XPRIZE Foundation is a non-profit organization that designs and hosts public competitions intended to encourage technological development.

In 1996, entrepreneur Peter Diamandis offered a $10-million prize to the first privately financed team that could build and fly a three-passenger vehicle 100 kilometers into space twice within two weeks.

It successfully challenged teams to build private spaceships capable of carrying three people and fly two times within two weeks to open the space frontier.

The first part of the Ansari XPRIZE requirements was fulfilled by Mike Melvill on September 29, 2004, On SpaceShipOne, a spacecraft designed by Burt Rutan and financed by Paul Allen, co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft.

After the 2004 success there was ample media coverage to afford both Scaled Composites and XPRIZE additional support for them to expand and continue to pursue their aims.

[4] The goal of the Progressive Insurance Automotive XPRIZE was to design, build and race super-efficient vehicles that achieve 100 MPGe (2.35 liter/100 kilometer) efficiency, produce less than 200 grams/mile well-to-wheel CO2 equivalent emissions, and could be manufactured for the mass market.

The $1 million prize had a goal to inspire a new generation of innovative solutions that will speed the pace of cleaning up seawater surface oil resulting from spillage from ocean platforms, tankers, and other sources.

The team of Elastec/American Marine won the challenge by developing a device that skims oil off water three times faster than previously existing technology.

[7] The Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander XCHALLENGE (NGLLXPC) was a competition (co-hosted by NASA) to build precise, efficient small rocket systems.

[9] On November 11, 2014, the winner was named to be team DMI, led by Eugene Y. Chan, MD, whose entry was the rHEALTH technology which used lasers and nanostrips to perform vast multiplexing on samples.

[13] The $10 million prize is awarded for creating a mobile device that can "diagnose patients better than or equal to a panel of board certified physicians".

The goal for competing teams is to develop a safety device for women that can autonomously and inconspicuously trigger an emergency alert while transmitting information to a network of community responders.

[19] The team, led by architect David Hertz, intends to use the award to productize the system to address water scarcity in the developing world.

[20] The Global Learning XPRIZE, launched in September 2014, is a $15-million prize to create mobile apps to improve reading, writing, and arithmetic in developing nations.

The finalist of the group, that then develops an app producing the highest performance gains, will win an additional $10 million top prize.

[22] On December 14, 2015, XPRIZE Founder Peter Diamandis announced the launch of a new $7 million prize that will be a three-year global competition that challenges researchers to build better technologies for mapping Earth's seafloor.

[23] On May 31, 2019, the grand prize winner, receiving a total of $4M, was GEBCO-NF Alumni, an international team based in the United States, while KUROSHIO, from Japan, claimed $1M as the runner-up.

[27] The $1 million Next-Gen Mask Prize is open to only 16–24 year olds and was sponsored by Marc Benioff and Jim Cramer, the host of Mad Money on CNBC.

At the competition finals, held in November 2022 in Long Beach, CA, USA, the avatar systems were evaluated on their support for remotely interacting with humans, exploring new environments, and employing specialized skills.

The prize would award $20 million to the first team to land a rover on the Moon that successfully roved more than 500 meters and transmitted back high-definition images and video.

[45] Round three began in April 2018 as the 27 semifinalists were cut down to ten finalists; each is receiving an equal share of $5 million milestone prize money.

[49][50] In 2020, the XPRIZE "Feed the next billion" challenge was launched as a $15 million 3-year competition with the goal of developing authentic chicken breast or fish filet alternatives, made from non-animal based ingredients.

[54] In November 2023, XPRIZE announced the largest prize to date of $101 million for medical interventions targeting the biology of aging that show a restoration of 10 or more years of function in muscle, cognitive, and immune clinical endpoints.