Verizon Community Disaster Resilience Innovation Accelerator

Verizon Community Disaster Resilience Innovation Accelerator

Supports teams solving disaster resilience with advances in analytics, communications, autonomy, power, sensing, and prediction technologies.

⚠ This may reflect a past cycle — verify the current call on the funder's site.

The Verizon Community Disaster Resilience Innovation Accelerator is an annual program co-run by MassChallenge and Verizon that awards non-dilutive cash to U.S.-based startups developing disaster resilience technologies. In the 2026 cycle, up to eight finalist startups each received $50,000 in non-dilutive prize funding, and up to two additional startups received a $50,000 prototyping grant for third-party laboratory testing, bringing the total prize pool to over $500,000. No equity is taken by either MassChallenge or Verizon. All applicant organizations must be U.S.-owned and U.S.-operated; universities and research-only organizations are ineligible. Applications were open January 21 through February 11, 2026 — a three-week window — with virtual information sessions held January 28 and February 4, 2026.

Solutions must demonstrate technological fit with Verizon 5G capabilities and must address at least one of seven defined disaster resilience challenge areas: AI analytics, communication infrastructure, drones and autonomous systems, power generation, satellites, sensors, and weather prediction. The 5G fit requirement is a hard filter — solutions that do not integrate with or leverage Verizon network technologies are outside the program scope. Verizon Frontline (Verizon's emergency response platform) and Verizon Innovation Labs are named program contributors. The program is administered by MassChallenge, which manages the selection process and accelerator programming.

The 2026 application cycle closed February 11, 2026. Award presentations and accelerator programming follow the selection process, with specific dates not published in advance. Organizations targeting the 2027 cycle should monitor masschallenge.org for announcement of the next application window, which historically opens in January. To compete effectively, applicants should explicitly address Verizon 5G integration in their proposals and map their solution to one of the seven named challenge areas.