Announces Winners

• Plug and Play hosted Demo Day on April 6, 2026, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, showcasing 10 winning teams from 285 applications in the NJEDA-supported AI Innovation Challenge. • Winners include AgentGov for AI-powered fraud detection in government, NJSecure for cybersecurity in community banks, CardioLink for cardiovascular care intelligence, and GlucoSync for real-time diabetes decision support. • The initiative advances AI solutions in government services, clinical intelligence, climate resilience, and energy forecasting, with up to $3.34 million in sub-grant funding available for pilots and commercialization.

• The U.S. National Science Foundation on March 24, 2026, named winners of the multi-year Critical Minerals Challenge, including alkaLi Labs, ChemFinity Technologies, Intel-E-Waste, and University of Wisconsin-Madison, to secure domestic supply chains for lithium, cobalt, rare earths, and other metals. • Winners develop innovations like engineered biosorbents recovering lithium from byproducts, tunable polymer sorbents capturing over 25 metals at room temperature, modular e-waste processing platforms, and electrochemical electrodes generating acids in situ. • The program, co-designed with Germany’s SPRIND Tech Metal Challenge, uses donated e-waste from IBM and Aurubis with U.S. Naval Research Laboratory collaboration for national security relevance and real-world validation.