We also catch up on milestones and learnings of the Miami-Dade Innovation Authority and what’s ahead.
By Nancy Dahlberg
In the form of a public challenge to startups locally and globally, the Miami-Dade Innovation Authority set out to find out how technology could improve the passenger and worker experience at Miami International Airport, one of the world’s busiest and Miami-Dade County’s top economic engine.
MDIA is an independent nonprofit on a mission to address Miami-Dade’s most urgent needs around health, housing, climate, transportation and equitable access to opportunity by identifying early-to-growth stage companies and supporting them through public challenges. In this airport challenge, MDIA worked closely with MIA, the county’s Office of Innovation and Economic Development and a panel of subject matter experts to ultimately select three startups and help those startups now pilot test their solutions at the airport. MDIA also invested $100,000 in each company to support their pilots at MIA, with the aim to scale their solutions to airports globally.
Here are the three companies that won the Public Innovation Challenge and were announced this morning:
RouteMe, from Florida, utilizes AI to allow a passenger to navigate MIA simply with their phone camera.
Signapse, from the United Kingdom, utilizes Generative AI to deliver text-to-sign translation, making digital signage and instructions accessible to deaf passengers.
Mapsted, a Canadian company, provides airport wayfinding mapping and accessibility features and integration to smart technology devices.
“We are making historic investments to ensure our airport is future-ready in order to provide the highest level of service to our visitors and residents for generations to come. This innovation challenge advances our mission by partnering with visionary innovators to position MIA as a global leader in sustainability and innovation,” Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said in announcing the winners.
Leigh-Ann Buchanan, president and CEO of MDIA, said MDIA set out to attract a qualified, diverse applicant pool and that is what they got. The airport experience public challenge attracted 136 companies from 27 countries that collectively were already booking $5 billion in revenue and had raised $589 million in funding. In the pool of applicants, 25% had a female/non-binary founder, 62% were led by founders of color, and 39% have founders with other underrepresented backgrounds, such as immigrants, differently-abled, and veterans, she said in an interview with Refresh Miami.
Each of the three winners – emerging from a pool of 11 finalists – have signed pilot agreements and have already embarked on their MIA pilots. For example, you can’t miss some of Signapse’s work as you are driving in and see “Welcome to Miami International Airport.” Now that massive message includes a sign language avatar that signs to people, welcoming passengers with hearing impairments and signaling to them that they will have help translating important instructions once inside.
Buchanan said the pilot will be a minimum of three months and can be extended at the discretion of the airport. The goal is to gather feedback from customers, with MDIA and MIA together reporting on the outcomes. “And then the vision is hopefully they’ll be able to expand their work as a vendor of the airport if they are able to demonstrate that their technology adds the value to customers,” she said.
“It’s a huge deal for these startups to be able to pilot with one of the busiest airports in the country. MIA moves more than 50 million passengers a year, and is the 10th biggest airport in the country, the 12th in the world,” said Buchanan. “The airport makes an amazing challenge host because they have an existing culture of innovation. They have an in-house innovation team and they have a strategy around innovation that they are deploying.”
MDIA was launched in 2023 with $9 million in seed funding from Miami-Dade County, Knight Foundation, and Citadel CEO Ken Griffin. The Public Innovation Challenge at MIA is the second of three challenges launched during MDIA’s first year. The first challenge was to find innovative ways to use South Florida’s sargassum surplus, and ultimately four companies received $100K grants and will be piloting their solutions this sargassum season, which is underway. The most recent challenge is to enhance cargo visibility in a collaboration with PortMiami.
In the PortMiami challenge, nine finalist companies have gone through the judging process and due diligence, and the three or four winners will be announced soon, Buchanan said. The solutions range from using computer vision to get better insight around what is moving through the port to optimizing that entire last mile and what that delivery process might look like.
“Partnering with these economic engines means that there’s a pathway of opportunity after the pilot, which is why we wanted to start with the two biggest economic drivers in our county,” says Buchanan. “I just can’t speak to how amazing it has been to work with these partners, because it’s not typical that we use the public sector as a catalyst for commercializing technology. But I think with these first round of challenges really demonstrate that even at the municipal level, it is possible. You just have to have the right platform or vehicle to do that, and that’s where MDIA comes in.”
Overall, over the course of the last year, 236 companies from 41 countries applied for the three challenges. MDIA now seven active pilots going with probably three to four more to start off in the fall for port challenge. MDIA is developing a robust pipeline of year two challenges, and plans to announce the next challenges in the fall, Buchanan said.
“When you think about what the timeline typically is to get things done in government, we probably cut that process in half of what it would take. And that’s really what the commissioners and Chair Oliver Gilbert and the mayor wanted to see: How do we fast-track innovation and not let some of the bureaucracy get in the way of getting really good solutions into the hands of these departments that serve our community.”
That the public sector can be a catalyst and critical partner for commercialization was one early learnings from the challenges so far, she said. “We’ve developed a series of processes that allow us to very rapidly get government departments on board, assess opportunities and then settle in on a focus.”
Buchanan sees a gap in the market for organizations that focus on pilot activities in the commercialization process versus traditional investors. “We’re helping you get closer to revenue by validating your product and testing it through a pilot. There may be way more opportunity for MDIA to do this at scale within the ClimateReady Tech Hub.”
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