Overview | Women’s Safety XPRIZE

Phase

Awarded

Developing technology for safer communities.

$1 Million

Prize Purse

The $1 million Anu and Naveen Jain Women’s Safety XPRIZE is a global competition that challenges teams to leverage technology to empower communities with a transformative solution that ensures women’s safety.

Prize Purse

$1M Grand Prize
$200k Surprise Finalist Teams Award
An additional $200k prize to be split by the 4 remaining Finalist Teams ($50k per team) was a surprise announcement made by Atul Jain and the Pagidipati family during the Award Ceremony at the United Nations in New York City.

Competition Video

Safety is a fundamental human right and should not be considered a luxury for women.

Anu Jain

Prize Sponsor

The Grand Challenge

One in three women globally have faced sexual violence, and at least one in five women are assaulted on college campuses in the United States alone.

Many nations do not have a universal emergency access number (like 9-1-1 in the United States) that victims can call to report a crime. Despite the universal need for women’s safety, basic emergency reporting and response networks do not exist in much of the world.

The goal of the prize is to use technology to find a solution which would allow communities to rapidly respond to threats against any of its members, ensuring that help is always available.

How to Win

To win the Anu and Naveen Jain Women’s Safety XPRIZE, teams need to come up with a solution that will, within 90 seconds:

Trigger - Autonomously and inconspicuously trigger an emergency alert

Transmit - Transmit information to a network of community responders

Affordable - Cost no more than 40 United States dollars

Impact

• Several of the Finalist teams’ technologies were market-ready immediately following the competition
• The competition and its goals were covered by a number of large media outlets (including the BBC during Round 2 Testing) which dramatically increased the exposure for both the competition and the success of the winning teams
• The prize was intentionally launched in India to build the XPRIZE presence in that region of the world, and this competition was a huge success in terms of the volume of media coverage generated and increased exposure gained by hosting the final round of testing in Mumbai, India. The XPRIZE brand is now more widely recognized (recently demonstrated by a massive increase in Indian team registrations in all XPRIZE competitions) and XPRIZE succeeded in tapping into an emerging market of technology and research, new prize partners, and future sponsors