Arcticar and Supercool Earth Win the 10th Urban Future Prize Competition

NYU Tandon School of Engineering’s Urban Future Lab (UFL) today announced the winners of the 10th Urban Future Prize Competition, following live pitches from eight finalists at the Urban Future Summit on October 22 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Supported by MUFG Bank, The New York Community Trust and New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), this year's competition marks a decade of backing early-stage founders building solutions to climate change.

Arcticar was awarded the Climate Mitigation Prize and Supercool Earth the Climate Adaptation Prize. Each receives a $50,000 non-dilutive cash prize and admission into ACRE (Accelerator for a Clean and Resilient Economy), New York's longest-running climatetech incubator.

For the first time in the competition's history, runners-up in each track are also recognized. Ultropia (Climate Mitigation) and Rarefied (Climate Adaptation) will each receive $10,000 in non-dilutive capital and admission into ACRE.

Meet the 2026 Awardees

• Arcticar | Climate Mitigation Prize ($50,000): An intelligent, clean energy platform for the cold chain, replacing diesel-powered trailer refrigeration with lower-cost electric units and integrated battery storage, eliminating the emissions and noise pollution reefers create.
• Supercool Earth | Climate Adaptation Prize ($50,000): An end-to-end precipitation enhancement platform that uses biology to increase rain and snowfall on demand for ski resorts, water utilities, hydropower operators, and agriculture, giving water-scarce communities a tool to stabilize supply before rationing or crop failure set in.
• Ultropia | Climate Mitigation Runner-Up ($10,000): An ultrasonic mechanical water extraction platform that removes moisture from materials, targeting the energy-intensive gas dryers used across the industrial laundry industry.
• Rarefied | Climate Adaptation Runner-Up ($10,000): A sunlight-driven propulsion mechanism enabling persistent flight in near-space, building a new atmospheric data layer to improve weather forecasting, disaster resilience, and climate risk modeling - data especially valuable in equatorial and developing regions, where sparse observations weaken storm and drought forecasts.

The four awardees were selected by a jury of leading climate investors: Sophie Purdom (Managing Partner, Planeteer Capital), Micah Kotch (Partner, Blackhorn Ventures), Jake Kent (Partner, Voyager), and Pat Sapinsley (Advisor, RA Capital Planetary Health), who evaluated finalists on team, product, market potential, competitive positioning, and environmental and social impact.

The eight finalists were Airbuild, Arcticar, Class 3, Emulate Cities, Every Electric, Rarefied, Supercool Earth, and Ultropia.

"Running this competition comes with a front-row seat to what's coming next in climate innovation," said Austin Evarts, Director of the ACRE Incubator at the Urban Future Lab. "Much of the attention in our industry moved to data centers and load growth this year, but the people building climate solutions are still at it. We saw more applications than in any of our ten years, from founders working on the power, heat, water and physical infrastructure New York needs."

“MUFG is proud to once again sponsor the Urban Future Prize Competition and its spirit of innovation,” said Beth Gilroy, Deputy Head of Sustainability Strategy & Planning at MUFG Bank. “ As Japan’s largest financial group with a global franchise spanning Asia-Pacific, the Americas, and EMEA, we power economic growth and new technologies across geographies and industry sectors. MUFG is committed to providing our clients with financial solutions that help them achieve their sustainability goals.”  

“The world needs more change agents like the promising companies that are finalists for this year’s Urban Future Prize Competition,” said Arturo Garcia-Costas, Program Director, Local, National & International Environment, The New York Community Trust. “I’m thrilled to celebrate the competition’s 10^th anniversary and proud that The New York Community Trust has been a funding partner from day one. It’s a great example of how philanthropy can empower the strategic investments that will be critical to confronting the growing environmental challenges of the 21^st century. This year’s record number of applications reflects both the scale of these challenges and the growing determination to build solutions that can help usher in a more sustainable and resilient future."

“Congratulations to the finalists and winners of the Urban Future Prize Competition who are working to bring more clean energy to New Yorkers while making it affordable and accessible,” said Richard Bourgeois, NYSERDA Director of Innovation Partnerships. “We encourage these founders and entrepreneurs to leverage the wide number of innovation ecosystem resources across the state that help advance solutions to market.”

“Congratulations to this year’s Urban Future Prize winners,” said Sayar Lonial, Vice Dean of External Affairs & Public Relations at NYU Tandon. “These teams demonstrate the kind of ingenuity and ambition that is necessary to tackle our most pressing climate challenges. Their work supports Tandon’s research priorities in sustainability and our commitment to translating technological innovation into real-world impact. As our newest Members of the Urban Future Lab, we are confident that these companies will advance solutions that will transform how we build more resilient communities.”

“New York is ground zero for the cold chain. More food and more refrigerated transportation move through here than anywhere else in North America, and much of it still runs on diesel, concentrated in the Bronx, where asthma rates are three times the rest of the city,” said Jim Castelaz, Founder & CEO at Arcticar. “We want to support with automated electric refrigeration and UFL is already helping us build the network and coalitions to make it happen.”

“The next six months are all about being in the field,” said Dacia Leon, Co-Founder and CEO at Supercool Earth. “We’ll be testing our snowmaking additive and cloud seeding with our protein, two things no one has ever done, and we’re excited for the Urban Future Lab to help us find partners for those field studies. Proving the tech works in the field is what will propel us to commercial sales.”

“We’ve shown proof-of-concept flight in the lab, and now we want to deploy our structures in the atmosphere to collect the first data that’s useful for weather forecasting,” said Ben Schafer, Co-Founder and CEO at Rarerified. “We’re looking forward to joining the ACRE Incubator and connecting with climate modeling groups at NYU and other universities in New York whose work fit naturally with the data we collect.”

“We just received our NSF SBIR Phase II award, so our focus now is moving our technology to pilot scale and deploying it in an industrial environment,” said Amy Jean Swanson, Co-Founder and CEO at Ultropia. “The Urban Future Lab’s network has already been powerful for us. At their Climate Week dinner we met people in government, investment, and industry, which we hope to turn into customers and now we’re looking to that network to find strategic partners.”

The 10th Urban Future Prize Competition drew a record 501 applications across its Climate Mitigation and Climate Adaptation tracks, from a pool that skewed early-stage and hardware-heavy. 77% of applicants had raised pre-seed funding or nothing at all. 71% are building hardware, up from 62% last year. Adaptation and resilience is now the competition's largest category.

NYU faculty and researchers Edwin Gerber, Pavel Kots, Miguel Modestino, Seda Sarp, and Omar Wani served as subject-matter experts during the review process, alongside experts from Baltimore Aircoil Company, Bloomberg Associates, Con Edison, Desert Research Institute, JLL, LG Electronics USA, QuantumCT, and Veolia.

The Summit also featured a panel on scaling climate companies with Gregory Constantine (AIRCO), Jeremy Cohen (SWTCH), and Rawand Rasheed (Helix Earth), moderated by UFL's Steph Jones.