Join 1000+ students from all around the globe at the University of Waterloo to build something incredible in just 36 hours.
At Hack the North, our goal is to make it easy for anyone to dream big. As a student-run organization, we aim to engage and empower students of all backgrounds and experience levels by providing the resources to turn your ideas into a reality!
NOTE: Registering on Devpost does not give you access to the event. You must have been admitted to Hack the North 2026 through our application process in order to attend.
Requirements
What to build
Anything you want. Hack the North is open-ended, so build the project you're most excited about. You'll have 36 hours.
What to submit
- A project you built during the hackathon
- A link to your source code, including all design assets created at the event
- The badge ID of every member of your team, exactly as it appears under the QR code on their badge
- Every sponsor prize you want to be considered for, selected before 2:00 PM EDT on Saturday
- A demo video is optional but recommended
What judges are looking for
Projects are judged on originality, user experience, technical complexity, and that all-important WOW factor. Your judging pitch should be a live demo, not a slide deck or a product pitch.
Prizes
Hack the North 2026: Finalists
At Hack the North, there's no first, second, or third place in our main award — top projects become finalists.
We love projects that are creative and surprise us: original ideas, clever technical work, and creative experiences that make people excited about what's possible. Your project can be playful, experimental, wonderfully weird, or useful. It doesn't need to become a real startup with a business plan or solve major world problems! Follow your curiosity, try something new, and build something you're excited to share, and you'll do great!
To see past finalist projects from Hack the North and get an idea of what makes a great project, check out museum.hackthenorth.com!
The prizes for becoming a finalist are a surprise!
OpenAI: API Prizes
Use the OpenAI API to build something ambitious, with Codex as your development teammate. Whether Codex helps you ship a focused feature, turn a prototype into a polished product, or coordinate an end-to-end build, show us how it helped you go further than you otherwise could.
Projects will be assessed on:
- What you built with the OpenAI API: how creatively and effectively the API powers the experience.
- How Codex helped you build it: how meaningfully it supported planning, implementation, testing, debugging, or iteration.
During your demo, show the working product, explain how the OpenAI API is used, and share one concrete way Codex improved your process or outcome. First, second, and third place will go to the strongest projects across both areas.
Check out our documentation on Codex use case examples (https://learn.chatgpt.com/use-cases?task_type=code) to get started, and feel free to stop by our booth if you have any questions!
Prizes:
1st Place - Lunch or Dinner with OpenAI Recruiters & Engineers, ChatGPT Pro Subscriptions, OpenAI Swag Bundle
2nd Place - ChatGPT Pro Subscriptions, OpenAI Swag Bundle
3rd Place - OpenAI Backpack & T-Shirt
RBC: Signal in the Noise
Financial research arrives as sprawling reports, transcripts, and filings—too large for any single context window. You'll design a custom agent/harness that ingests massive, real-world research data via an MCP tool and answers precise, citable questions accurately, even when the corpus is noisy or contradictory.
Phase 1: Master the known dataset. Ingest it, structure it, query it—proving accuracy, precision, and auditability at every step.
Phase 2: Can your system generalize? On judging day, a completely new industry dataset appears live. Your harness must adapt immediately—no pre-built solutions, no shortcuts.
This challenge rewards systems that genuinely work: smart retrieval, reliable grounding, and honest handling of ambiguity. The challenge isn't prompt engineering. It's real infrastructure under real pressure.
MCP server: http://3.143.20.160/mcp
Prizes:
1. Best Business Value: Win a Kodak PIXPRO FZ45-WH 16MP Digital Camera by building the solution that masters the art of translating cutting-edge AI infrastructure into clear business outcomes. Impress with compelling storytelling, polished demos, and deployment-ready systems that executives would want to implement..
2. Top Tech Performance: Win a Wooting 80HE Keyboard by engineering the most sophisticated agent harness in the competition. Achieve flawless accuracy on surprise datasets, nail precise citations, handle real-world data chaos with elegance, and execute with ruthless efficiency. Build the infrastructure that scales—no shortcuts, no excuses.
