XPRIZE Rainforest Impact Report Reveals $163M+ Mobilized to Advance Biodiversity Monitoring and Conservation

• At a time when biodiversity solutions are needed most, XPRIZE Rainforest Impact Report demonstrates tangible impact. 
• Competition spurred 27x prize-purse return on investment, generated over 280 new jobs, and deployed over 75 conversation pilots. 

June 22, 2026 -- XPRIZE, the world's leader in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions to solve humanity's grand challenges, today released the XPRIZE Rainforest Impact Report, revealing how its five-year, $10 million competition accelerated breakthrough solutions to help conservationists, Indigenous communities, and decision-makers better understand and protect  rainforest ecosystems.  

XPRIZE Rainforest, sponsored by Alana Foundation, launched in 2019, with a goal to accelerate the innovation of novel technologies that rapidly and comprehensively survey biodiversity and produce impactful insights to inform conservation efforts. The competition culminated in November 2024 with Limelight Rainforest earning the $5 million Grand Prize, alongside runners-up Map of Light Rapid Assessments (MOLRA) and the Brazilian Team whose breakthroughs in environmental DNA (eDNA), bioacoustics, imaging, and artificial intelligence accelerated the development of field-ready biodiversity monitoring systems.

"One of the greatest barriers to protecting biodiversity has always been our inability to measure it at the speed and scale the challenge demands," said David Babson, Executive Vice President of the Energy, Climate, & Nature Domain at XPRIZE. "XPRIZE Rainforest demonstrated that a competition can accelerate entirely new technologies, mobilize significant follow-on capital, and create solutions capable of transforming how we understand and protect nature. The results captured in this report are evidence of a new field emerging and a blueprint for the next generation of nature-based innovation."

XPRIZE Rainforest Impact Report tracks the evolution from competition into a turning point for biodiversity monitoring. In the year and a half since the competition concluded, its impact can be seen across five dimensions:

• Creating a New Biodiversity Intelligence Ecosystem: XPRIZE Rainforest brought together more than 2,100 innovators, 600 institutions, and participants from 60 countries. This fostered unprecedented collaboration across artificial intelligence, robotics, ecology, molecular biology, and Indigenous knowledge systems to tackle one of conservation's greatest challenges.
• Turning Innovation Into Action: Technologies developed through the competition supported more than 75 conservation deployments across more than 5 million hectares, helping transform biodiversity monitoring from a fragmented research activity into deployable infrastructure for conservation, restoration, agriculture, and climate action.
• Accelerating Scientific Discovery: Finalist teams contributed more than 4,000 peer-reviewed publications and nearly 250,000 citations, helping strengthen the scientific foundation for the field.
• Unlocking Capital and Market Confidence: Collectively, teams raised approximately $163.56M during and after the competition— representing a 16.3x of the $10M prize purse—while expanding investor participation from 16 to more than 100 funders, demonstrating growing confidence in biodiversity intelligence solutions.
• Advancing Breakthrough Technologies: Teams generated 237 active and pending patents, with nearly two-thirds filed during the competition, demonstrating accelerated innovation in scalable biodiversity monitoring technologies, including advanced sensor systems, AI-driven analytics, and integrated field-deployable platforms.   

“At a meeting of the XPRIZE Innovation Board, I proposed the idea of a prize dedicated to protecting the Amazon and other tropical forests. It was clear that realizing this vision would require a bold commitment, one that embraces risk and challenges conventional approaches,” said Ana Lucia Villela, Founder & President of Alana. “XPRIZE Rainforest Tropical Forests was born from this ambition, at a moment when biodiversity loss represents one of the most urgent crises in humanity’s relationship with nature. It is helping expand scientific knowledge while also creating bridges between research, local knowledge, conservation, health, bioeconomy models and future generations. For Alana, investing in this work is, above all, a commitment to children and to our collective future, because protecting biodiversity today is a concrete way to expand the possibilities for life tomorrow.”

The report comes at a time when only 25% of the world's remaining tropical rainforests are considered high-integrity forests, meaning they remain structurally intact and minimally disturbed by human activity. The rainforest continues to be destroyed at a rapid rate, despite being home to half of all living animal and plant species on the planet. The findings highlight how new biodiversity monitoring technologies are helping reveal life that might otherwise remain unseen—including the first known images of two living species captured during competition testing—while providing conservationists with faster, more actionable data to protect vulnerable ecosystems. 

“What made XPRIZE Rainforest transformative for me was the collaborative synthesis it enabled,” said Tom Walla, Founder and CEO of Limelight Rainforest. “The competition brought together roboticists, academic ecologists, Indigenous leaders, AI researchers, molecular biologists—even neuroscientists—around a single, measurable performance goal. It pushed us to integrate disciplines that rarely intersect and to operate as one cohesive system under real-world constraints. That integration strengthened our architecture, improved our deployment efficiency, and ultimately allowed Limelight to deliver the performance that secured the Grand Prize.”

The full XPRIZE Rainforest Impact Report is available here.