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Public Hackathon Platform Winners (AI Agents)

Research compiled April 2026 for Meta PyTorch OpenEnv Hackathon Grand Finale (Bangalore, Apr 25-26 2026). Round 2 themes: Multi-Agent Interactions, Long-Horizon Planning, World Modeling, Self-Improvement, Wild Card. Judging: 40% Innovation, 30% Storytelling, 20% Reward Improvement, 10% Pipeline.

What Wins on Public Platforms (Executive Summary)

Across DevPost, Devfolio, MLH, lablab.ai, and adjacent platforms in 2025–2026, a reproducible pattern emerges for which AI-agent projects take home top prizes:

  1. Story beats novelty. Nearly every grand-prize winner (EcoLafaek, Edu.AI, DreamOps, RiskWise, Province) opens with a concrete, emotionally legible pain point — waste in Timor-Leste, Brazilian education inequity, 3 AM on-call debugging, supply chain shocks, IRS Form 1040. The model is always a means; the problem is the hook.
  2. Multi-agent architectures are now table stakes. A single-agent chatbot is almost never a winner in 2025-26. Winners compose 3-7 specialized agents (planner / researcher / verifier / executor) with a coordinator. Judges reward visible role separation.
  3. Polished 3-minute demo video. DevPost data shows winners spend ~30% of their effort on video storytelling. Vertical narrative (problem → agent reasoning trace → outcome) dominates. Screen-recorded "thinking" traces convert well.
  4. Production-grade plumbing wins tiebreakers. AgentCore, ADK, Semantic Kernel, LangGraph, MCP — use of sponsor infrastructure correctly and creatively is how you leap from top 50 to top 3.
  5. Quantifiable metric improvement. Winners report numbers: "30-60 min → 2-5 min debug time" (DreamOps), "100% accuracy on Form 1040" (Province), "~24% on ARC-AGI-2" (NVARC). This directly maps to OpenEnv's "Reward Improvement" criterion.
  6. Training vs. prompting is rare but wins heavily when present. Most DevPost winners just call APIs. The minority who actually fine-tune (NVARC, DAMCS, Tiny Recursive Model) win research-credibility prizes disproportionately. OpenEnv hackathon's training mandate is a defensible moat.
  7. Personal / indie-feeling projects beat enterprise demos on lablab.ai and Devfolio; the reverse is true for AWS/Google/Microsoft hackathons where enterprise polish wins.

DevPost Winners

1. EcoLafaek — AWS AI Agent Global Hackathon 2025 (1st Place)

  • One-liner: Citizen-led waste mapping in Timor-Leste powered by an autonomous multi-modal agent.
  • Domain: Environmental / civic tech, emerging markets.
  • Link: https://aws-agent-hackathon.devpost.com/submissions/818816-ecolafaek
  • Hackathon page: https://aws-agent-hackathon.devpost.com/updates/38140
  • Approach: Amazon Bedrock Nova-Pro + AgentCore tool chaining. Multi-modal reasoning classifies waste images, generates real-time pollution-hotspot data visualizations.
  • Why it won: Emotional story ("waste in my country"), real citizens as users, concrete civic impact, showcased AgentCore's tool-orchestration correctly. Judged at AWS re:Invent 2025.
  • Prize: Share of $45K USD pool (1st place).

2. AegisAgent — AWS AI Agent Global Hackathon 2025 (2nd Place)

3. Province — AWS AI Agent Global Hackathon 2025 (3rd Place)

  • One-liner: Turn tax filing into a conversation; autonomous FormMapping pipeline hits 100% on Form 1040.
  • Link: https://aws-agent-hackathon.devpost.com/submissions/828293-province
  • Approach: Multi-agent architecture on Bedrock + Claude 3.5 Sonnet. One agent parses intent, another traverses form DAG, a third validates against IRS rules.
  • Why it won: Headline metric ("100% accuracy"), universally hated problem, crisp multi-agent architecture diagram.

