Build Your AI Co-Founder Hackathon
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You bring the idea. Build the AI that makes it happen.
The Challenge Build Your AI Co-Founder is a hackathon where you build and ship a company with a founding team of 2–4 co-founders, combining humans and AI.
Every team must have at least one human and one AI co-founder. You decide the rest—including who takes which role, what you build, and how your founding team works together.
AI co-founders can take any role: CEO, CTO, Product, Marketing, Sales, Research, or anything your company needs.
The goal is to experience what it means to build a real company with AI as part of the founding team—from idea to execution to a shipped product.
Prizes
Build the Product challenge using AdaL prize: +1 month AdaL pro for the winners
Using AdaL, build and ship a functional app or MVP for a real-world problem. Your product should be something real people can use and should demonstrate how your human–AI founding team turns an idea into a working company.
The focus is on execution: build a useful product, validate it with real users, and show what your AI co-founder contributed to the journey from idea to launch.
Ask The W think Before You Build Challenge: Prizes: Gift cards for best context, most bugs found and an opportunity to build with the founder. More details: https://askthew.com/hackathon
The fastest way to ship is to avoid building the wrong thing.
Use Ask The W to gather the right context, question assumptions and get clear on what should be built before writing code. Understand first. Build second.
Tenki code review challenge: 1000 Tenki credits for winner
Use Tenki to sandbox, test, and review your project’s code. Identify bugs and issues in AI-generated code, improve the implementation, and demonstrate how your team builds, reviews, fixes, and ships reliable software.
Sponsors & Tools Our sponsors provide the technology and infrastructure you'll use to turn your ideas into working companies.
AdaL
AdaL is automation-first agent harness and coding companion. While any coding agent can build, AdaL uniquely turns your codebase into go-to-market execution, helping you ship faster from development to launch.. Learn more at adalagent.ai.
AdaL code: COFOUNDERHACKATHON-K4CG for 1 month of AdaL Pro free, or 30% off Max and Max+. Redeem at adalagent.ai by 12 Oct.
AdaL technical support on Discord: Join Discord Server
Nebius
Nebius provides AI-focused cloud infrastructure and computing resources designed to help teams build, train, and run modern AI applications and workloads.
Tenki
Tenki provides developer infrastructure at tenki.cloud, including sandboxes, code review, and code runners to help teams safely build, test, and iterate on their products.
Aisa
100+ AI models, composable skills, and deployable agents unified under one API. Build, monetize, and scale autonomous workflows with pay-per-call simplicity at Aisa.com
Ask the W
Ask the W helps you figure out what is worth building with AI. It helps identify good ideas, tasks that can be handled by agents, places where human judgment is needed, and the next steps to take.
Venue and Community Partner
AI Global Campus
Global Platform for Applied &Agentic AI AI for Humanity. AI with Education. AI Beyond Systems
Sartorial
Sartorial helps D2C brands optimize catalogs to drive sales through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and custom AI interfaces.
Articuler AI
Articuler.ai helps people find the right professionals for their goals — whether that's raising a round, finding a co-founder, or entering a new market
Bridge US
Bridge US is an AI-powered networking platform for conferences and events. It helps attendees find the right customers, partners, engineers, investors, and other connections
Devnovate
Hosts hackathons and events all over the world
Hosted by Crewbase Collective
Crewbase Collective is organization running hackathons and events across the San Francisco
Schedule
Before 12:00 PM: Online hacking begins
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM: Welcome session
1:00 PM – 6:00 PM: Hacking continues
6:00 PM – 7:00 PM: Judging
7:00 PM – 8:00 PM: Finalist demos and winner announcements
8:00 PM – 10:00 PM: Networking
Participants who are unable to attend the venue can participate and hack online throughout the event.
Judges & Mentors
Merve Isler: Fouder @ Marvelous & AI Insiders
Ash Bao: Head of Marketing @ Gruve
Julie Zhu: Head of Design @ Zawa (Meitu)
Anya Ozmen: Founder @ Gameer
Vince Kohli: Strategic Advisor @ GoogleDeepmind
Sumit Jagdale: Founder @ Sartorial
Saurabh Khire: Software Engineer @ Govia
David Li: Co-Founder @ Induction Labs
Mia Yang: AI Product Manager @ Baidu USA
Clarie Kwon: Chief Technology Officer @ San Francisco General Labs
Aria Shi: GTM Lead @ AdaL
Jax Koh: GTM Engineer @ AdaL
Li Yin: Chief Executive Officer @ AdaL
Marcel Spisak: Member of Technical Staff @ Endeavor
Optional Tracks
Build It: Launch the Business
Turn your idea into a launch-ready business. Your AI co-founder helps with research, permits, costs, suppliers, branding, operations, and the launch plan.
Fund It: Raise Capital
Prepare your company to raise funding. Your AI co-founder researches investors, finds the right fit, builds fundraising materials, and helps manage outreach.
Sell It: Get Customers
Get your first customers. Your AI co-founder identifies prospects, researches them, creates personalized outreach, and supports the sales process.
Grow It: Acquire Users
Build a repeatable growth engine. Your AI co-founder helps define your audience, develop positioning, test channels, run experiments, and measure results.
Make It: Build the Product
Turn an idea or problem into a working product. Your AI co-founder helps validate the problem, define the MVP, design the experience, build, test, and iterate.
Run It: Operate the Business
Make your business run better. Your AI co-founder helps improve processes across scheduling, customers, team coordination, reporting, inventory, and automation.
Choose your own
How It Comes Together
The company is up to you. The co-founders are up to you. The roles are up to you. The track defines what you want to accomplish. For example:
Company is AI bookkeeping platform. Co-founders are Human CEO + Human CTO + AI Product + AI Sales Track is Sell It. Build the product, find potential customers, run outreach, and aim to secure the first paying customers.
Company is AI travel startup. Co-founders are Human Product Lead + AI CEO + AI Growth. Track is Grow It. Build the product, define the target audience, launch growth experiments, and acquire the first users.
Company is Developer productivity tool. Co-founders are Human CTO + AI Product + AI Marketing. Track is Make It. Validate the problem, build the MVP, test it with developers, and ship a working product.
Choose your company. Build your founding team. Pick your mission. Then go build.