Summer Hack
There is nothing I love more than when a moment or inside joke lands so perfectly that it unites a group of people.
A few weeks ago, it was the Coldplay Astronomer CEO who brought the whole internet together.
At last weekend’s 150-person AI Engine hackathon that Chapter One joined forces with Zoe Qin and Alexandra Tsylnitsk from Dawn Capital, and Anna Cachadina Abello, Ayala Ples, and Max Chapman from Crane Ventures to organize —
It was this GIF.
If you don’t recognize the face, it’s Zoe’s, who did a heroic amount of work to drive the organization and make sure the hackathon ran seamlessly.
And if you don’t recognize the GIF… well, you should spend more time online.
The GIF was created by one of the track winners - Alexander Cobb and Rayan Saleh from Team Coffee Monster 3000 - who built GifSwap, a meme-generator platform where you can drop anyone’s face into a meme. And everyone appreciated the personalized generation.
The full platform lives here: https://gifswap-production.up.railway.app/
The hackathon spanned two full days, brought together 19 top startups as sponsors, and was packed end-to-end with builder energy, creativity, and grind. We gave away 5K in cash prizes, exclusive bounties, and tens of thousands in credits to help the winners take their ideas even further.
Of course, it wasn’t just about memes. Here's a full recap in numbers:
150 participants
3 venture organizers: Chapter One, Dawn Capital, Crane Ventures
19 sponsors - including Stripe, ACI.dev, Anthropic, Prolific, ElevenLabs, Crusoe, Manus, Memories.ai, Daytona, incident.io, Requesty, Inforcer, Encore (Leap), Firebolt, Atla, Cogna, Quantexa, Oneleet, Runware.
50 industry mentors
61 hacker teams
47 project submissions
28 judges
96 first-round judging submissions
4 track winners 🏆
17 final judging submissions
1 final winner!! 🏆 🏆 🏆
It was an awesome weekend.
For me, the best part was seeing how people are combining models and modalities to create powerful tools or experiences. The track winners:
GoodOmen, the final winner, built a real-time video generation tool. You could talk to it and instantly update the visuals. In their demo, an elephant walked through London - first green, then red, then with another elephant riding on its back. It all changed on command, seamlessly.
Dashmap, the winner of the Personal Productivity track, turned a cyclist’s phone into a smart safety companion. If you crash, it calls an emergency line and explains the situation. It used Memories AI for video summarization, ElevenLabs for the call, and Prolific for training data around bike crashes.
Coffee Monster 3000, winner of the Fun AI Project track, as mentioned, made a meme generator where you can put anyone’s face on a GIF.
Clueless, winner of the Redefine Search track, created an AI agent that gives instructions for tasks like updating your billing info on GitHub. It’s aimed at onboarding and internal knowledge-sharing.
It’s always hard to put the energy of a hackathon into words - but hopefully the photos below help capture some of the spirit.
What’s next? We’re builders. And we’re just getting started. Join us at future AI Engine hackathons and events:
Website: https://aiengine.build/
Mailing List: https://aienginehack.beehiiv.com/subscribe
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ai-engine-hackathon/
Events Calendar: https://lu.ma/aiengine
🥇 (Overall Winner!) Summer Chat - Conversation AI - GoodOmen - Team #24
Aaron Jones, Marko Stapfner, Giovanni Funchal
🥇 Summer Dream - Create a Fun AI Project: Coffee Monster 3000 - Team #30
🥇 Summer Goals - Personal Productivity - Dashmap AI - Team #11
Nadhira Salsabila, Saffan Firdaus, Shi Jinwei
🥇 Summer Quest - Redefine Search: Clueless - Team #44
Aryan Kaushik, Pratyaksh Mishra, Jeremy Shorter, Adam O'Neill
🙌 Thank you!!
There is something that is truly magical about hackathons - and one of the special things is that it gets so many different people together. Thank you to everyone who was involved: all the sponsors, partners, all the participants, and the volunteers. Thank you, Adam Isfendiyar, for the photos!
Until next time!
I’m a General Partner at Chapter One, an early-stage venture fund that invests $500K - $2M checks into pre-seed and seed-stage startups.
If you’re a founder building a company, please feel free to reach out on Twitter (@seidtweets) or Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesin-seidel-5325b147/).