Colorado-Wyoming Engine Announces Second Round of Grant Opportunities to Accelerate Innovations in Community Resilience

The Colorado-Wyoming Engine (CO-WY Engine) is announcing a second round of use-inspired and translation grant opportunities. These grants are available to qualifying startups and universities for accelerating the research, development, and commercialization of innovations in advanced sensing and computation that lead to tangible products, services, or soutions for environmental decision making.

Two types of grants are available.

  • The Use-Inspired R&D Grant Program aims to foster innovative activity leading to high-impact data products, technology, or other practical solutions for building resilience. The program will fund collaborative, use-inspired R&D projects, and is meant to foster innovations that are early in maturity but can eventually be translated to real-world products or services. This program is intended for projects that have not yet been licensed or optioned.
  • The Translation Grant Program aims to support and accelerate startup companies commercializing innovations into viable products, services, or solutions.
  •  The organizing theme for this round of investments is Advanced Sensing and Computation for Environmental Decision Making (ASCEND). Translation proposals should demonstrate alignment by prioritizing activities that seek to (1) leverage or advance the state of the art of the unparalleled body of environmental sensing assets in the CO-WY region; (2) transform environmental sensing data through advanced data analytics, including AI/ML; (3) develop actionable decision-support tools in one or more of our core use-case areas.

The use case areas in which proposed R&D and Translation activities should focus are: wildfire preparedness and response, air quality, water availability and quality, and soil health.

Selected projects will receive funding support ranging from $250,000 to $750,000 for the Translation Grant Program and up to $500,000 for the Use-Inspired R&D Grant Program. Each program cycle will have a project period of one year.

Translation grant proposals must be led and submitted by startup companies , while Use-Inspired R&D Grant proposals are open to qualified investigators at startups, Engine corporate partners, federal research labs, and institutions of higher education in Colorado and Wyoming. Collaborations, either funded or unfunded, with other cross-sector partners in our region are allowed and highly encouraged.

To provide more information about the RFP and answer questions, the CO-WY Engine will host two virtual events:

Key Dates and General Program Information:

  • February 25: Concept submissions due (required)
  • March 3: Requests for full proposals sent to qualifying applicants
  • March 24: Full proposals due
  • April 8: Decisions finalized (anticipated)
  • April 22: Winners announced via press release

Full proposals are due by 5:00 pm MT on the submission deadline date of March 24th and must be submitted electronically via the CO-WY Engine website. No late submissions will be accepted. Teams must submit a letter of interest by the February 25 deadline to be eligible to submit a full proposal.

For more information about the CO-WY Engine and its programs, visit https://www.co-wyengine.org/