Screenshot 2026-02-11 at 10.45.37 AM.png

The Gateway to Global Urban Innovation

LaunchPad 11 is the global membership ecosystem connecting innovators, cities, investors, partners, and experts working to move urban innovation into real-world impact.

It offers a curated pathway to stronger visibility, more trusted relationships, and more direct access to the people, opportunities, and partnerships shaping the future of cities.

Membership Benefits

Apply to Become a Member

I am a Solution Provider

I am a City

I am an Investor

I am a Sponsor or Partner

I am an Industry Expert

What is LaunchPad 11?

LaunchPad 11 is Leading Cities’ global virtual membership ecosystem for innovators, local governments, investors, partners, and experts working to shape more resilient, sustainable, and smart communities.

Built as a virtual version of Silicon Valley for the urban innovation ecosystem, it helps members connect faster, collaborate more intentionally, and move projects toward real-world impact.

Curated Monthly
Virtual Events

LaunchPad 11 offers a rolling calendar of virtual programming designed to bring the ecosystem together around real priorities, emerging challenges, and shared opportunities. These events create structured ways for members to exchange insight, build relationships, and engage with the people and perspectives most relevant to their work.

Access to Global Experts & Leaders

Members gain access to a global network of solution providers, advisors, and subject-matter experts who bring practical insight across sustainability, resilience, smart cities, finance, policy, and implementation. This helps members make more informed decisions, strengthen collaboration, and engage more effectively across the ecosystem.

Practical Learning & Certifications

LaunchPad 11 provides access to practical learning designed to help members work more effectively across the urban innovation ecosystem. Through Leading Cities’ certification pathways, members can deepen their understanding of government collaboration, public-private partnerships, sustainability, and innovation while building skills that support stronger engagement and execution.

Pitch Events & Matchmaking

LaunchPad 11 creates structured opportunities for members to connect around aligned priorities, relevant solutions, and emerging projects. Through curated pitch sessions, introductions, and targeted matchmaking, the platform helps members move beyond generic networking and toward more focused conversations that can lead to collaboration, investment, project development, and implementation.

Priority Access to Opportunities

Members gain visibility into high-value opportunities across the Leading Cities ecosystem, including strategic introductions, partner-led initiatives, curated recognition pathways, and opportunities to engage in new projects and collaborations. LaunchPad 11 is designed to help members identify relevant opportunities earlier and engage with them more intentionally.

Ecosystem
Access

LaunchPad 11 connects members to a global ecosystem of more than 5,000 vetted solutions, over 16,000 communities, and industry experts from around the world. By bringing the right stakeholders into closer contact earlier, the platform helps surface stronger pathways for collaboration, project development, piloting, and real-world impact.

Membership Pathways

There is a membership pathway designed to help each type of member build stronger relationships, access more relevant opportunities, and contribute more directly to projects and impact across the urban innovation ecosystem.

Choose the pathway that best fits your role.

LaunchPad 11 helps innovators stay connected to the people, opportunities, and conversations that can accelerate growth long after a single accelerator or challenge cycle ends. Membership gives you ongoing access to city leaders, investors, partners, and experts across a global ecosystem built around real-world priorities.

Instead of constantly starting over with new applications, cold outreach, or isolated networking, members gain a more direct path to visibility, stronger relationships, and opportunities that can lead to project development, partnerships, funding, and real traction.

Become a LaunchPad 11 Member

Become a Mentor or Contributing Expert

LaunchPad 11 gives local governments a more strategic way to engage innovation. Membership provides access to a curated ecosystem of solutions, experts, and collaborators aligned with real community priorities, without relying only on lengthy market scans, fragmented outreach, or one-off pilot searches.

By joining LaunchPad 11, governments gain a stronger position inside the ecosystem itself — able to surface priorities earlier, build relationships with aligned innovators and partners, and engage opportunities in a more intentional, informed, and efficient way.

Become a Featured Guest at a City Solutions Forum

Apply to Become a Member

LaunchPad 11 gives investors a more structured way to stay close to where momentum is forming across resilience, sustainability, infrastructure, and public-sector innovation. Membership provides earlier visibility into aligned innovators, stronger access to ecosystem relationships, and more informed entry points into emerging opportunities.

Rather than waiting until companies are already widely visible, investors can engage earlier with the themes, actors, and projects taking shape across the network — helping them identify relevant opportunities, build stronger relationships, and stay closer to where long-term value is being created.

Submit Your Investment Focus to Be Matched with Relevant Opportunities

Apply to Become a Member

LaunchPad 11 gives corporate partners, foundations, and ecosystem organizations a more meaningful way to engage with the people and priorities shaping the future of communities. Membership creates stronger pathways to visibility, collaboration, and strategic alignment across a curated network of innovators, local governments, investors, and experts.

Instead of one-off sponsorship or surface-level engagement, members can participate more directly in the conversations, initiatives, and relationships that help move projects forward and create measurable impact.

Explore Partnership & Sponsorship Opportunities

Apply to Become a Member

LaunchPad 11 gives experts a place to contribute where their insight can have real influence. Membership creates meaningful ways to share expertise, shape important conversations, and support the people, projects, and partnerships driving progress across the ecosystem.

Whether you bring experience in policy, implementation, finance, technology, infrastructure, or urban innovation, LaunchPad 11 helps turn that expertise into stronger relationships, more relevant opportunities, and a more visible role in work that leads to real-world impact.

Become a Mentor or Contributing Expert

Apply to Become a Member

Why Membership Matters

The value of LaunchPad 11 is not just access to a network. It is what happens when the right people are inside the same ecosystem, engaging more intentionally. Membership helps innovators, local governments, investors, partners, and experts build stronger relationships, gain earlier visibility into relevant opportunities, and create more practical pathways to collaboration and impact.

