Challenges

Decode the Noise

Build an AI-powered tool that detects propaganda, bots and bad actors online – and deploy it live on Hostinger's infrastructure.

Prizes:All three winning teams: All three winning teams will also receive one year of Hostinger hosting and a domain to keep their project live, Hostinger swag, and a spotlight on Hostinger's social media channels. · 1st Place: 2000 € · 2nd Place: 1000 € · 3rd Place: 500 €

Earned Trust in AI Code

How does AI code review keep pace with AI-written code, while humans stay accountable for every change?

Prizes:1st Place: €2,000 cash prize for the winning team. · 2nd Place: €1,000 cash prize for the runner-up team. · 3rd Place: €500 cash prize for the third-place team.

Spread

Spread: run a car transport company for a week

Prizes:1st Place: 2000€ · 2nd Place: 1000€ · 3rd Place: 500€

Break the Agent

Build a reinforcement learning environment that challenges today's best AI agents, demonstrate real failure modes, and show that its rewards reflect real progress.

Prizes:1st Place: 3,000€ + A work trial at AfterQuery + Merch · 2nd Place: 1,500€ + Merch · 3rd Place: 500€

Trusted Trade Agents

How can a food-service wholesaler let autonomous purchasing agents place an order – finding products, comparing offers and getting the right approval in a fraction of the time it takes today – without exposing real systems, confidential data or the marketplace roadmap?

Prizes:1st place: 4 000€ · 2nd place: 2 000€ · 3rd place: 1 000€

The Internet Butler / Your Personal Assistant

Build an agent that takes tedious tasks in people’s lives off their hands.

Prizes:1st Place: $2,500 Cash, $5,000 in Exa credits, Exa hoodie per person & Exa branded TRMNL dashboard · 2nd Place: $1500 cash, $3,000 in Exa credits, Exa hoodie per person & Exa branded macropad · 3rd Place: $500 Cash, $1k Exa credits & Exa hoodie per person · Participation Trophy: Every Junction participant get free $50 Exa Credits

The Green European Renaissance

Make Europe Green through Edge AI using Arduino

Prizes:1st Team: Ventuno Q unit per Team member · 2nd Team: UNO Q 4G + Plug and Make Kits per Team member · 3rd Team: Plug and Make Kit per Team member

AI Glasses for Everyone, Everyday

Demonstrate how a first-person field of view enables new or better interactions in everyday scenarios.

Prizes:Best overall: Each member of the winning team will receive a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

Stop Simulating, Start Moving: See It. Detect It. Act on It. The Intel Physical AI Challenge

AI is great on screen, but have you ever made it move? Welcome to the Intel Physical AI Challenge at Junction. This weekend, we’re taking your models out of the cloud and giving them hands, eyes, and real-time brains

Prizes:1st Place: €5,000 · 2nd Place: €3,000 · 3rd Place: €2,000

The Robot Teleoperation Challenge

Use professional motion capture suits and gloves to control robotic hands, arms and humanoid robots. Build something useful, unexpected, or downright unbelievable.

Prizes:1st place: 1x pair of Smartgloves II + 1x SDK license + featured post on Rokoko’s blog and extended support from Rokoko team (valued at €4,990) · 2nd Place: 1x Smartsuit Pro II (valued at €2,295) · 3rd place: 1x pair of Smartgloves I (1st gen gloves) + Rokoko merch (valued at €1,095)

Aaltonomous Humanoid

Our humanoid robot can do backflips but can't sort a few blocks into boxes. Give it a brain.

Prizes:Winning Team: 2,000€ + a visit to the Aalto robotics lab · Top 5: 🤖 Top ~5 teams (chosen by performance in simulation) get to run their solution live on the real Unitree G1.

Make Unicorns Real

Build a product that solves a real need for founders or investors, powered by reliable public data from Cala.

Prizes:1st: Travel and accommodation covered for three hackathons (around 5,000€ in value for a team of 4) + 1,000€ in Cala credits + Cala merch · Runner Up: 500€ in Cala credits + Cala Merch

Personal Economic Trainer

Explore how AI can turn personal banking data into a trusted financial coach for everyday life.

Prizes:1st Prize: 2000€ Airbnb Gift Card · 2nd Prize: 1000€ Airbnb Gift Card · 3rd Prize: 500€ Airbnb Gift Card

Equal Care Across Finland

At AstraZeneca stand we will provide key insights to the challenge on Friday at 20:00

Prizes:Best Overall: 1000€ · 2nd Overall: 750€ · 3rd Overall: 250€

Beyond the Clinic

Build the product that helps people stay well at home after depression treatment, using anything from natural stimuli to a phone, music, games, light or AI.

Prizes:2000€ for the best team: A prize for the winning team, a visit to the brain stimulation lab, and for the most promising idea, a change to keep developing it together with the researchers

Make Blueprints Talk

Build a program that answers natural language questions about construction drawings and building information models accurately and verifiably.

Prizes:Best Overall: 1000€ + A work trial at Stoa · 2nd Overall: 750€ · 3rd Overall: 250€

The Web Is Your Real-Time Database

Build a product that reacts to the live web.

Prizes:1st Place: €2,000 + swag · 2nd Place: €500 + swag · 3rd Place: Swag

Rethinking Recruitment

How can recruitment and matchmaking events organized by City of Espoo help companies and talent relevantly find and connect with each other, despite AI-generated job search materials and AI-assisted recruitment processes are becoming common?

Prizes:Best overall: 1500€ · 2nd Overall: 1000€ · 3rd Overall: 500€

Wikipedia Through Time.

