c0mpiled-15: Penn State
📅 Sunday, Oct 11, 2026 | 12:00PM – 9:00PM
📍 Penn State University | Engineering Design & Innovation Building
🍕 Dinner, Drinks, and Snacks provided!!
c0mpiled, (by Transpose Platform) and Builder's Collective are teaming up once more to host another amazing hackathon!
Join us for an evening of building, meeting driven founders, and turning bold ideas into real products!!
Challenge
Track 1: Transpose Platform
Challenge A: Build a Self-Improving Agent Team
Powered by Luminal (YC S25)
Build a system where multiple AI agents work in parallel to improve a solution through repeated rounds of proposing, testing, and learning.
Pick a problem with a measurable outcome, such as optimizing code, improving a game-playing bot, or solving a scheduling problem.
Use DeepSeek or GLM Flash models hosted on Luminal Cloud to explore competing approaches, evaluate them, and feed the results into the next round.
Your demo should show:
Your starting baseline
A working system
How performance improves over successive rounds
Your final solution’s performance on fresh tests that weren’t used during optimization
Judged based on relative improvement and problem difficulty, not raw scores across unrelated problems.
Challenge B: YC Requests for Startups
Pick any topic from Y Combinator’s Requests for Startups Fall 2026!
Track 2: Build AND Sell!
This track is for those who want to make sales TODAY.
At so many hackathons, the winners are those who build a flashy dashboard or are able to demo their product in a fancy way.
Winners of this track will be those who successfully build and validate their product by getting actual sales, or getting close to sales, during the event!
To help you with this, we’ll be bringing in BC’s local business connections so you can find problems to solve, quickly validate ideas, and hopefully create connections that’ll last longer than this hackathon!
Bloomerang Challenge: An AI Agent for Volunteer Coordinators
Nonprofits run on volunteers, and the people who coordinate them are buried in busywork.
1. Find someone to interview.
Talk to a volunteer coordinator from a THON committee, a club, or a local nonprofit.
2. Find the problem.
Ask what part of their week they’d hand off if they could.
3. Build an AI agent that does it.
The agent should do the work, and the coordinator should stay in charge.
4. Demo it to the person you interviewed.
Credits
Luminal (YC S25): $1,000 in free inference on Luminal Cloud
Prizes
Track 1 Prizes
Transpose Platform
🥇 1st Place: $3,000
Plus a 1:1 session with Joe Fioti, Founder & CEO of Luminal and PSU alum.
🥈 2nd Place: $1,500
🥉 3rd Place: $500
AGI Inc: Best Use of On-Device Intelligence
🥇 $500
MongoDB: Highest-Aura Use of MongoDB
🥇 $1,000 in credits + swag + article
Track 2 Prizes
AWS: Best Use of AWS
🥇 1st Place: $3,000
🥈 2nd Place: $1,500
🥉 3rd Place: $500
Engineering Entrepreneurship: Coolest Sales Story
🥇 1st Place: $1,500
🥈 2nd Place: $1,000
🥉 3rd Place: $500
Bloomerang: An AI Agent for Volunteer Coordinators
🥇 1st Place: $1,000
🥈 2nd Place: $600
🥉 3rd Place: $400
Builder’s Collective: For First-Time Hackers!
🥇 1st Place: Join BC on a fully funded trip to another hackathon
MICS: For Solo Hackers!
🥇 1st Place: Join MICS on a fully funded trip to AfroTech
Agenda:
11:00AM: Doors Open | Registration & Team Formation
11:30AM: Introductions | Challenge Overview | Speeches
12:00PM - 8:00PM: Building
8:00PM: Judging Begins | Optional Demos
8:45PM: Awards & Closing
Judges:
Amanda Lind — Unseen AI (SPC | Founder & CEO | PSU Alum)
Kevin Cohen — VetRec (YC S23 | PSU Alum)
Shevy Karbasi — NPU Ventures (YC W21 | PSU Alum)
Het Sheth (PSU Alum, Labs @ Bloomerang)
Professor Ted Graef (Director, Engineering Entrepreneurship)
Greg Woodman (Adjunct Professor, Engineering Entrepreneurship)
Kanika Gupta (Founding Engineer, Raya, HF0 W26)
Kartikey Pandey (MTS, Cara)
Krushil Amrutiya (SWE, Fanatics)
Ajay Narayanan Sridhar (ML Engineer, Dropbox)
Vivek Patel (SWE, AGI)
Rushi Patel (Co-Founder, Starborn)
Sponsors:
Transpose Platform
Luminal (YC S25)
AWS
MongoDB
Bloomerang
AGI, Inc
Engineering Entrepreneurship Program
RedBull
Partners:
MICS
HackPSU
Connect Happy Valley
co.space
Nittany AI
Hax Club
Google Developers Club
Open Build
CCSO
This Hackathon is Open to All!
Are you a marketing or advertising major? Apply! The CS students need you!
Are you a CS/AI/data student? Apply! We gotta build, build, build!
Are you a freshman? Apply! Meet upperclassmen who'll teach you the tricks of the trade!