Hackathon: Empathetic Agents
Empathetic Agents, by EverSettled x ElevenLabs x Lovable - London chapter
You've built an agent, but have you built one that knows when to stay quiet? Or one that catches itself before it accidentally gives legal advice?
Join EverSettled, partnered with ElevenLabs and Lovable, for an evening hackathon about building AI that shows up when life gets hard: a diagnosis, a loss, a layoff, a night you can't sleep. Most software treats a person in crisis like a support ticket. We want to see what it takes to build something better, and safer.
Tracks
Pick a track. Both leave room to be creative, one just has a wider brief than the other.
Track 1: Presence
An open, exploratory track. Build an agent that helps someone through something hard, not by answering one question well, but by being there for the stretch of it. Two directions to take it, or blend them:
A copilot: an agent that helps someone find distraction, meaning, or joy alongside the hard thing they're going through. A bucket list generator for someone with a new diagnosis, a late-night chat companion, a way to plan a good day in the middle of a bad month, etc.
The infrastructure to track progress and make decisions: the system underneath: what does it remember, and how does it decide when to check in versus when to leave someone alone.
This track will be judged on originality, technical execution, and how genuinely the agent responds to a person going through something hard. This is a template to get you started, but get creative with the direction.
Track 2: Guardrails
A narrower brief, same freedom to solve it your way. Build the layer that catches an empathetic agent when it gets something wrong.
AI guardrails for dealing with death: the checks that stop an agent overstepping, sounding falsely certain, or saying the wrong thing around death, grief, legal, or financial matters.
An outlier detector: a layer that spots when someone's signal is a real crisis, and routes it differently.
This track will be judged on technical rigor, how well it catches the failure case, and how it holds up against inputs designed to break it.
Best teams from both tracks will be invited to the stage to demo and share their approach.
Schedule
5:00–5:30 PM: Doors open, food, team formation
5:15–5:30 PM: Welcome and challenge briefing
5:30–8:30 PM: Hacking
8:30–9:15 PM: Demos
9:15–9:45 PM: Judging
9:45–10:00 PM: Awards and close
Prizes
Track 1 (Presence): cash + ElevenLabs credits
Track 2 (Guardrails): cash+ ElevenLabs credits
Hosts
EverSettled: The infrastructure for inheritance, helping families navigate probate and estate settlement after a death with clear guidance instead of a $5,000 attorney bill or a stack of confusing forms.
Sponsors
ElevenLabs. The voice AI platform behind natural, expressive text-to-speech and conversational voice agents. If your build talks back to someone, tone and pacing matter as much as the words themselves. Use ElevenLabs to make your agent sound like it's actually paying attention, not reading a script. elevenlabs.io
Lovable. Build a full working app by describing what you want in plain language. If your team has more idea than infrastructure, Lovable is the fastest way to get a real interface in front of the judges by demo time. lovable.dev
Judges
Our judges have been carefully selected for their hands-on technical expertise and track record building real AI products, bringing both depth and practical judgment to every submission they evaluate.
Maria Luque is an AI/ML engineer, published author, and MSc AI graduate (DeepMind Scholar), and co-founder of YAMLRG, one of London's leading ML research communities, now backing exceptional technical founders at Entrepreneurs First.
Preesha Gehlot is the CTO of Iridium, building AI agents for autonomous invoice finance to unlock the $7T gap in the US debt market. She comes from a machine learning background spanning industry and research - shipping recommendation systems at Bloomberg and anomaly detection at Microsoft, with published research on causal inference and graph neural networks at top-tier AI venues.
Adrian Sager is a Founder and computational scientist, in the past working for ESA’s ExoMars mission, doing AI research at IBM, and leading teams in AI for healthcare, now he helps accelerate the development of complex hardware like medical devices, robots, and rockets
Jaka Bavdek is the Founder of Immatura and Co-founder of 8x, a San Francisco-based startup building the largest AI marketplace, orchestrating more than 200,000 humans across UGC, sales, and research.
Darijan Ducic is a former entrepreneur and founding team member at 8x. Leading branding, sales, and partnerships while helping build one of the fastest-growing AI companies through community, events, and strategic partnerships.
Jacob Effenberger is the CTO of EverSettled, guiding people through their toughest times in life with the help of empathetic AI agents.