AI Valley Hackathon

​🎉 AI Valley Hackathon — For Students, By Students
🗓️ April 19–20 | 2-Day Hackathon

​Get ready for a 2-day AI Hackathon powered by students from Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley — where the best student builders, engineers and founders from across the bay will come together to invent, compete, and connect. Whether you’re an AI expert or just curious to explore the frontier, this is your chance to form a team of up to 4, dive into real-world challenges, and present your work in front of VCs, startup founders, and engineers from top AI companies.

​🧠 About the Hackathon
This hackathon will focus on AI Agents & Applied Intelligence, and our sponsors Solana, Trae, and Gru.ai will bring industry-grade challenges for teams to tackle. Think automation, personalization, LLMs, and next-gen user experiences. Challenges will be announced at the start of the Hackathon.

​🤝 About Our Sponsors & Supporters

​Trae - a brand new intelligent collaborative AI IDE that flexibly adapts to your needs in different scenarios. You can work closely with AI throughout the development process, enhancing each other to achieve outstanding results in a faster and more efficient manner.

​Gru.ai - a startup building coding agents and has topped the SWE-bench verified leaderboard twice. Recently, gru.ai open-sourced [gru-sandbox](https://github.com/babelcloud/gru-sandbox), which is an open-source project providing a self-hostable sandbox for MCP integration or other AI agent use cases.

​Solana Foundation - a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the growth, development, and security of the Solana blockchain ecosystem. Based in Switzerland, it funds and supports initiatives around decentralized applications, developer tools, infrastructure, and community building.

​EntreConnect – A founder-first community built to empower entrepreneurs.
We envision a community where founders come together to navigate the entrepreneurial journey. By sharing experiences and overcoming challenges, we harness the power of collaboration, innovation, and support to drive success and growth.
👉 Sign up here to secure exclusive early access 💌 and join a community that empowers your entrepreneurial spirit!
🔗 Learn more at entreconnect.us

​LanceDB: Database for Multimodal AI. Designed from the ground up for AI to store and query all of your data from embeddings to text, images, audio, and video. LanceDB delivers blazing fast retrieval on billions of vectors from object storage, accelerates training or fine-tuning, and supports distributed pre-processing for petabyte-scale multimodal datasets. Sign up for LanceDB Cloud cloud.lancedb.com

​📅 Agenda Sneak Peek:

​CLICK HERE FOR A GENERAL FAQ --> FAQ

​Saturday
🕘 8:30 AM – Registration & Breakfast
🎤 10:00 AM – Welcome + Kickoff
👥 10:30 AM – Teaming & Hacking Begins
🍛 12:00 PM – Lunch
🧠 1:00 PM – Workshops (Tejas Chopra — Netflix, Suresh Bysani — Eightfold, Gary Qi — Trae, Tan Li — Gru.ai, Lu Qiu — LanceDB)
🍪 2:30 PM – Snack Break
💻 3:00–6:00 PM – Hacking Time
🍜 6:00 PM – Dinner
💻 7:00 PM – Late-night hacking

​Sunday
☕ 9:00 AM – Breakfast
💻 9:00 AM–11:45 AM – Final Stretch of Hacking
📣 11:45 AM – Notes from Organizers
🥖 12:00 PM – Lunch
🚀 3:14 PM – Final Push (GitHub Submission Deadline)
🎪 3:45 PM – Hackathon Fair
🏆 5:30 PM – Finalist Pitches & Deliberation
🎤 6:30 PM – Awards + Closing

​🏆 Prizes: $3K+, $20k OpenAI/Gemini credits (More to be announced)
Expect a mix of cash, sponsor swag, and career-boosting exposure 👀

​💰 Up to $300K in pre-seed funding is on the table for standout teams ready to build beyond the hackathon 🚀

​🎯 Potential internship opportunities with sponsoring companies and partners for top participants 🔍

​✨ Why You Should Join:

• ​Free food & swag

• ​Build with top CS/AI students

• ​Showcase your skills to real startup leaders & investors

• ​Potential internships or offers

• ​Hands-on experience with real AI challenges

​📅 Important Dates
📌 Apply solo or with a team by April 17th
✅ Acceptances sent on a rolling basis — apply early to secure your spot!
📍 Location details will be shared upon acceptance

​Got questions? Email us at vsuortiz@andrew.cmu.edu

​🚀 Let’s redefine what’s possible with AI — see you in April!