Build the tools Wikipedia is missing, powered by MariaDB's vector search (RAG) and system-versioned tables.

Prizes:1st Place: €1,000 in cash, €1,000 in UpCloud credits, and a MariaDB certification for every team member (5 vouchers at learn.mariadb.com, value 750 USD). · 2nd Place: €500 in cash. · 3rd Place: €250 in cash. · All Winners: All winning teams to be credited in blog on mariadb.org.

By Verda

Verda Compute Track

From electron to token, it takes decades of progress to run AI. Add scale, efficiency, and sustainability, and AI becomes a monumental achievement.

Prizes:1st Place: $10,000 in Verda cloud credits + Verda hoodies · 2nd Place: $2,500 in cloud credits · 3rd Place: $2,500 in cloud credits

By Major League Hacking

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 or sign up for the Atlas free forever tier (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! Build a hack using MongoDB Atlas for a chance to win a M5Stack IoT Kit for you and each member of your group.

Prizes:Best Overall: M5Stack IoT Kit

By Major League Hacking

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!

Prizes:Best Overall: M5Stack mini programmable monitor

By Major League Hacking

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.

Prizes:Best Overall: Stream Deck Mini

By Major League Hacking

Best Use of Solana

The world of development is evolving fast and Solana is leading the charge with a network built to handle all of your infrastructure needs. Forget high fees and slow confirmations, it’s time to build applications that are fast, efficient, and scalable.

Prizes:Best Overall: Unruggable Hardware Wallets

By Major League Hacking

Best Use of Entire

Entire is the Git forge for agent-human collaboration. From syncing your sessions and prompts to your Git history, to hosting code and replacing the Pull Request with Trails, Entire are reimagining code hosting and collaboration for the agent era.

Prizes:Best Overall: Mini Portable Projector

By Major League Hacking

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.

Prizes:Best Overall: Wireless Earbuds

By OpenAI

Best Use of Codex

OpenAI challenges you to push the boundaries of what's possible with AI-powered software development.

Prizes:1st Overall: $10 000 API Credits · 2nd Overall: $5000 API Credits · 3rd Overall: $2500 API Credits

By Google DeepMind

Best Use of Gemini API

Build something extraordinary with Google's Gemini API.

Prizes:1st Overall: The winning team will receive 4000€, plus $1,000 in Google Cloud credits per team member. · 2nd Overall: 2000€ · 3rd Overall: 1000€

By Google DeepMind

Best Use of Gemma

Awarded to the team that demonstrates the most innovative and impactful use of Google's Gemma open models. We're looking for creative applications, strong technical execution, and solutions that showcase the potential of open AI models to solve real-world problems.

Prizes:Top 3: €1,000 per team for the top 3 teams, with no ranking between winners.

By NVIDIA

Best Use of Nemotron

Build a project powered by NVIDIA Nemotron that solves a real problem through reasoning, tool use, or coordinated workflows. Applies to: Any track.

Prizes:Two best teams: 1x NVIDIA RTX 5080

By Arduino

Best use of Arduino Uno Q

Bring your idea to life in the physical world with Edge AI and the Arduino UNO Q.

Prizes:Arduino UNO Q & Plug and Make kit for each team member: Each member of the winning team receives an Arduino UNO Q and an Arduino Plug and Make Kit.

By Context.dev

Best Use of Context.dev: Fully Structured Web

Plug the Context.dev API into whatever you're building and give it the live web: pages, brands, companies, people and news as clean structured data in one API call.

Prizes:1st Place: €750 + swag · 2nd Place: €250 + swag · 3rd Place: Swag

By Aiven

Best Use of Aiven

Great ideas need somewhere to run, data they can use and systems that work together. Whether you’re building an AI agent, an interactive game, a sustainability tool or something nobody has thought of yet, Aiven can help bring your project to life. We’re looking for the most impressive use of Aiven technology: a thoughtful implementation that makes a meaningful difference to your working solution.

Prizes:Best Use of Aiven: 1000€ · 2nd Overall: 750€ · 3rd Overall: 500€

By Craci

Best use of CRACI

Make every build your first line of defence.

Prizes:1st Team: LEGO set for each team member · 2nd Team: 24-pack of Red Bull for each team member · 3rd Team: invite to the CRACI x OpenAI lunch event during Slush. · Top 5 Teams: Each of the top 5 teams receives 50,000 CRACI CI/CD build minutes per team member, plus the opportunity to interview for a job at CRACI.

By Cloudinary

Best Use of Cloudinary

Build an innovative solution using one of our four tools listed on cld.media/hackathons that uses images and video to create a more engaging and intelligent digital experience.

Prizes:1st: $500 worth Amazon gift cards (for your local Amazon) / team member

By Modal

Best use of Modal

Take your Junction project from laptop to production AI on Modal.

Prizes:1st team: $2000 in cash prize & $3000 in Modal credits

By Oxylabs

Best agentic usecase of Oxylabs Web API

Design your project around the Oxylabs Web API: use live search and scraping to verify and inform your AI agent with what is true on the web right now.

Prizes:The winning team: The winning team will receive a €1,000 Apple gift voucher, plus $500 in Oxylabs product credits for each team member to use our web data collection products and explore their potential for future projects.

By Atech

Atech Real World Challenge

The API for the physical world

Prizes:Best Overall: The winning team gets a special Pro Atech kit for the team to keep building. · Runner ups: Runner-up teams get Atech kits and swag. Top teams are invited to show their project on Atech's channels and visit us in Copenhagen.