For decades, one of conservation’s greatest challenges has been visibility. How do you protect what you cannot fully see, measure, or understand?
That question was at the heart of XPRIZE Rainforest, a five-year, $10 million competition launched in 2019 to accelerate new technologies capable of rapidly surveying and analyzing rainforest biodiversity. Today, the newly released XPRIZE Rainforest Impact Report shows how that competition helped move biodiversity monitoring from a slow, fragmented process into a turning point for biodiversity monitoring
All early evidence suggests that the competition did more than award a prize. It accelerated a new field of biodiversity intelligence.
What the Impact Report Reveals
The XPRIZE Rainforest Impact Report captures the momentum that continued beyond the competition itself. Among its key findings:
- $163M+ in capital mobilized
- 27x return on philanthropic investment
- 75+ conservation pilots deployed across more than 5M hectares
- Commercial adoption and engagement with organizations including Cargill, Unilever, Klabin
- Continued use of competition-developed technologies across conservation, climate, biodiversity, and supply chain applications
Together, these signals point to something larger than individual team success. They show how incentive competitions can accelerate an entire ecosystem of innovation; helping move ideas from prototype to deployment, and from scientific possibility to real-world application.
The Competition Behind the Impact
Launched in 2019, XPRIZE Rainforest, sponsored by Alana Foundation, challenged teams from around the world to develop technologies capable of rapidly surveying rainforest biodiversity at unprecedented speed and scale. The competition concluded in 2024 with Limelight Rainforest receiving the Grand Prize. Map of Life Rapid Assessments (MOLRA) and the Brazilian Team were also recognized for their groundbreaking approaches to biodiversity monitoring, leveraging technologies such as artificial intelligence, environmental DNA (eDNA), bioacoustics, drones, and remote sensing. Together, the winning teams demonstrated new ways to make biodiversity visible in some of the world's most complex ecosystems. Their work helped lay the foundation for the impact highlighted throughout the report.
A Blueprint for What Comes Next
The Impact Report shows that XPRIZE Rainforest is a proof point for a broader idea: targeted philanthropic capital can unlock outsized impact when paired with ambitious goals, global competition, and real-world validation.
As biodiversity loss and climate change intensify, the need for scalable nature-based innovation is more important than ever before. XPRIZE Rainforest set out to fulfill this need and demonstrated that progress protecting the living world is possible.
The competition may be complete, but its impact is still unfolding.
Read the full XPRIZE Rainforest Impact Report to explore the teams, technologies, and outcomes shaping the future of biodiversity monitoring.