Test your knowledge of Canadian markets and companies across three sectors: Financials, Mining, and Technology. Answer one or more research-style questions about recent earnings, major transactions, acquisitions, and industry developments to earn credit toward RBC’s Hack the North prize. See https://hackthenorth.notion.site/Prizes-3c0b70e03de780ffa66af292e8ded6cf#:~:text=RBC%20%2D%20Signal%20in%20the%20Noise for the full RBC Prize Questions list!
Shopify: Hack Shopping with AI
At Shopify, we're obsessed with making commerce better for everyone—merchants and the customers they serve. Your mission: experiment where AI meets commerce. Build something that makes us say "wait, that's possible?" We're looking for technical innovations that challenge what AI can do for entrepreneurs—from foundation-shaking algorithms to delightfully practical tools. The only constraints? Your imagination and the hackathon clock.
Optional: Tap into Shopify's ecosystem to accelerate your build—Shopify API, Remix, Polaris design system, and more. Take inspo from one of our projects - SimGym.
Theme ideas (not requirements):
- AI-powered merchant superpowers
- Commerce intelligence & data insights
- Workflow automation
- LLM applications in the commerce ecosystem
- Customer experience enhancements
Judging Criteria
- Technical Excellence: Sophisticated, appropriate use of AI with quality execution
- Impact Potential: Meaningfully improves merchant operations or customer experience
- Innovation Factor: Unexpected approaches that make us think differently about commerce
Prize: Winning team receives (per person): Shop Cash!
Warp: Best Developer Tool by Warp
Build a hack that focuses on improving the developer experience in some meaningful way - this could be tackling any part of the development lifecycle (creating, modifying or testing software)!
Prize: Keychron keyboards for each member of the team.
Eligibility
No API requirements for this prize! You do not need to use Warp, but we'd love for you to try it out to build this + check out the Oz API!
Judging Criteria
Does the project improve the developer experience?
- Wow factor: Does the project stand out?
- Technical difficulty: How technically complex is the project?
- Originality: Is the project new or unique?
- Design: Is the project easy to use and polished?
Note that many developer tools may not have traditional GUIs - we are referring to all relevant aspects of UI/UX design here, there's no need to add a GUI for the sake of adding one.
GPTZero: Best Use of GPTZero API
We are looking for ambitious projects that protect the quality and authenticity of our world's information, using our AI detection and hallucination detection APIs. Firstly, we are interested in investigative projects that use our API to scan context and find AI slop and hallucinations from noteworthy, unexpected, or significant sources. Secondly, we are also interested in projects that integrate AI or hallucination detection in significant ways, to create products or platforms the world sorely needs in an age of rampant AI slop.
Prizes:
1st place - AirPods Pro 3 + Premium GPTZero swag + $2000 of GPTZero credits per teammate
2nd place - Premium GPTZero swag + $500 of GPTZero credits per teammate
QNX: Create an Embedded System with QNX that Uses AI
Create an embedded system with QNX that uses AI!
Hard requirements:
- Project uses QNX OS
- Project includes one of the open-source AI modules available at https://oss.qnx.com
Judging criteria:
- Is it a "cannot-fail" embedded application?
- Does it require real-time or reliability?
- Is it using AI in an interesting or creative way?
- Is it running on the embedded hardware or QNX VM (and not in the cloud)?
Prizes:
1st Place: $1500
2nd Place: $500
3rd Place: $500
Dryft: Dryft Company Challenge
Dryft is building the future of manufacturing intelligence.
We're giving every team an autoregressive transformer and one goal: make it generate tokens as fast as possible.
How you get there is up to you: write Triton kernels, fuse operations, rethink memory layouts, or build an autoresearch agent that experiments, benchmarks, and discovers optimizations for you.
Submissions will be run on H100s and must pass correctness tests before being benchmarked on hidden workloads.
The team with the fastest and correct implementation wins $2000.