4. SalesShortcut — ADK Hackathon 2025 (Grand Prize)

  • One-liner: Autonomous SDR: an AI sales rep team that generates leads, researches them, writes proposals, and does outreach.
  • Link: https://devpost.com/software/salesshortcut
  • Builders: Merdan Durdyyev, Sergazy Nurbavliyev.
  • Approach: Google ADK multi-agent SDR system — Lead Hunter, Researcher, Proposal Writer, Outreach agents, coordinator.
  • Why it won: Unambiguous business value, clear agent-role separation (judges love it), end-to-end demo video.
  • Hackathon: 10,400+ participants, 62 countries, 477 projects, 1,500+ agents.

5. Edu.AI — ADK Hackathon 2025 (Latin America Regional Winner)

6. GreenOps — ADK Hackathon 2025 (Asia Pacific Regional Winner)

  • One-liner: Autonomous FinOps/GreenOps team that continuously audits, forecasts, and optimizes cloud infrastructure for carbon.
  • Link: https://devpost.com/software/greenops-gzp4aj
  • Builders: Aishwarya Nathani, Nikhil Mankani.
  • Why it won: Sustainability angle + measurable cost/carbon savings — ideal judging-criteria bait.

7. Nexora-AI — ADK Hackathon 2025 (EMEA Regional Winner)

8. Particle Physics Agent — ADK Hackathon 2025 (Honorable Mention #1)

  • One-liner: Converts natural language into validated Feynman diagrams using real physical laws and high-fidelity data.
  • Link: https://devpost.com/software/particle-physics-agent
  • Why it matters for OpenEnv: Best example of a "world-modeling" winner — the agent operates inside a formally-verified physics environment. This is the template for Round 2's World Modeling theme.

9. TradeSageAI — ADK Hackathon 2025 (Honorable Mention #2)

10. Bleach — ADK Hackathon 2025 (Honorable Mention #3)

11. RiskWise — Microsoft AI Agents Hackathon 2025 (Best Overall, $20K)

12. Apollo: Deep Research Meta Agent — Microsoft AI Agents Hackathon 2025 (Best C# Agent, $5K)

13. Konveyor — Microsoft AI Agents Hackathon 2025 (Best Python Agent)

14. ModelProof: Sentinel AI Chat — Microsoft AI Agents Hackathon (Best JS/TS Agent)

  • GitHub issue: https://github.com/microsoft/AI_Agents_Hackathon/issues/517
  • Approach: Dual-LM consistency check — two models cross-validate each other's output for hallucinations, bias, toxicity.
  • Why it matters for OpenEnv: Cross-agent verification is a reward-signal design pattern — use this for multi-agent interaction Round 2 theme.

15. WorkWizee — Microsoft AI Agents Hackathon (Best Copilot Agent)

16. Everything Claude Code (ECC) — Anthropic Hackathon 2025 Winner

  • GitHub: https://github.com/affaan-m/everything-claude-code
  • Builder: Affaan Mustafa (solo) — won the Anthropic × Forum Ventures hackathon in ~8 hours.
  • One-liner: Turns Claude Code into a "professional development engine" — skills, instincts, memory, continuous learning, security scanning.
  • Why it won: Meta-tool for agent harness performance. Story: "a solo builder stacking compound tools." 140K+ stars.
  • Prize: $15,000 in API credits.

Devfolio Winners

17. DreamOps — Warpspeed 2025 (Lightspeed India, Bengaluru, June 21-22 2025) — Grand Prize

  • Hackathon: https://warpspeed2025.devfolio.co/
  • Recap: https://devfolio.co/blog/warpspeed-2025-recap/
  • Team: SkySingh04, IncyJ4, harshkg23, Himanshu Singh.
  • One-liner: AI agent that triages and resolves late-night programming issues, cutting debug time from 30-60 min to 2-5 min.
  • Why it won: Relatable pain (3 AM on-call), clear metric (~15x speedup), lived-experience storytelling. Post-hack spun into product "Riquell Ops".
  • Prize: Share of $12K+ pool.
  • Theme: Agentic AI (24-hour offline). Sponsors: Sarvam AI (voice/multilingual stack), Bhindi AI.

