Babcock Ranch, America’s first solar-powered town, will become the hub for the Southwest Florida Resilience Accelerator, which is part of Ambition Accelerated, a statewide effort to build the next generation of American companies. The first cohort of companies will kick off this fall and focus on developing technologies and solutions for climate resilience through sustainable construction, infrastructure, and more.
“Anchoring the new Southwest Florida Resilience Accelerator at Babcock Ranch underscores our vision to be the most sustainable, innovative, and resilient town in America,” says Lucienne Pears, vice president of economic and business development for Kitson & Partners, developer of Babcock Ranch. “By welcoming pioneers from across the globe into our sandbox to scale concepts in real-time, we are convening the capital, resources, and like-minded people needed to cultivate long-term economic growth in Southwest Florida.”
Launched by the Florida Council of 100 and its foundation, the strategic business-led initiative connects CEOs, founders, investors, universities, and corporate partners to help enterprise-ready companies build and scale in the Sunshine State.
Babcock Ranch will serve as a living laboratory where innovators collaborate to pilot, test, and scale solutions for the future. To help build disaster resilient communities, the program is focused on entrepreneurs building solutions tailored to four key areas:
- Inspections, assessment, and certification: Innovators utilizing drone inspection and AI modeling, or tackling construction performance, building and site inspections, and resilient program construction validation certifications
- Resilient real estate and infrastructure systems: Infrastructure advances in building hardening, water systems, mobility, leak detection and shut off, pervious pavements, energy storage, off-site construction, industrialized housing, and building materials
- Purpose-built planning and design: Solutions for permitting, asset risk analysis, lifecycle cost modeling, insurance-linked resilience tools, and building and infrastructure operations efficiency tools
- Natural systems modeling: Technologies addressing water, flood, wind, habitat, ecology, fire, coastal, estuary, riverine challenges, etc.
Applications for the Southwest Florida Resilience Accelerator are open through August 21, and the cohort will be announced toward the end of September. The program will officially start in October.
