Traverse City's NMC Opens Blue Tech Challenge Registration; $55,000 Prizes

Northwestern Michigan College has opened registration for the Great Lakes Blue Tech Challenge, a competition that will award $55,000 in seed funding to startups developing solutions for the Great Lakes. First prize is $30,000, second prize is $15,000 and third prize is $10,000, and finalists will present at the Lakebed 2030 conference in Traverse City on Sept. 17, gaining regional visibility and investor networking opportunities.

The Challenge is open to entrants from the United States and Canada, including entrepreneurs, startups, early-career professionals, and student-led ventures. Registration closes March 27 and first-round pitches are scheduled for June 29. Organizers say the competition seeks technologies and business models focused on resilience and adaptation, aquatic ecosystems and aquaculture, maritime mobility and exploration systems, water treatment and purification, resource recovery and circular solutions, water intelligence and decision support, and water infrastructure and asset management.

This is the third Blue Tech Challenge run by NMC, and it runs in parallel with the college’s Freshwater Research and Innovation Center, part of a broader push to make Traverse City a freshwater innovation hub. The program’s track record provides concrete evidence of local economic impact. After 35 initial inquiries, 18 teams entered the 2025 Challenge, which was won by Traverse City-based Wave Lumina. The company manufactures a portable, rapid-response PFAS testing device and previously placed second in Aquahacking the Great Lakes in 2024.

Wave Lumina’s trajectory illustrates commercialization potential in local blue-tech entrepreneurship. Since launching in founder Vernon LaLone’s spare bedroom in 2023, the company has secured a $305,000 National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research grant, hired two employees who are NMC alumni, and served its first paying customers in December. The firm now operates from a lab in NMC’s Parsons-Stulen Building, and LaLone has said he hopes to become a tenant at the Freshwater Research and Innovation Center when it opens in 2027.

“It’s all maturing together in a way which is beneficial for northern Michigan,” said Canadian Trade Commissioner Dakota Korth, a judge for the 2025 competition.

For Grand Traverse County, the Blue Tech Challenge represents both environmental and economic implications. The Great Lakes supply drinking water, support tourism and fisheries, and anchor manufacturing and shipping corridors; innovations in PFAS testing, water purification and asset management can reduce municipal costs, protect local recreation economies, and create skilled jobs. At the same time, federal and private grant flows into water technology suggest a growing market: seed prizes, NSF SBIR awards and conference exposure can help startups move from prototypes to paying customers and attract follow-on investment.

Registration and additional details are available at nmc.edu/bluetechchallenge. For direct inquiries contact Denver Peters, Director, Strategic Portfolio and Development, at dpeters@nmc.edu or (231) 995-1215. The competition offers an early entry point for local founders and students to plug into a scaling regional ecosystem; the next key dates are the March 27 registration deadline, June 29 first-round pitches and finalist presentations at Lakebed 2030 on Sept. 17.