Introduction
After the 2026 Builders Weekend (BW), I met up with a bunch of my friends from various universities, all of whom I met at the BW-2026 Hackathon. We came together to organize, sponsor, and host our very own Hackathon. The SDGs to Startups Hackathon was successfully organized and hosted on June-20 and June-21, 2026.
Planning
After over four of months of ardenous planning, finding sponsors, setting up the event, making posters, advertising, physical advertising, and a lot of organisation work, we were finally ready to announce the SDGs to Startups Hackathon 2026.
It was especially tough to find sponsors. Being a student run organization and not a well-established, or even remotely established company, we had a hard time convincing sponsors that we had what it takes. This resulted in a lot of companies rejecting our proposals for sponsorship, funding, or even covering some of the budget for the Hackathon.
Team Formation and Harmony
As someone who has organized a lot of Hackathons before, I notice that many Hackathon teams usually fall apart. This hackathon was no different, many teams imploded at the end of day 1 or at the start of day 2 even.
There’s a couple of reasons for this, but mainly, I believe it was because there was no proper team harmony. As organizers, we promote team harmony and collaboration by encouraging people to find teams beforehand, either by joining a mixer event that we hosted two days before, or by texting in the Discord server hoping for more interaction among participants in the Hackathon.
People even came with their friends, which is heavily encouraged, so they have proper team harmony on the day, can communicate well, and perform in the Hackathon up to their best.
In my experience, the teams with the best harmony, and an ideal communication were either teams created at the mixer event, were teams that were formed before entering the Hackathon within friend groups, or teams that had similar goals before entering the Hackathon.
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Projects
The projects at every Hackathon are always a hit. Every one of the organizer was fascinated by each team and what they were able to do within the span of 48 hours. Because the use of AI was allowed in this Hackathon, as it was a multi-disciplinary hackathon, we placed our expectations pretty high for everyone’s pitches. Teams completely dominated in the pitches too, I was definitely impressed by most of the teams’ pitches, even with the short 5 minute time limit we gave them, most teams absolutely killed their pitches.
Winners
Unfortunately, as much as we loved everyone’s projects, there can only be a handful of winners. Thanks to the judges we were able to invite to the Hackathon, we picked out a couple of winners and gave them prizes!
But I believe people should take part in Hackathons regardless of the prize. Even at this one, though the prizes weren’t super exciting or anything crazy like a million yen backed by an AI company, we still had a great community, supportive organizer group, and a great turnout.
This time, the prizes were cash, ElevenLab credits, and fame. The opportunity to make that LinkedIn post to show how enthusiastic and involved you are, never fails to amuse people. The first place team even got an invite to an OpenAI Hackathon the next week as a prize for winning this Hackathon!
| 2nd | 1st | 3rd |
|---|---|---|
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| HumanGate: Deepfake recognition and human verification. | FocusHear: Accessibility Tools, Live translation, and more features built into one app for people with hearing disabilities. | MedBridge: Tool to narrow down and search for hospitals offering specific care according to patient needs. |
Author Comments
Written by Bhushith Gujjala Hari.
I had a lot of fun organizing and hosting this Hackathon. Every organizer, volunteer, member, judge, and person I met at this Hackathon were amazing. This was definitely the most memorable Hackathon I have ever co-organized, and I am lucky to have been part of such a huge, successful, fun, and wonderful event.
Organizers Photo
Organizers and Judges Group Photo