Read more: htn.dryft.ai
Elastic: Find the Signal - Best Use of Elasticsearch
We're looking for projects that take genuinely messy, unstructured, real-world data (transcripts, logs, PDFs, scraped forums, sensor streams, multilingual text and more) and turn it into something a person or agent can actually act on. The most exciting projects will build agentic systems: agents that can reason over your data, decide what to retrieve, call tools, and trigger actions on their own, with Elasticsearch as their context layer. That means going beyond RAG with a chatbot. Think hybrid search combining BM25, Jina dense vectors, and reranking, plus aggregations, ES|QL, geo or time-series queries, with Agent Builder tools and Workflows that close the loop by taking action, not just answering questions.
Prizes:
1st place: Meta Quest 3S VR Headset
2nd place: Bose QuietComfort Headphones
Baseten: Best Use of Baseten
Baseten is a leading platform for both inference and training, and we want you to come up with a creative way to incorporate it into your hack! Check out our GitHub repo to get started, and if you have any questions, come visit our booth!
https://github.com/basetenlabs/Hack-the-North-2026
Prizes (per team member):
Grand Prize: Free trip to SF to meet the Baseten team + final round interviews with Baseten + $200 of Baseten credits + signed hardcover of Inference Engineering
Runner-Up: AirPods 4 + $100 of Baseten credits + signed hardcover of Inference Engineering
Rox: Best AI Agent
To qualify for this award, your team must build a system that leverages large language models to operate on real-world, messy data and take meaningful actions. More specifically, qualifying teams must build agents that can handle unstructured information, incomplete datasets, conflicting sources, or noisy data - the kind of messy reality that exists in customer databases, support tickets, financial records, or operational systems. Teams should demonstrate techniques like data cleaning and validation, multi-source resolution, intelligent error handling, or robust decision-making under uncertainty.
Teams will be judged on technical complexity, creativity, how well the system handles real-world messiness, and practical utility. Show us agents that don't just work in clean demos, but can actually operate in the chaotic data environments that businesses deal with every day. We will award 2 prizes: $10K for top and $2K for second place.
CSE: Log & Order
Here at Big Company Incorporated Inc., we take cybersecurity very seriously. That's why we'd like you to review some of our internal traffic logs and make sure there's no funny business going on. If you find anything, let us know the who, what, when, and how. Although we're very sure that our current threat detection model, which is to trust that everyone is just going about their assigned business, is completely effective!
... but just in case it isn't, maybe having a more robust detection solution would be a good idea. Can you also put something together that will look at this data as it comes in, and identify any weirdness? Maybe so we don't have to ask a bunch of hackers to comb through our log data again, cough.
(See our Discord channel for the dataset to analyse, and don't be afraid to come chat with us for hints!)
Tether: The Best Sovereign App
Take the foundation from hello-pear-qvac-tui and turn it into something uniquely yours. Your project must use the repository as a core part of the application, then push it further to create a local AI experience that is innovative, useful, and genuinely cool.
Build anything from a powerful developer tool to an unexpected everyday application—but make it your own. Projects will be judged on innovation, usefulness, technical creativity, and overall wow factor.
Two prizes (1,000 USD and 500 USD) will be awarded to the projects that best demonstrate what's possible when you build on QVAC and Pear.
Intact: The Quoting Interface of the Future
Prize Description: $100 gift cards for a team of 4 + an exclusive opportunity to interview with our tech and lab team
Eligibility: Creating modern and new ways to get car and tenant insurance via AI (chatbots, AI agents, etc.)
Judging Criteria:
1. Build a functional prototype that reimagines how people obtain car insurance, tenant insurance, or both.
2. Demonstrate a complete or partial quoting experience, allowing a user to provide relevant information and receive an insurance recommendation, estimate, or next step.
3. Prioritize user experience and accessibility, with a clear, intuitive, and inclusive interface.
4. Provide a brief explanation or README describing: the problem being solved; how AI is used; the user journey and key features; any assumptions, limitations, or future improvements.
