Louisiana Startup Wins Smart City Challenge, Beating Microsoft and IBM

The first ever Smart City Challenge took place in April in Lafayette, bringing together innovators over 24 hours to improve the city.

Hosted by LUS Fiber, the city’s community-owned telecommunications system, the Challenge was created to identify ways to better transportation and quality of life in Lafayette.

The problem posed to this year’s competitors was:  “With traffic congestion increasing in Lafayette, do we feel safe in public transit? How can we improve transportation so that it may in turn improve our quality of life? How can we as a community come together and solve for traffic congestion and come up with social impact solutions that can lower insurance costs?”

Louisiana-based 360Fuel, an IoT company delivering connected fueling and C-Store retail, took home $10,000 in cash and prizes for winning the Challenge. The company’s winning solution was a sensor, mobile, cloud, and AI-driven platform for smart cities called Geaux, which, “incentivizes transportation options like carpooling, bike-sharing, bus-riding and walking, while enabling the quickest directions and fastest parking times,” shared a news release.

“Creating this civic hackathon was an important step towards paving the way for Lafayette as a Smart City,” said Mayor-President Joel Robideaux. “We wanted to showcase and connect our local talent in order to unleash the potential of our city, and introduce technological innovators to our community.”

The Smart City Challenge was an invite-only event, and 360Fuel ended up winning over other participating companies such as Microsoft, IBM, and CGI.