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XPRIZE Foundation operates in industries of public education and innovation management in order to encourage new developments. The company was founded by Peter Diamandis in 1995, in Culver City, California, United States.
The company has overseen and operated seventeen competitions in the interests of such topics as space, oceans, learning, health, energy, environments, transportation, safety, and robotics. XPRIZE has awarded over $140 million in prizes since launching, and awarded their denominations to industry-changing technologies. The first prize the company awarded was given at the value of $10 million.
XPRIZE holds their competitions and awards projects to meet their mission of articulating a vision of a positive future, establish and incentivize competition in markets, and to accelerate breakthroughs.
In response to the pandemic outbreak of COVID-19, the XPRIZE Foundation has launched a $1 million challenge to make a new form of personal protective equipment, namely a face mask, in order to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. The challenge is so-named the Next-Gen Mask Challenge, and is meant to help make wearing a mask more comfortable, functional, accessible, and fashionable.
Breathe is a company that builds technology for efficient and scalable conversion of carbon dioxide. Breathe develops new strategic tools to design promising catalytic materials for the efficient and selective conversion of CO2 into methanol and other value-added chemicals. The team succeeds in integrating several components of the overall technology in a single unit. The technology development was planned in four stages - bench, pilot, demo, and commercial, having CO2-processing capacities of 1 kg/day, 5 kg/day, 300 kg/day, and 2000 kg/day, respectively. While CO2 capture technology is well established and readily available, Breathe's technology focuses primarily on conversion technology development and integrating it with different CO2 capture subsystems to offer a complete solution.
Breathe Applied Sciences Pvt. Ltd. forms in March 2016 at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) in Bengaluru, India as a part of the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE competition comprising of Prof. Sebastian C. Peter, Dr. Rakshith Belur, and Prof. Wumesh V. Waghmare. The team focuses on the methodology and design of materials targeted to scalable and efficient conversion of waste CO2 emitted from coal and natural gas power generation to methanol and other value-added products.
During the course of the technology development, Breathe has been selected as one of the 100 best start-ups by Karnataka State Government in 2017 through the program ELEVATE-100. CleanEquity Monaco (2019) selected Breathe's CO2-to-methanol technology as the best runner-up in the category of "Excellence in the Field of Environmental Technology Research".