5. Ensure that the project was created during the hackathon and is substantially the team's own work.
Dominion Dynamics: WHITEOUT
WHITEOUT drops hackers into a live Arctic simulation. Your team will write the shared intelligence that coordinates a heterogeneous fleet — fixed-wing aircraft, quadcopters, rovers, and fixed sensor towers, all running ArduPilot and MAVLink — to detect, classify, and track a moving target across contested terrain. No swarm experience required; bring your best distributed thinking.
Teams are scored live on coverage, collaboration, efficiency, and tracking accuracy. The best agents earn the API Prize.
1st place walks away with $2,000, 2nd place $1,000, and 3rd place $500. 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place also receive a guaranteed first-round interview with Dominion Dynamics in addition to the cash prizes.
Expo: Best Mobile Experience Built with Expo
Build a mobile app with Expo, the open-source framework for native iOS and Android apps with React Native. We're looking for the best mobile experience: an app that's beautiful, feels truly native, and is a joy to use. Use whatever parts of Expo get you there - Expo Router for navigation, Expo UI for native SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose components, expo-widgets to add widgets and Live Activities to your iPhone, and so much more (see docs.expo.dev).
Prize: $150 & an Expo swag box for each teammate
Bracket Bot: Best Use of Bracket Bot Hardware
Build a creative, useful, or technically ambitious project that uses Bracket Bot to interact with the physical world. Use navigation, voice, manipulation, teleoperation, robot learning, or surprise us with something completely new. We're looking for a sick demo where the robot is essential to the idea.
Judging: Meaningful use of Bracket Bot, technical execution, creativity, impact, and demo quality.
Prizes:
1st: 4x Bambu Lab A1 Mini + 4x SO-101 leader-follower kits
2nd: 4x SO-101 leader-follower kits
3rd: 4x SO-101 follower robots
Sentry: Best Use of Sentry
Most teams stop at catching errors. We want to see you go further. Build with Sentry and use at least two products beyond error monitoring: Session Replay, Logs, Tracing, Profiling, Uptime Monitoring, or our MCP/AI agent monitoring, to debug, understand, and improve your hack. Show us how observability actually shaped what you built: the slow endpoint you found in a trace, the broken flow you caught in a replay, the bug you squashed at 4am because your logs told you where to look.
We'll judge on creativity, depth of integration, and how meaningfully Sentry data influenced your project, not just whether the SDK is installed.
Prize: every member of the winning team gets a guaranteed interview with the Sentry team for our internship or new grad roles. Skip the resume pile entirely.
Aramco Americas: Best Beginner Hack
The prize will be awarded to a team whose members have collectively demonstrated excellence and where all team members have attended one (1) or fewer hackathons prior to Hack the North 2026.
All eligible teams meeting this criterion will be eligible to be considered for this prize.
Human Computer Lab: Build with LeLamp SDK
Our SDK gives you full control over LeLamp's character and behavior. We're looking for the most creative or technically impressive use of our robot platform, whether that's genuinely useful, delightful, or just weird in the best way. Docs and example code will be provided at the event.
Prize: 1 Bambu A1 printer and 1 LeLamp (total per team)
Backboard.io: Built on Backboard
Build anything. The only rule is it runs on Backboard.
Text, image, voice, and 17,000+ models on top of state management, RAG, memory, embeddings, tool calling, web search, and adaptive context management, all through one API. The glue is gone. The only limit is how far you push the idea in 36 hours.
We judge ambition. Not polish, not pitch decks. We want the project that makes the room say "you built that this weekend?" The more of the stack you use, the crazier it gets, the better your odds.
Prize: Guaranteed internship interviews, $400 (per team), swag packs
Huawei: openJiuwen Multi-Agent Challenge
AI agents are moving beyond single-agent assistants toward teams of specialized agents that collaborate to solve complex tasks. This challenge asks hackers to build a functional multi-agent application that solves a meaningful real-world problem through genuine agent collaboration — task decomposition, communication, tool use, and coordination — rather than simply chaining LLM prompts together. Teams are encouraged to build on JiuwenSwarm or its successor, WorkSwarm, though this isn't required. Teams will be judged on quality of multi-agent collaboration, scenario creativity, demo completeness, technical implementation, and reusability.
