Miami-Dade County has committed up to $300,000 in pilot funding to technology companies able to help its water and sewer utility recover value from waste streams, predict infrastructure failures and modernise legacy operational workflows. The initiative, announced on 19 May 2026, will channel $100,000 each into at least three early-to-growth-stage firms selected to test their solutions inside one of the largest municipal water systems in the United States.
A Joint Public Procurement Vehicle for Emerging Water Tech
The programme is the eighth round of the Public Innovation Challenge run by the Miami-Dade Innovation Authority, the first public innovation authority of its kind in the United States. For this edition, MDIA is partnering with the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department (WASD), the county’s Department of Environmental Resource Management (DERM) and the Florida International University Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering to co-design and supervise the pilots.
Applications close on 15 July 2026, with submissions handled through the official challenge portal. MDIA has indicated that “at least three” firms will be selected, leaving room for additional awardees if the candidate pool warrants it.
Four Operational Problem Areas in Scope
The call for proposals targets four specific capability gaps. The first is the conversion of fats, oils and grease, known in the industry as FOG, captured from sewer infrastructure into renewable or circular-economy products such as biofuels. The second is the management, recovery and repurposing of treatment byproducts including biogas and lime residuals.
The remaining two relate to operational digitalisation. WASD is seeking planning and maintenance tools that integrate with existing sensor networks, and data-centralisation or workflow systems capable of replacing legacy practices with predictive and intelligent alternatives. The framing aligns with WASD’s WAVE Plan, the department’s 2023 to 2028 strategic roadmap.
Why FOG Is a Pressure Point
FOG is identified by the county as a major driver of sewer blockages, backups, overflows and maintenance costs, and Miami-Dade reports spending millions of dollars each year clearing grease from its pipes. Reducing those interventions is a direct cost lever and one of the few areas where a pilot can show measurable return on investment within a single budget cycle.
The challenge is structured to reward solutions that can shift the utility away from a linear “use, treat, dispose” approach toward circular resource recovery, repositioning waste streams as feedstock rather than a disposal liability. Comparable shifts are being explored at other US and European utilities, including biogas valorisation at large wastewater treatment plants and lime residual reuse in construction materials.
A System at Significant Operational Scale
The scale of the utility frames the urgency. WASD serves close to 3 million residents and a county that hosts more than 28 million visitors annually. According to figures published by the county, the department oversees more than 8,700 miles of water mains and more than 4,100 miles of sewer lines, manages over 450,000 direct customer accounts and conducts more than 150,000 drinking-water quality tests each year for regulatory compliance.
WASD’s own departmental profile reports more than 14,000 miles of combined water and sewer pipelines, over 1,000 pump stations and six water and wastewater treatment plants under its operational oversight. A parallel $8.9 billion Capital Improvement Program is already in execution to upgrade pipes, pump stations and treatment plants. The innovation challenge is positioned as a faster-cycle complement to that long-horizon capital programme rather than a substitute for it.
A Track Record That Now Extends to Water
This is the first time MDIA has applied the Public Innovation Challenge model to water and wastewater, having previously deployed it across other municipal verticals. MDIA reports that across prior editions it has deployed more than $1 million in challenge funding and reviewed proposals from more than 580 startups across 65 countries, with the cumulative applicant base representing roughly $7 billion in revenue and $4 billion in capital raised.
The challenge model echoes MDIA’s earlier work with the county’s Department of Solid Waste Management, where a similarly structured competition produced pilots for app-based recycling guidance, biochar production and worm-farm composting. Kurrant reported in January on the Miami-Dade Department of Solid Waste Management’s deployment of the Scrapp recycling-education app, one of three pilots selected through that round, which the county is using to address a 37 percent diversion rate and 40 percent contamination rate.
“This challenge allows us to work directly with companies that can help us improve our operations, enable circular resource recovery, and hopefully result in cost savings strategies for our rate payers,” said Jay J. Fink, P.E., Director of the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department, in the county’s 19 May 2026 press release.
Market Context for Smart Water Procurement
The Miami-Dade challenge lands in a US smart water market where utilities are increasingly pairing capital improvement programmes with shorter-cycle pilots to test sensor analytics, AI-driven asset management and resource-recovery technologies. Federal infrastructure funding under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, including drinking water and wastewater state revolving funds, has expanded the appetite for vendor experimentation, while utilities face mounting pressure from PFAS regulation, climate-linked stormwater volumes and ageing pipe networks.
The county is not disclosing a target list of vendor categories or named technology suppliers in the application phase, leaving the field open to startups working in areas such as anaerobic digestion, lipid-to-biofuel conversion, machine-learning-based leak and blockage prediction, GIS-integrated asset planning and utility data fabric platforms.
