Serena Shapero

Director of Individual Giving @XPRIZE

XPRIZE is the world-recognized leader in designing and operating large-scale incentive prize competitions to help solve our planet’s greatest challenges. Our competitions spotlight difficult problems and set audacious but achievable goals – tied to measurable objectives – that attracts a diverse community of innovators to focus on areas that have traditionally been neglected or unaddressed by industry, governments and other nonprofits, or where current solutions need to be accelerated. In the past 29 years, XPRIZE has launched some of the largest incentive competitions ever run. We proved the concept in our first prize, the $10M Ansari XPRIZE for sub-orbital spaceflight, which helped catalyze the $100B+ commercial space industry—an exceptional return on philanthropic investment and the proof of concept for our incentive prize model. Today, we continue to tackle issues ranging from environmental conservation to health, food, education, deep tech, and more – all in an effort to build a abundant future for all in which we can be bold enough to challenge unexamined and tightly held assumptions about how the world ought to be, to bring forth new possibilities and innovation. Our competitions have collectively launched over $300M in aggregate prize purses. These competitions comprise over teams of innovators, scientists, and entrepreneurs from 140 countries to solve the world’s grand challenges. Each XPRIZE competition is designed to push the limits of what is possible and demonstrate that anyone, anywhere can be a part of our global movement.