We will award 2 prizes: 1st place receives a Huawei Watch GT 6 + an internship opportunity with the openJiuwen team at the Huawei Toronto Research Center, subject to interview (per team member). 2nd place receives Huawei FreeClip 2 Earbuds + an exclusive office tour (per team member). Each participating team may also receive up to $40 USD in API credits.
Full challenge details, sponsored API credits, and resources: https://github.com/openJiuwen-ai/jiuwenswarm
Huawei: OMNI Live Challenge
AI is moving beyond text-based chat toward real-time, multimodal interaction. OMNI Live challenges hackers to build a functional AI application for a real-world edge-device scenario - a phone, wearable, smart home device, robot, or vehicle - using an OMNI multimodal model accessed via cloud APIs. Qualifying teams must meaningfully incorporate all three core modalities (vision/video, speech/audio, and language) and demonstrate at least one complete end-to-end scenario; concept-only designs and static mockups won't be considered. Teams will be judged on scenario creativity, effective use of OMNI's multimodal capabilities, demo completeness, interaction quality, and technical implementation.
We will award 2 prizes: 1st place receives a Huawei Watch GT 6 + an exclusive office tour at the Huawei Waterloo Research Center (per team member). 2nd place receives Huawei FreeClip 2 Earbuds + the same office tour (per team member).
Full challenge details, sponsored API credits, and resources: https://github.com/cari-waterloo-rc/OMNI-Live-Build-the-Next-Generation-of-Real-Time-Multimodal-AI
MLH: Best Use of ElevenLabs
Deploy natural, human-sounding audio with ElevenLabs. Create realistic, dynamic, and emotionally expressive voices for any project, from interactive AI companions to narrated stories and voice-enabled apps. ElevenLabs will empower you to build rich, immersive experiences without the need for actors or complex audio production, using simply the power of AI.
Integrate fully autonomous audio experiences into your hack with ElevenLabs and give your project a voice, along with giving your team the chance to win some wireless earbuds!
Prize: Wireless Earbuds
Build with ElevenLabs: https://mlh.link/elevenlabs
MLH: Best Use of Gemini API
It's time to push the boundaries of what's possible with AI using Google Gemini. Check out the Gemini API to build AI-powered apps that make your friends say WHOA. So, what can Gemini do for your hackathon project?
- Understand language like a human and build a chatbot that gives personalized advice
- Analyze info like a supercomputer and create an app that summarizes complex research papers
- Generate creative content like code, scripts, music, and more
Think of the possibilities… what will you build with the Google Gemini API this weekend?
Prize: Google Swag Kits
Build with Gemini: https://mlh.link/gemini
MLH: Best Use of Tiger Data
Building high-performance apps under hackathon deadlines shouldn't mean spending half your weekend configuring complex databases or learning obscure query languages. Tiger Data extends PostgreSQL to give student developers an ultra-fast foundation for real-time data, time-series metrics, and complex analytics.
Why build with Tiger Data this weekend?
- Standard SQL Power: Query massive datasets instantly using the SQL you already know, with no complex NoSQL aggregation pipelines required.
- Unified Data Stack: Store relational user profiles and high-frequency metric streams side-by-side in a single database.
- Instant Dashboards: Serve lag-free, real-time frontend charts using pre-computed Continuous Aggregates.
- 90%+ Data Compression: Store millions of events on free-tier cloud instances without running out of disk space.
Whether you're building real-time IoT monitoring, AI-driven analytics dashboards, or financial prediction engines, show us how Tiger Data powers your project. The team that demonstrates the most innovative, impactful, and performance-driven use of Tiger Data will take home some great prizes!
Prize: Stream Deck Mini
Build with Tiger Data: https://mlh.link/tigerdata
MLH: Best Use of Vultr
Vultr empowers hackers to bring their high-performance projects to life instantly; providing everything from the speed of one-click deployment and scalable cloud compute, to specialized Vultr Cloud GPUs that can power AI-driven applications. We want you to push the limits of what can be built when infrastructure is no longer the bottleneck!
