Consumer AI Buildathon: Build Alongside the Teams from Google & OpenAI
One day. ~30 consumer AI teams. Senior engineers from Google and OpenAI are in the room with you.
You show up with a real problem from your product and spend the day building through it with the people who make the models.
This is a co-building session, not a competition. No prizes, no judges, no pitching. Just founders building alongside other founders with serious technical expertise in the room.
Who this is for: Founders actively shipping consumer AI products. Pre-seed to seed. ~30 teams, max.
What you'll work on: Pick one or two of these. They're the hardest, most hairy problems across consumer AI right now.
1. Personality & Voice Making your AI feel consistent across your product. System prompts that hold character. Guardrails that don't kill the vibe. Handling edge cases without breaking persona.
2. Memory & Personalisation Going from "who are you?" to "it knows me." Short-term vs. long-term memory. Feedback loops. Solving cold starts without being creepy.
3. Multimodal & Content Voice, video, chat, wiring them together so they actually work. Generating content at scale without everything looking the same.
4. Cost & Latency Making the unit economics not embarrassing. Smart routing, caching, inferencing keeping per-session costs viable. Optimising for perceived speed.
Working on something that doesn't fit neatly into these four? Tell us in your registration. If we think it's relevant and the engineers in the room can help, we'll make space for it.
What you get:
→ $300 in API credits from Google Gemini & OpenAI each
→ Live office hours with senior engineers from Google and OpenAI, working through your problems with you in real time
→ Senior founders from Elevation's portfolio who've built and scaled consumer products, in the room jamming with you
→ Elevation's investment team to help pressure test your ideas and validate your problem statements
→ A WhatsApp community with all of the above for continued access after the Buildathon
→ Direct access to Elevation's partnership team to pitch your product
Who’s in the room:
From Google:
NEXT Announcements by Abirami Sukumaran, Staff Developer Advocate
Mentor/Expert: Harsh Dattani, Regional Lead, Developer Communities
From OpenAI:
Arjun Gupta, AI Deployment Engineer
Tara Lodh, Solutions Architect
Elevation Portfolio Mentors:
Arpit Mittal, SpeakX
Palash Somani, Seekho
The agenda:
9:30 – 10:00 / Arrivals & Coffee. Settle in. Informal networking.
10:00 – 10:30 / Intros & Problem Framing.
10:30 – 11:00 / Latest AI Announcements from NEXT by the Google Team & OpenAI Team
11:00 – 13:00 / Build Block 1. Heads down building. Lab engineers rotate between tables for 1:1 guidance.
13:00 – 13:45 / Lunch Informal conversation. Swap war stories. Regroup.
13:45 – 16:30 / Build Block 2. Continue building or pivot to a second challenge. Lab teams available for deeper technical dives.
16:30 – 17:30 / Show & Tell. We pick a few startups to demo what they built. 5 minutes each.
17:30 onwards / Snacks and Drinks.
Lab engineers and portfolio founders rotate between tables. At the end of the day, we'll pick a few startups to demo what they solved for. Just what you tried, what surprised you, what you'd tell another founder facing the same problem.
How to apply: Spots are limited. Max 3 people per team. Each person needs to apply individually and get approved. If you're coming with your cofounder or an engineer, have them submit their own registration.
Hosted by Elevation Capital. Supported by OpenAI and Google.