In a field where timing, trust, and alignment matter, LaunchPad 11 helps members get closer to the people, priorities, and opportunities that can move real work forward

Apply to Become a Member

Become a Mentor or Contributing Expert

What Members Say

Members describe LaunchPad 11 as a platform that creates stronger connections, more useful engagement, and more meaningful opportunities to grow within the ecosystem.

Member Impact

LaunchPad 11 Member Impact Since 2018

6,000

Jobs Created

LaunchPad 11 members have created over 6,000 jobs (and counting) to date

$620 M

2025 Revenue

The total amount of revenue (in counting) earned by LaunchPad 11 members in 2025

$3.3 B

Capital Raised

The total amount of funds (in counting) raised by LaunchPad 11 members to date

983

Patents Filed

LaunchPad 11 members have filed 983 patents (and counting) to date

Benefits of a LaunchPad 11 Membership

LaunchPad 11 membership gives members structured access to the relationships, opportunities, and capabilities that move work forward. The benefits below show how that value takes shape across city access, project pathways, strategic connections, public-sector readiness, and global visibility.

City Solutions Forums

City Solutions Forums give members a more direct path into conversations that matter. In these facilitated sessions, local governments share real priorities, challenges, and initiatives with a curated group of aligned ecosystem participants.

Rather than relying on fragmented outreach or generic networking, members gain structured opportunities to engage around real needs, test alignment early, and open stronger pathways to collaboration, project development, and implementation.

The goal is simple: fewer cold introductions, more structured conversations that can realistically move toward implementation.

Become a City Guest

Public-Sector Readiness Certifications

LaunchPad 11 gives members access to practical learning designed to strengthen collaboration across the urban innovation ecosystem. Through Leading Cities’ curriculum and certification pathways, members can deepen their understanding of government collaboration, public-private partnerships, sustainability, and innovation while building skills that support stronger engagement and execution.

For innovators, this builds the readiness and credibility needed to work successfully with governments and communities.

For governments, it helps de-risk engagement by increasing confidence that participating solution providers understand how to work within real public-sector priorities and constraints.

Learn More About Leading Cities Academy

Networking, Strategic Connections and Matchmaking

LaunchPad 11 gives members structured opportunities to get in front of the right people in the right context. Through curated pitch sessions and targeted matchmaking, members can engage with city leaders, corporate partners, investors, and ecosystem stakeholders around real priorities, active interests, and emerging opportunities.

These opportunities can include:

- Curated virtual pitch sessions

- Targeted introductions based on aligned interests and priorities

- Opportunities to present in front of cities, partners, and investors exploring relevant solutions

- Follow-on conversations that can lead to partnerships, project development, funding, or implementation pathways

These are not generic demo days. They are structured opportunities designed to create more relevant visibility, stronger alignment, and higher-value conversations across the ecosystem.

Partner With Us on a Virtual Event

Global Recognition & Nomination Pathways

LaunchPad 11 creates access to visibility and validation that members are unlikely to build on their own. Through Leading Cities’ network, members may be considered for curated nominations, partner-led opportunities, and high-profile recognition pathways that can strengthen credibility, raise profile, and open doors across the ecosystem.

These pathways include opportunities connected to globally recognized platforms such as Prince William’s Earthshot Prize, the World Economic Forum, and the Clinton Global Initiative—helping the right members gain stronger validation, broader visibility, and closer access to influential audiences.

Global Event Access &
Delegation Opportunities

Screenshot 2026-03-30 at 11.09.36 AM.png

LaunchPad 11 members receive priority access to Leading Cities–organized delegations and curated opportunities surrounding major global convenings, including Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona, the largest Smart City event globally, and other international urban innovation events.

This access can include:

- Priority ticket opportunities

- Participation in Leading Cities–hosted side events and private ecosystem gatherings

- Curated introductions to city leaders, investors, and partners

- Speaking, panel, or booth opportunities when available

- Inclusion in coordinated delegation strategy and visibility efforts

Rather than navigating major convenings alone, members engage through more intentional pathways designed to increase signal, reduce noise, and create stronger conversations before, during, and after the event. Because Leading Cities works across cities, investors, and industry year-round, these convenings become extensions of an ongoing ecosystem strategy—not isolated conference moments.

Project Pathways and
City Connections

LaunchPad 11 gives members a more direct path to where real projects begin. Through AcceliGOV — Leading Cities’ no-cost, low-risk project platform — members can connect with Leading Cities’ global network of more than 16,000 communities through structured, community-facing opportunities designed to move promising ideas closer to implementation.

Through this pathway, members can:

- Present aligned solutions directly to communities in the Leading Cities network

- Participate in structured feasibility conversations with interested communities

- Engage public-sector decision-makers already prepared to explore fit and next steps

- Move more efficiently from early alignment to project development, piloting, and implementation

Rather than relying on cold outreach or trying to break into city networks alone, LaunchPad 11 helps members engage through a more established and intentional pathway.

Learn More about AcceliGOV

Become a Member Today

LaunchPad 11 membership is curated to ensure strong alignment, relevant connections, and meaningful participation across the ecosystem.

To be a strong fit, you should be ready to:

Contribute solutions, priorities, expertise, capital, or partnership value relevant to real community challenges
Engage actively in a network built around collaboration and action
Participate in conversations and opportunities designed to move ideas, relationships, and projects forward

After you apply, our team will schedule a short conversation to better understand your role, priorities, and fit within the network.

Apply to Become a Member

Become a Sponsor, Expert or City Guest

Our Innovation Pathway

LaunchPad 11 serves as the challenge-definition engine and ecosystem hub within Leading Cities, bringing together cities, innovators, investors, and partners to identify priority challenges and collaborate on potential solutions.

Scroll to view