Sign up for a Vultr account today and claim your free cloud credits! Take your next hack to the cloud with Vultr for a chance to win some awesome portable screens for you and your team!
Prize: Portable Screens
Build with Vultr: https://mlh.link/vultr
MLH: Best Use of Snowflake API
Play with industry-leading LLMs on a single account using the Snowflake APIs. Adding AI capabilities into your application can be as simple as a single CURL command to Snowflake's REST API.
Build customized applications, RAG powered chat bots, or embed AI-powered features into your app in half the time with half the hassle. Get started for free with a special, student 120-day Snowflake trial (https://mlh.link/snowflake-signup) and check out this repository (https://mlh.link/snowflake-tutorial) for an example of the Snowflake REST API in action.
Prize: Raspberry Pi 4
Build with Snowflake: https://mlh.link/snowflake
MLH: Best Use of MongoDB Atlas
MongoDB Atlas takes the leading modern database and makes it accessible in the cloud! Get started with a $50 credit for students (https://mlh.link/mongodb) or sign up for the Atlas free forever tier (https://mlh.link/mongodb-free, no credit card required). Along with a suite of services and functionalities, you'll have everything you need to manage all of your data, and you can get a headstart with free resources from MongoDB University (https://mlh.link/mongodb-university)! Build a hack using MongoDB Atlas for a chance to win a M5Stack IoT Kit for you and each member of your group.
Prize: M5Stack IoT Kit
Build with MongoDB: https://mlh.link/mongodb
MLH: Best Domain Name from GoDaddy Registry
GoDaddy Registry is giving you everything you need to be the best hacker no matter where you are. Register your domain name with GoDaddy Registry for a chance to win some amazing prizes!
Prize: Digital Gift Card
Build with GoDaddy Registry: https://mlh.link/GoDaddyRegistry
Solana: Best Use of Solana and Badge Hack
$5,000 USD and Ledger Nano S Plus— Best Use of Solana
Build something creative with Solana. Show us an interesting use case, a clever application, or a creative way to leverage the Solana ecosystem and its capabilities. Take this in pretty much any direction and surprise us!
$2,500 USD — Best Badge Hack
Build something creative with your Hack the North badge! This prize is all about what you build on or with the badge itself. Your badge hack does not need to be related to your main hackathon project necessarily, you can build something completely separate just for fun.
Federato: Building the Federato Insurance Agent
Objective
Build an AI agent that thinks like an underwriting professional. Broadly, your agent should ingest submissions, enrich them with real-world risk data, and produce insights relative to a carrier's appetite guidelines. This mirrors work our Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team tackles daily.
Problem Statement
Insurance teams are buried in submissions that must be checked against outside data and appetite guidelines before they can act. Your agent should distill this into explainable, actionable insights so decision-makers can move faster and with confidence.
Provided Resources
- Sample submissions dataset via API
- Schema-discovery endpoint
- Sample appetite guidelines
- Underwriting glossary
Prize: Federato will be awarding $3,500 (split amongst the team) with the best solution from this challenge!
Browserbase: Best Use of Browserbase
Prize: $2,000 cash
We’re looking for projects that makes the best use of Browserbase, ideally by using AI to automate work on behalf of humans on the web.
What you can use
Browsers — interact with any website with a live view (book flights, make payments, fill forms, test UIs, and more)
Fetch — get any page’s content reliably (without rate limits, anti-bot blocks, or CAPTCHAs)
Search — high-quality results for any query
Ways to build
(recommended) Stagehand — our SDK for browser agents that lets you use all of our APIs
Browse CLI — npm i -g browse with any agent sandbox & harness (or browse.sh)
Directly via our API or Browserbase SDK — docs.browserbase.com
Get started
Ask your agent to read https://browserbase.com/SKILL.md and follow the setup instructions
Demo: https://browserbase-demo.com
Credits: 100 browser hours for the hackathon - come by our booth for more info
Judging
Projects will be assessed on how meaningfully Browserbase powers the experience: live browser interaction, fetch/search for real web data, and overall technical creativity / demo quality.
