submit competitive proposals that seek to support entrepreneurship and accelerate company growth in their community, region, or combination of regions. Competitive proposals will outline how the project will strengthen economic competitiveness through new product innovation or new technology adoption, enhancing research commercialization processes and outcomes, remediating structural barriers that inhibit regional innovation capacity and resilience, and/or leveraging regional competitive strengths to stimulate innovation and job creation. Under this Challenge, there are two funding levels, “Build” and “Scale”.

The Venture Challenge may award up to $30 million in grants in FY2021.