And the Winners Are...

... third place: Synergetic Power Systems!

Not bad considering we put all this together in just 3 months. I'm psyched! The grand prize winner was a company called Stellaris that has patents, customers and is well on its way to being a real start-up (we're not even incorporated, but that may change now). Winning a prize in this competition is a great validation for us: we have something here and we should continue to develop our technology.

However, this was not the biggest news that we received last night. We now have a customer for our product. A customer that has big, deep pockets and offices in every country of the world: it's called the World Bank. Yup, we received a $130K grant from the World Bank to develop this technology and make it available to emerging marktes around the world, starting in South Africa. The World Bank grant was not connected at all with the Ignite Clean Energy competition (in fact, the application for this grant was done before I even joined the team), but it should help us tremendously with our US-based business plan. Here's a huge pot of money (with some strings attached) which will help us develop prototypes and validate the concept. And better yet, we don't have to sell our souls to the (VC) devil...