Linq: Best Use of Linq
Prizes:
1st Place - $1,000 cash prize + 3 months of Linq API credits
2nd Place - $500 cash prize
How to Access the Linq API
We'll provide a dedicated hackathon landing page where hackers can sign up for access to the Linq sandbox. Once approved, you'll receive access to the sandbox environment and can start building with the Linq API.
Landing page: linqapp.com/s/events/hack-the-north
What We're Looking For
We want to see new utilities and experiences brought directly into iMessage. Think: texting Ticketmaster to find and buy tickets, renting a car from Enterprise through a conversation, or completing an everyday task without ever needing to open another app.
Ask yourself: what annoying or time-consuming tasks do people still do that could be made easier through messaging? Use Linq's messaging infrastructure to rethink those experiences and build something that makes everyday tasks faster, simpler, and more conversational.
Course: Building with the Linq API
Get up and running with the Linq API and learn how to start building conversational experiences through messaging. This quick technical session will walk hackers through accessing the Linq sandbox, understanding the basics of the API, and getting their first project off the ground. We'll cover core concepts, walk through a simple example, and leave time for questions and troubleshooting.
Cloudflare: Best Agent with a Brain
Build an agent that does more than chat. We want agents with memory, tools, state, workflows, or real-world actions, powered by Cloudflare Workers. Your agent could help people research, build, coordinate, automate, play, learn, debug, create, or make decisions.
Strong projects will use Cloudflare as the agent's backend brain: Workers for logic and orchestration, Durable Objects or D1 for state, R2 for files, Vectorize for retrieval, KV for lightweight data, or Queues for background work.
Get started with the Cloudflare Agents SDK: https://agents.cloudflare.com/. Full challenge details: https://hack-the-north-cloudflare-prize.devrel.workers.dev/.
To qualify, your project must use Cloudflare Workers meaningfully as the runtime, backend, or orchestration layer for an agent. Pages alone does not qualify.
Submissions will be judged on agent capability, meaningful Cloudflare usage, creativity, technical execution, demo quality, and real-world impact. Show how your agent plans, remembers, calls tools, and completes tasks for users during demo.
Zip: Best Use of Zip
Zip is AI for procurement. Zip is the first and most comprehensive AI-native platform for enterprise finance and procurement teams, making it as intuitive as ChatGPT or Claude, and as secure and compliant as Fortune 500 enterprises demand.
An employee can request a purchase, it routes for approval, becomes a PO, gets invoiced, and eventually somebody pays it. Every step has rules attached: budgets, approval limits, policy, and people who have to sign off. We expose all of that through a REST API and a remote MCP server, so an agent can read real purchasing data and act on it. We'll give you a Zip company to work in, with an approval workflow and vendors already set up.
Prizes:
1st place - One JBL Charge 6 speaker for each hacker
2nd place - One $50 Amazon gift card & one Zip branded weekender for each hacker
Eligibility:
Build something that uses the Zip API or Zip MCP in a way that matters to the project. If you want somewhere to start, things we'd find interesting:
- An agent that runs purchasing end to end: takes requests, approves what should go through, and stops or escalates what shouldn't.
- Anything that catches what a single approver can't see. Approval thresholds assume a human pace, so ten thousand individually compliant approvals can add up to something nobody would have signed off on.
- Governing AI spend, which almost nobody has solved. Usage-based consumption breaks a system built around knowing the amount up front.
- A different way in entirely: voice, ambient, physical, whatever.
Judging Criteria:
- Is it a real problem? We'd rather see something an enterprise company would genuinely want than a clever demo. Tell us who has this problem and why it matters to them.
- Is it a novel solution? We'd take one strange idea that half works over a polished version of something obvious.
- Does it make the best use of what Zip has to offer? The strongest projects treat Zip as more than somewhere to read data from. Approvals, budgets, policy and the write paths are all there, and using them well counts for a lot.
