Applied AI
Agents that ship.
Reasoning systems, tool-use, retrieval, evals that catch real failures. Production over prototype.
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Climate + Software
"Tools that move the needle, not the conversation."
Every edition picks a topic that deserves 48 hours and a room of senior operators. No theme-park JavaScript demos — these are the categories we keep coming back to.
Agents that ship.
Reasoning systems, tool-use, retrieval, evals that catch real failures. Production over prototype.
From paper to PR.
Training infra, inference at scale, distributed systems for ML. Engineering, not arXiv.
Wet × dry lab.
Protein design, single-cell analysis, lab automation, drug-target prediction. The hackathon a wet lab can actually use Monday.
Measurable impact.
Verifiable carbon accounting, mitigation tools, market design, registries. Software that lowers carbon — not the conversation.
Voice as the surface.
Voice agents, accessibility, music, live transcription, voice-first apps. Where voice carries the product, not a feature.
Physical systems.
Perception, planning, control. Manipulation, navigation, edge inference. Bring hardware, ship a demo.
Click through for the full recap — winners, sponsor wall, the schedule, and a few photos from the venue.
We read every application. Tell us what you've shipped, who you ship with, and why this topic. ~30% acceptance rate per edition.
Friday night kickoff in the host city. The brief drops. You meet your team if you don't already have one.
48 hours, in-person. Mentors from sponsor companies float through. Sleep is optional. Coffee is not.
Sunday afternoon. Six minutes on stage to a room of judges, sponsors, and companies hiring. Prizes that night.
Sponsor an edition or send your team as a hiring partner. Mentor on Saturday, judge on Sunday, and hire on Monday — most of our shippers are open to their next move.
Apply to the next edition or co-host one in your city.
Patient outcomes.
Diagnostics, drug repurposing, clinical workflows, EHR pipelines. Working with real labs and real data partners.
Trust at the protocol.
ZK proofs, verifiable compute, decentralized identity, registries. Hard math, useful primitives.
Software that respects taste.
Design systems, plugins, generative layout, type tooling, accessibility kits. The hackathon designers, not just engineers, can win.
DevX as the moat.
IDEs, build pipelines, debuggers, code review, infra tooling. The boring software that compounds — built well.
Beyond the rectangle.
AR / VR / MR for the Vision Pro era. Spatial UIs, hand tracking, immersive workflows. Mixed reality worth wearing.
Adversarial-first.
Threat modelling, privacy-preserving primitives, zero-knowledge UX, supply-chain hardening. The kind that stops a real attack — not a checkbox.
48 hours, one playable.
Mechanics, level design, netcode, procedural systems, mobile-first. Bring the gameplay loop you can't stop thinking about.
Atoms that ship bits.
Embedded systems, IoT, microcontrollers, sensor fusion, on-device inference. Bring hardware, leave with a demo on a desk.
Software for makers.
Writing, drawing, filmmaking, podcasting, music production. Build the tool you wish existed for your own work.
Money that flows differently.
Payments, lending, open banking, on-chain rails, fraud detection. Real money problems, real risk surface.
Programmable money, programmable trust.
Smart contracts, DeFi protocols, on-chain identity, cross-chain bridges, on-chain games. Where the protocol is the product.
Models that don't bite.
Evals that catch the failures benchmarks miss, red-teaming pipelines, interpretability tooling, alignment research infra. Hard, important, underserved.
Pipelines that don't break at 3 a.m.
Real-time streams, lakehouse layouts, schema evolution, data observability. The plumbing that lets analytics ship.
Multiplayer everything.
CRDTs, sync engines, presence, offline-first apps, conflict resolution. The hard part of every modern document.
Software with coordinates.
Mapping, location intelligence, satellite imagery, routing, OpenStreetMap tooling. Bring a dataset, ship a usable map by Sunday.
Software everyone can use.
Assistive tools, screen-reader-first apps, voice control, eye tracking, alt-text generation. Built with disabled users, shipped for them.
Algorithms before hardware.
Variational circuits, hybrid classical/quantum, error mitigation, quantum-inspired methods. Build for the machine that's almost here.
Government that ships.
Open data tools, public-service workflows, transparency dashboards, civic accessibility. Built for the public, in public.
Models with a director's eye.
Text-to-image, video gen, music gen, controllable diffusion. Tools that put model output in the hands of a creator with taste.
Watts as data.
Demand response, smart-meter analytics, grid stability, EV charging, renewable forecasting. The unsexy stack that keeps the lights on.
Atoms moving on time.
Routing, inventory, last-mile, customs paperwork, demand forecasting. Software for the physical economy — boring, brutal, immensely valuable.
Don't see your domain? Sponsors propose edition topics — talk to us about co-hosting.Propose a topic