The startup tech “incubator” 1776 is expanding beyond its D.C. base. At a party last night at its 15th Street office—featuring a truly dreadful cover band butchering every already-bad radio hit of the last few years—the facility’s founders said they are hoping to attract the most inventive startups they can find to bring their works to Washington.

“We’re going to identify the most promising startups around the world who are tackling the worlds biggest problems,” Evan Burfield, one of 1776’s founders, said of the competition.

The “Challenge Cup,” as 1776 is calling it, will sift through upstart companies in 16 cities around the world, eventually settling on 64 finalists to come to D.C. next May. In particular, the contest is looking for companies specializing in education, health care, resource management, smart growth, and just about anything that can have a policy angle attached to it.

The goal is to keep burnishing D.C.’s attempt to be an East Coast hub of high-tech businesses, according to 1776’s founders and Mayor Vince Gray, whose administration has made significant financial investments in the startup facility since it opened in February. The contest is being funded in part by a $180,000 from the office of the deputy mayor for planning and economic development; the District government previously committed $200,000 to getting 1776 up and running.

“We want cities in Silicon Valley to say ‘We want to be the District of Columbia of the west’,” a particularly amped-up Gray said at the 1776 event.

Since taking office, Gray’s administration has made several forays into developing D.C.’s tech economy. Not all have panned out as rosily as initially forecast, notably LivingSocial, which received a $32.5 million tax break last year. (Though the tax break does not go into effect until 2015, and then only if the struggling daily deals company can show profitability, which it hasn’t yet.)

But 1776 is shaping up better in officials’ eyes. “It’s probably one of the best investments D.C. has made,” Gray’s spokesman Pedro Ribeiro said. “All it takes is one of their startups to hit it big.”