Composio: 6 months free subscription + $10k of credits for the 6 months
Composio is everything your agents need to take action: 1,000+ integrations, secure delegated auth, and sandboxed execution, all in a few lines of code. Read iMessage DMs, send Slack messages, post on X, or automate any app your project touches with no OAuth headaches, no glue code.
For this prize, build and scale an agent that can do anything using Composio. We're looking for the most creative, ambitious, and genuinely useful use of our platform. The projects that show what agents can really do when you give them the right tools.
Prize: The best project built with Composio wins 6 months free + $10K in credits over those 6 months.
Give your agent the intelligence and the ability to execute. Come build with us.
Unto Labs: Best Use of Thru
What becomes possible when blockchain interactions feel instant?
Use Thru's SDKs to build an experience people haven't seen before. Turn live blockchain activity into a game, create an app secured by passkeys, build a new kind of market or coordination tool, visualize the network in an unexpected way, or take Thru somewhere completely different.
We'll reward the project with the strongest combination of creativity, meaningful Thru integration, technical depth, and "wow" or comedic factor.
Prize:
1st place - A Nintendo Switch for every member of the winning team.
Cognition: Best Use of Devin
Most interesting and technically impressive project built with Devin. Prize: $5,000 in Devin credits
Devpost Achievements
Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:
Judges
Tom Alterman
GoodLeap, Director of Product
Advait Maybhate
Warp, Software Engineer
Nabil Fahel
Communitech, Vice President
Jen Dewalt
Tokay.io, Co-founder and CPO
Mike Kirkup
Elderella, Co-founder
Albert Chen
Two Small Fish Ventures, Partner
Alroy Almeida
BDC Capital, Pre-Seed/Seed Investor
Alana Goyal
Basecase, Founder
Alex Marley
Upfront Ventures, Investor
Devon Galloway
Garage Capital, General Partner
Michael Gibson
1517 Fund, Co-Founder
Sahand Sojoodi
8090 Solutions, VP Engineering and GM Canada
Nish Sinnadurai
Cerebras Systems, SVP Engineering
Brooke Joseph
OpenAI, Member of Technical Staff
Ishaan Dey
Google DeepMind, Software Engineer
Mike McCauley
Garage Capital, Cofounder and GP
Eli Aleyner
Docker, VP of Product Strategy and Alliances
Charlie O'Neill
Baseten, Co-Head of Base Labs
Aron Levitz
Foolish Entertainment, CEO and Co-founder
Dylan Itzikowitz
South Park Commons, Partner
Nick Rubin
First Round, Investor
Krish Shah
The Bot Company, Member of Technical Staff
Bogdan Frusina
Dejero, Founder and CTO
Mathurah Ravigulan
Netflix, Design Engineer
Catherine Yeo
Altara, Co-Founder
Ryan Fox
Super.com, CTO
Michelle Lim
Flint, CEO and Co-Founder
Ulkar Akhundzada
Mappedin, Principal Forward Deployed Engineer
Jeff Nguyen
BobaTalks, Founder
Arif Virani
Apple, AI/ML — prev. CEO, DarwinAI
Zachary Laberge
Omen AI, Founder and CEO
Mudith Jayasekara
Baseten, Co-Head of Model Training
Taeuk Kang
Rox, AI Product Lead
Prem Kalevar
N49P Ventures, Venture Partner
Umesh Khanna
SpaceXAI, Talent Engineering
Brian Master
Aramco, Senior Software Engineer
Judging Criteria
-
⭐ WOW factor
Judges will be looking for projects that stand out and leave a lasting impression! They'll be looking for a project that achieves its goals (any goal!) exceptionally, whether that's creatively, technically, or in any other dimension. -
Technical ability
Projects that showcase technical depth and demonstrate advanced technical knowledge will be rated more favorably. Take the time to learn something new at Hack the North with some of our workshops! -
Originality
Tackle a new problem, approach a current problem a new way, or make something unique and cool (even if it doesn't solve a problem) to impress our judges! -
Design
Judges will be looking for projects that offer a user-friendly experience. Make sure your product is intuitive and engaging for its target audience!
Questions? Email the hackathon manager
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