18. Likeminds — Agentic Multi-Social Semantic Network — Global Agent Hackathon May 2025 (Grand Prize $5K)

19. Superwizard AI — Global Agent Hackathon May 2025 (2nd Place $2K)

20. Beifong — Global Agent Hackathon May 2025 (3rd Place $1K + BrowserUse Grand Prize $2.5K)

  • Builder: Arun.
  • One-liner: Curated information & podcasts agent.
  • Why interesting: Double-dipped — won category + partner bounty. Teaches the strategy of targeting multiple tracks.

21. TripCraft AI — Global Agent Hackathon May 2025 (3rd Place $1K)

  • Builder: Amit Wani.
  • One-liner: Travel-planning multi-agent system.

22. github-potpie-agno-agent — Global Agent Hackathon May 2025 (Potpie Grand Prize)

  • Builder: Arnav.
  • Approach: Agno + Potpie + Groq — parses repos, answers code questions, generates deep repo insights via interactive playground.

MLH / University / Research Hackathon Winners

23. DAMCS — UC Berkeley LLM Agents MOOC Hackathon 2025 (Decentralized & Multi-Agents Track, 1st Place)

  • Hackathon: https://rdi.berkeley.edu/llm-agents-hackathon/
  • DevPost: https://uc-berkeley-rdi-llm-agents.devpost.com/
  • Team: Dr Marie Siew (SUTD) + Roblox researchers + academic collaborators.
  • Full title: "LLM-Powered Decentralized Generative Agents with Adaptive Hierarchical Knowledge Graph for Cooperative Planning."
  • Approach: Graph-based memory + structured communication protocol between agents. Agents cooperate to play Crafter (2D Minecraft-style env) multi-agent extension.
  • Why it's the most relevant for OpenEnv Round 2:
    • Uses a real RL-style sandbox environment (Crafter) — template for OpenEnv.
    • Multi-agent + long-horizon planning + world-modeling all converge.
    • Published as research, not just demo — judges valued reward curves.
  • Attendance: 3,000+ students, 127 countries.

24. ThreadFinders — UC Berkeley LLM Agents MOOC Hackathon 2025 (Applications Track, 2nd Place)

  • Team: SoftServe employees.
  • One-liner: System of interconnected GCP-hosted agents that search for missing people.
  • Why it won: Social-impact story + complete GCP architecture.

25. NVARC — Kaggle ARC Prize 2025 (1st Place on Public Leaderboard)

26. Tiny Recursive Model (TRM) — ARC Prize 2025 Paper Prize

  • Author: Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau.
  • Approach: ~7M-param single-network recursive model with separate answer + latent states, deep supervised refinement.
  • Result: ~45% on ARC-AGI-1, ~8% on ARC-AGI-2.
  • Why it won: Elegance — proved small + recursive beats big + brute-force.

HuggingFace Trending Agent Environments (2025-26)

These aren't "hackathon winners" in the DevPost sense, but they are the trending Spaces / repos that the OpenEnv judges will be familiar with and compared against.

27. OpenEnv Hub itself (by Meta × HuggingFace)

28. AgentRL (arXiv 2510.04206)

  • Paper: https://huggingface.co/papers/2510.04206
  • One-liner: Scaling Agentic RL with Multi-Turn, Multi-Task Framework — fully-asynchronous generation/training pipeline.
  • Why it matters: Blueprint for "Reward Improvement" (20% of judging).

29. Forge (by MiniMax)

30. Absolute Zero (Tsinghua)

  • Summary on HF Q2 2025 roundup: https://huggingface.co/blog/vansin/hf-papers-25q3-top50
  • One-liner: Models learn by proposing and solving their own tasks — no external data. SOTA on code + math reasoning.
  • Why it matters for Round 2's Self-Improvement theme: Direct template. Agent proposes task → solves → trains on success signal. This is likely what the top Self-Improvement projects at Bangalore will echo.

31. ScienceBoard (HKU + Shanghai AI Lab)

  • One-liner: Benchmark + environment for autonomous agents in scientific workflows (169 real tasks).
  • Why it matters for World Modeling theme: A built domain env is the strongest World-Modeling pattern.

