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WITH THE GRIT TO SOLVE THE
TOUGHEST CHALLENGES.
Accelerating solutions in Healthcare & Life Sciences, Security & Resiliency, Sustainable Food Systems, Climate, and Global Financial Systems.
We back the rare humans with the grit to solve the toughest challenges.
Accelerating solutions in Healthcare & Life Sciences, Security & Resiliency, Sustainable Food Systems, Climate, and Global Financial Systems.
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WHAT'S HAPPENING AT MASSCHALLENGE?
Here are just a few of the programs currently accepting applications. Don't see a fit? Follow @MassChallenge on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date on new opportunities as they open.
FINTECH • HEALTHCARE & LIFE SCIENCES
MassMutual
What if we could stop fraud before money moves? Make financial advice smarter? Help people live longer, healthier lives? MassMutual is looking for startups rethinking what's possible across finance, technology, and health.
Explore MassMutual's six challenge statements to discover where your technology could make an impact.
01 Building data that teams can trust and act on Data Management & AI Enablement +
Description
Teams pull data from many systems, spreadsheets, and SharePoint sites, then reconcile it by hand, leading to challenges across the organization. We're looking for ways to create reliable, well-governed data that teams can use with confidence.
Where a Solution Can Drive the Greatest Outcomes at MassMutual
- Trusted, AI-Ready Enterprise Context - How might we make fragmented enterprise data and knowledge AI-ready by dynamically discovering, connecting, contextualizing, and governing structured and unstructured information, so that AI applications and agents can access trusted business context without requiring every use case to build its own bespoke data integration and knowledge layer?
- AI Evaluation & Continuous Assurance - How might we continuously evaluate enterprise AI systems and agents for quality, reliability, security, compliance and business effectiveness as models, data, prompts and workflows change over time?
- Privacy-Safe/Synthetic Data - How might we enable teams to rapidly create high-quality, representative and privacy-safe data for developing, testing and evaluating AI solutions without unnecessarily exposing sensitive production data?
02 Protecting clients from fraud and exploitation before money moves Fraud & Cybersecurity (Customer Protection) +
Description
Referrals for suspected exploitation of seniors and vulnerable adults are rising sharply, and many schemes overlook traditional red flags. At the same time, fraudsters use AI to impersonate customers while legitimate customers start using AI agents to act for them. We’re looking to identify emerging technologies and data-driven solutions that strengthen MassMutual’s ability to detect, prevent, and respond to fraud and cyber-enabled threats across the customer, agent/AI, and producer ecosystem.
Where a Solution Can Drive the Greatest Outcomes at MassMutual
- Financial exploitation early warning: Identify behavioral, transactional, and identity signals that may indicate exploitation of older or vulnerable customers before funds or assets leave the institution.
- Intelligent investigator prioritization: Use risk signals and analytics to surface and prioritize cases most likely to result in customer harm or financial loss, enabling investigators to focus on the highest-risk activity.
- AI agent identity & authorization: Determine whether an AI agent or digital assistant interacting on behalf of a customer is legitimate, authorized, and operating within the scope of the customer’s consent.
- Producer risk intelligence: Identify emerging fraud, misconduct, and sales-practice risk associated with producers, including risk signals that may persist or emerge as producers move between firms.
03 Understanding and serving clients at every stage Customer Centricity (Client Experience & Growth) +
Description
Clients and advisors interact with MassMutual through various channels – such as the web, mobile, chat, email, and phone - leading to siloed feedback. For example, Protection and retirement income products can feel complex, and many clients struggle to see how they fit everyday goals. The result is missed opportunities, a persistent protection gap, and risk to the next generation of policyowners. We're looking for ways to understand client needs and make our solutions easier to act on.
Where a Solution Can Drive the Greatest Outcomes at MassMutual
- Client listening: Helping teams see the full client and advisor journey across every channel.
- Clear protection: Making protection relatable to everyday financial goals.
- Simpler selection & enrollment of products: Improving how easily advisors & customers choose and enroll for MassMutual products. This includes looking for ways to get cleaner applications in the door and reaching accurate decisions faster.
04 Keeping pace with regulation and risk Regulatory & Compliance (Risk Management) +
Description
Regulations, guidance, and expectations for AI use are changing faster than teams can translate them into policies, procedures, and training. At the same time, growing volumes of marketing, social media, website, email, customer complaint, and other compliance-related work still require significant manual review. We are looking for trusted, explainable AI solutions that can proactively identify concerns, apply established guidance, triage routine matters, and escalate higher-risk issues for human judgment. The goal is to shift from reactive review to earlier risk detection while improving auditability, consistency, efficiency, customer protection, and employee experience.
