AI-Memory Hackathon by cognee
🧠 AI-Memory Hackathon #1 🚀
This hackathon is for developers who want to build AI with real memory and context awareness.
🏆$5,000+ Prize Pool
Main Prizes
🥇 Prize: $1,200 cash
🥈 Prize: $900 cash
🥉 Prize: $500 cash
Special Prize
🎖️ Best use of Distil labs: $1,000 SLM training credits
🎖️ Best use of Qdrant: $1,500 cash
🎖️ Best use of DigitalOcean: $400 Amex & $1,000 DO credits per teammate
🧰 Build Something Awesome
You’ll work with a local model + a prebuilt knowledge graph over realistic finance and operations data (vendors, invoices, payments, discounts). The core challenge: turn question-answering into useful agents, tools, or workflows that solve concrete problems. Think:
Finance or ops agents that reason over transactions
Auditing, anomaly detection, vendor analysis, or internal QA tools
Interfaces or automations powered by structured + free-text answers
Systems that combine memory, retrieval, and inference locally
💥 Show us what you got
You’ll have 3 minutes to stand out:
Present your powerful ideas and strategy using any tools you like
Run a live-demo that show-cases your disruptive application
⏱️ Schedule
9:00 AM — Doors open + breakfast & coffee
10:00 AM — Opening remarks + partner demos
10:30 AM — Hacking begins
1:00 PM — Lunch
4:00 PM — Project Submission Deadline - finalists selection
5:00 PM — Finalist presentation & judging
5:30 PM — Awards ceremony
6:00 PM — Event wrap-up & doors close
🚀 Technology & Venture Partners
💯 Judges
Vasilije Markovic - CEO & Founder of Cognee
Daniel Scott - Principal AI Researcher @Cognee and Brown University
Thierry Damiba - Developer Advocate @Qdrant
Lizzie Siegle - Developer Advocate @DigitalOcean
Nicole Levin - Platform @Pebblebed
🧠 About Cognee
Cognee is an open-source AI memory engine that transforms unstructured data into a persistent, queryable knowledge graph. It allows AI agents to store, retrieve, and reason over information across time. Rather than one-off RAG, Cognee provides a unified memory layer for building reliable, stateful AI systems.
About Pebblebed
Pebblebed is a technical early stage VC founded by Pam Vagata (cofounder of OpenAI, ran AI for Stripe, inventor of FBLearner Flow); Keith Adams (founded Facebook AI Research, was chief architect at Slack, 20th engineer at VMWare) and Tammie Siew (former Sequoia Southeast Asia investor, former Sequoia & Notable Capital backed founder)