32. OpenEnv Turing Evaluation

33. OpenEnv Scaling Post

Other Notable Platform Winners

34. AURA — lablab.ai Recent Winner

35. GameForge AI — lablab.ai

  • One-liner: 4 specialized agents on a LangGraph pipeline turn any idea into a playable browser game in <60s.
  • Why it won: Demo-is-the-product — you see a game materialize live.

36. Stylin' — lablab.ai

  • One-liner: Two collaborating agents identify fashion from photo, find item at every price point, build 3 outfits in <30s.
  • Why it won: Time-to-value is visible on screen.

37. Prism — lablab.ai

  • One-liner: Agent that watches WhatsApp/Slack/Discord, extracts bugs/features/ideas, filters noise with product context.

38. Customer Support Agent — Kong Agentic AI Hackathon 2025 (Best Agentic Project)

39. Autonomous Security Auditor — Kong Agentic AI Hackathon 2025 (Best Solo Project)

  • Builder: Sachin Ghumbre.
  • Why it won: Solo builder, security vertical, clean demo.

40. kongversation-plugin — Kong Agentic AI Hackathon 2025 (Most Creative)

Cross-Platform Patterns (Most Important Section)

Patterns that appear in >50% of 2025-26 winners:

  1. Coordinator-Workers architecture (Apollo, SalesShortcut, Province, DAMCS, GameForge). A planner agent orchestrates 3-7 specialists.
  2. Long, visible reasoning traces in the demo video. Judges watch the agent "think."
  3. Self-verification / dual-check patterns (ModelProof, Apollo self-reflective RAG, DAMCS knowledge graphs). Critical for self-improvement storytelling.
  4. A named metric in the headline (100%, ~24%, ~15x, <60s). Maps 1:1 to Reward Improvement judging.
  5. Emotional civic or personal hook (EcoLafaek waste, Edu.AI Brazilian education, DreamOps 3am debugging, ThreadFinders missing people). Round 2's "Personal" world-modeling theme rewards this.
  6. Sponsored infra used non-trivially (AgentCore orchestration, ADK regional envs, Semantic Kernel). For OpenEnv finale: show OpenEnv's state-persistence and multi-turn semantics being used in ways a simple tool-call can't replicate.
  7. Training, not just prompting, is a research-judge differentiator (NVARC, TRM, DAMCS, Absolute Zero). This is where OpenEnv + TRL/Unsloth shines — most public DevPost winners skip this, but ARC-Prize-calibre judges punish submissions that don't actually train.
  8. Solo builders can win (Giovanna Moeller on Edu.AI, Amirul Hamizan on Superwizard, Affaan Mustafa on ECC, David Babu on Energy Agent AI, Sachin Ghumbre on Kong). Don't let small team size be a blocker.
  9. Productize-in-demo. Projects that show a path from hack → product (DreamOps → Riquell Ops) win trust.
  10. Regional / local problems travel well internationally (EcoLafaek Timor-Leste, Edu.AI Brazil, Bhindi AI Indian use-cases at Warpspeed). For a Bangalore finale, leaning into an Indian problem is legitimate strategy.

Top GitHub Repos to Study

Repos directly useful as reference code / architecture patterns:

Repo Why
https://github.com/global-agent-hackathon/global-agent-hackathon-may-2025 All 60+ submissions with READMEs. Gold mine of patterns.
https://github.com/microsoft/AI_Agents_Hackathon (issues #349, #517, #526, #587, #638, #645, #681) All 7 Microsoft category winners.
https://github.com/affaan-m/everything-claude-code Solo-builder hackathon winner template.
https://huggingface.co/openenv Reference envs from Meta/HF themselves.
https://github.com/Sri-Krishna-V/awesome-adk-agents Curated ADK examples — excellent starting-point templates.
https://github.com/huggingface/blog/blob/main/openenv.md Canonical OpenEnv intro — align your framing with this doc.
https://github.com/dipanjanS/mastering-intelligent-agents-langgraph-workshop-dhs2025 LangGraph multi-agent patterns (good cross-ref for architecture diagrams).
https://github.com/victordibia/designing-multiagent-systems Theory / design patterns for multi-agent LLM systems.

Key Hackathons to Monitor (April-June 2026)

Sources