Where a Solution Can Drive the Greatest Outcomes at MassMutual
- Regulatory change: Turning new rules and guidance into updated policies, procedures, forms, and training more quickly.
- Proactive review: Identifying regulatory, disclosure, testimonial, brand concerns etc., in marketing and client communications before submission.
- Intelligent triage: Using governed AI agents to assess, route, or escalate complaints and workflows such as OBAs, PSTs, gifts and entertainment, retail communications, technology evaluations, and personal interviews, with people retaining final accountability.
- Scalable value: Reducing routine manual work, improving consistency and audit readiness, surfacing risks earlier, and creating reusable capabilities with potential value across MassMutual and the broader industry.
05 Building the advisor experience and distribution system of the future Talent Retention/Recruiting & Workflow Efficiency (Advisor & Seller Productivity) +
Description
Advisors today spend more time than they’d like re-entering client information across multiple systems, navigating platforms that with siloed data, and searching for the right resources to support client needs. Critical client insights are fragmented across CRM, reporting, workflow, and servicing platforms, while processes such as alternative investment transfers can leave advisors with limited visibility for extended periods.
Our goal is to create a unified data fabric that connects information across systems, eliminates redundant work, and delivers a seamless advisor experience. By reducing administrative burden and increasing access to connected, actionable data, advisors can spend more time focused on client relationships and advice.
Just as importantly, an exceptional advisor experience is a key driver of growth and retention. Making it easier for advisors and their teams to do business at MassMutual helps strengthen engagement, improve productivity, and position the firm as a destination where advisors can build and sustain successful practices.
Where a Solution Can Drive the Greatest Outcomes at MassMutual
- Distribution growth & capacity: Helping identify, recruit, develop and retain the next generation of advisors while enabling practices to build teams, increase capacity, and serve more clients.
- Advisor insights: Spotting the clients and next best actions with the most potential.
- Asset visibility: Helping advisors see client holdings at other firms sooner.
- Less admin: Reducing re-entry of client information across systems and time spent finding the right Home Office team.
06 Enabling our customers to live longer, healthy lives HealthTech +
Description
Our objective is to help our policyowners maximize their longevity by providing them with access to personal health technologies that can help them take a more proactive role in their personal wellness.
Where a Solution Can Drive the Greatest Outcomes at MassMutual
- Detect health conditions or risks that may not be known to policyowners through new/innovative and accessible diagnostics that can provide early and actionable pathways to treatment or avoidance
- Deliver personal insights to policyowners that allow them (and their healthcare network) to engage in their wellness through preventative action and sustained behavior change that can prevent future illness
- Provide solid evidence of positive health outcomes that result from utilization of health technology
- Support a customer experience that helps drive long-term engagement and loyalty
Eligibility, timeline, information sessions and application details
FINTECH
SMU Cox FinTech Accelerator
Connecting fintech startups from around the world with industry experts, financial institutions, and investors to accelerate commercial growth. The hybrid program combines specialized mentorship, corporate engagement, and three immersive experiences in Dallas, Texas.
HEALTHCARE & LIFE SCIENCES
Eli Lilly
Millions of transactions. Thousands of policy changes. What if AI could find what matters before anyone thinks to look? Lilly is exploring smarter ways to protect resources and improve patient access.
Explore Eli Lilly's two challenge statements to discover where your technology could make an impact.
01 Turning Copay Claims Anomalies into Recovered Dollars +
Description
Lilly’s patient affordability programs help patients get access to Lilly medicines and support millions of pharmacy transactions. Unusual activity can be hard to interpret at this scale. The challenge is not only spotting a potential issue. It is confirming what happened, pulling together evidence that partners can review, and recovering dollars when a claim should not have been paid. Vendor data also comes in different formats, so each new vendor can add more cleanup and manual case-building work. Today, this work is primarily manual which slows down validation and makes it harder to move quickly from a flagged issue to a recoverable finding. We are looking for ways to help teams move from a suspected anomaly to a validated, recoverable finding more quickly.
Where This Could Help Lilly Most
Today, teams may spend significant time reviewing data and building cases manually. A useful solution reduces that manual effort and helps program and reimbursement teams spend less time sorting through data and more time resolving the issues that matter. The main opportunities are:
- Validate issues faster: Reduce the time it takes to confirm whether a flagged transaction is a problem.
- Spot patterns earlier: See emerging patterns sooner and identify changes before they become harder to investigate.
- Create evidence partners can review: Build clear findings that make it easier for partners to assess and respond.
- Improve recovery: Move more confirmed issues toward recovered dollars.
- Make vendor data easier to use: Reduce the effort needed to standardize data and bring on new vendors.
- Focus team time: Help teams prioritize the work most likely to create value.
Startup Eligibility
We are looking for growth-stage companies with a working solution, customer traction, and the ability to test in a secure, compliant enterprise environment. Experience in transaction monitoring, investigation workflows, case management, evidence assembly, financial recovery, data standardization, or vendor onboarding would be relevant. Experience in healthcare, insurance, financial services, legal services, or another regulated industry would be helpful.
What Lilly Offers Startups
- A problem that extends beyond healthcare: Transaction integrity and anomaly investigation also matter in financial services and payments, so a strong solution could have uses beyond this challenge.
- A practical testing environment: Teams may be able to test solutions in relevant business workflows, subject to security and compliance review.
- Access to people who know the work: Startups can engage with business, analytics, and compliance teams who understand the day-to-day constraints.
- An embedded pilot: A pilot could measure time to validated findings, quality of supporting evidence, movement of confirmed findings toward recovery, vendor onboarding effort, and reviewer capacity gained.
- A path to scale: Solutions that meet security and interoperability expectations and show value may move through Lilly’s innovation process for broader consideration.
The Partner We Want
We want a partner who can reduce the manual work behind anomaly investigations, including data cleanup, transaction review, evidence creation, and case preparation. The partner will help teams validate findings faster, create evidence partners can use, lower the cost of review, and move confirmed issues toward recovery.
02 Helping Teams Spot Important Coverage Changes Faster +
Description
Health plans often update coverage policies, formularies, utilization management criteria, and plan designs. Those changes do not always show up in obvious places. They may be buried in long public documents, posted across different sites, or written in formats that are hard to compare. A team might not realize something changed until someone goes looking for it, reads through the source, and checks it against an older version. Alternatively, they may only learn of an update when a customer asks a question about an access change. We want to make that easier. The right solution would help teams know of meaningful changes soon after they are published. It would also show where the change came from and help teams understand whether it could affect patient access. Before anyone acts on the information, expert partners should be able to review and confirm the finding.
Where This Could Help Lilly Most
Market access and access strategy teams want to catch important policy changes earlier and know what to do next. We are interested in solutions that help teams:
- Catch changes earlier. Spot updates to coverage policies, formularies, utilization management criteria, and plan designs soon after they are posted.
- Get alerts to the right people. Route the right updates to the right teams, without turning every small change into another alert.
- Show the source clearly. Point users to the original document and the exact language that changed. That makes it easier to verify the finding quickly.
- Add useful context. Help teams understand why a change may matter for patient access, not just that something changed.
- Reduce manual work. Save analysts time they would otherwise spend searching, reading, and comparing policy documents by hand.
- Work within enterprise workflows. Meet Lilly’s security and compliance expectations. Also enable experts to review findings before they are used in business decisions.
Startup Eligibility
We are looking for growth-stage companies with a working product, some customer traction, and experience in secure, regulated environments. The best fit may be a company working in document intelligence, change detection, policy or regulatory monitoring, or market intelligence. Experience in healthcare, insurance, financial services, legal services, or another regulated industry would be especially helpful.
What Lilly Offers Startups
- A real problem that shows up in many markets: Healthcare is not the only industry that has to keep up with changing policies, rules, and documents. If a solution works here, it could be relevant in other regulated spaces too.
- A practical place to test: Startups may be able to test against real public policy sources and real business workflows. Any testing would be subject to Lilly’s security and compliance review.
- Input from people who know the work: Market access and access strategy experts can help explain which changes matter, how the information is used, and where the current process creates friction.
- A chance to define what success looks like: A pilot could look at how quickly changes are detected, how many meaningful updates are caught, and how useful the alerts are. It could also measure analyst time saved and whether teams actually use the tool.
- Potential to grow if it works: If a solution is useful, secure, and easy to fit into Lilly workflows, there may be an opportunity to test it more broadly across teams and therapeutic areas.
The Partner We Want
We are looking for partners who can help teams see important updates sooner, understand what changed, and trace each finding back to the source. Less time spent on manual tracking means more time focused on the work that supports patient access to Lilly medicines.
Eligibility, timeline, information sessions and application details
CLIMATE • SUSTAINABILITY
MC Switzerland Sustainable Materials Challenge
2027 Sustainable Materials Challenge connects startups with global industry leaders to advance bio-based materials, circular solutions, and technologies that turn waste into value. The goal: lower emissions, better performance, and innovations ready to scale.
REAL WORDS FROM FOUNDERS REDEFINING WHAT'S POSSIBLE.
DAVID GORY
KYLE HENRY
SHUAI LI
RICK WHITTAKER
JIM BOYTE
FEATURED PARTNERS
THANK YOU TO OUR FINANCIAL PARTNER