LA Hacks is excited to celebrate its 14th year back at Pauley Pavilion as Southern California's Largest Collegiate Hackathon. Our team is excited to welcome 1,200 participants, mentors, and sponsors back to LA Hacks to learn, develop, and innovate on this journey. Building on the success of our recent in-person hackathon, we are thrilled to carry this momentum forward and create a space for hackers to set the course for the next generation of innovation.
Are you ready to light the fuse? This year, LA Hacks believes in our theme One Spark Is All It Takes to ignite breakthroughs and fuel your competitive fire. From breakthrough AI models to hardware hacks you can hold, we're handing you the math- now it's up to you to strike inspiration into action. Join students around the globe as we spark ideas, tackle real-world challenges, and watch a single flash of creativity set the world ablaze.
All hackers must apply at https://lahacks.com/, be accepted, RSVP'ed, and attend in person to participate.
More information (including full company challenges) can be found at https://live.lahacks.com/
PRIZE DISCLAIMER: All cash values listed down below is the monetary value of the prize(s) and are strictly listed just for the total prize pool calculation on this page. Similarly amount of winners (usually listed as 1) is listed purely for prize pool calculation. See prize description for the actual prize(s) and # of winners.
Requirements
What to Build
LA Hacks features four submission tracks: Sustain the Spark (Sustainability), Light the Way (Education), Flicker to Flow (Productivity), and Catalyst for Care (Healthcare). Learn more about each track on our website: lahacks.com.
To submit, your project must align with one of these tracks and demonstrate innovative use of technology to solve real-world challenges. We encourage you to think big, build creatively, and push the boundaries of what's possible!
What to Submit
Your submission must include:
- Project Description: A brief explanation of what your project does, the problem it solves, and which track it falls under. How does it apply to the company challenges you submitted to?
- Code Repository: A public GitHub repository (or equivalent) containing your source code. Ensure it’s well-documented.
- Demo Video (2-3 min): A walkthrough of your project, showcasing its features, functionality, and how it works.
- Devpost Submission: A complete Devpost page with a clear summary, technologies used, and any additional resources (e.g., Figma designs, API docs).
Make sure your submission is original, adheres to the hackathon rules, and is completed within the hackathon timeframe!
In order to be judged and eligible for prizes, you must be present in person for the judging phase of the hackathon!
Prizes
1st Overall
Frontier GoWILD All You Can Fly Pass till Apr. 2027
2nd Overall
Apple Watch SE 3
3rd Overall
Polaroid Now+ Generation 3 Spectrum Set
Track: Sustain The Spark
Arc'teryx Mantis 1 Waist Pack
Our planet's future hangs in the balance, and one bold idea can tip the scales. This track welcomes grassroots innovation and is your space to cultivate projects combating climate change, reducing waste, or accelerating the transition to clean energy. Your project can help the world sustain its spark for years to come.
Track: Catalyst For Care
Creative Pebble V3 Bluetooth Speakers
The pulse of progress beats strongest where it matters the most: human health. This track challenges you to develop solutions that revolutionize the patient-provider experience. From optimizing hospital logistics and streamlining diagnostics to building tools that enhance wellness, your creation will be the catalyst for a healthier world.
Track: Light The Way
Rocketbook Core - Next Gen
A single idea can unlock a universe of knowledge. This track invites you to transform the future of education by making learning accessible to all. You can create projects with accessibility features or interactive learning platforms. How will your spark light up the classrooms of tomorrow?
Track: Flicker To Flow
Keurig K-Mini® Single Serve Coffee Maker
With all the chaos of the world, how can we turn the flickers into a flowstate? Use this track to focus on enhancing how we work, play, and connect. Whether you automate mundane chores, organize a chaotic schedule, or create a platform that promotes better work-life balance, show us how you can transform friction into function.
Track: Agentverse - Search & Discovery of Agents
1st: $2500
2nd: $1500
3rd: $1000
4th: $500
Build and Register AI Agents on Agentverse, discoverable via ASI:One, that turn user intent into real, executable outcomes.
Full Description: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DvVmkBTyY6T_muNkINt62yhSBcS_8pF8Mnk6Eb0oZNg/edit?tab=t.0
Organizers' Choice
Magcubic HY350Max Home Projector
Best Social Impact Hack
JBL Flip 5
Best UI/UX
Wacom Intuos Medium Bluetooth Graphics Drawing Tablet
Best Hardware Hack
Holy Stone GPS Drone
High Quality Sponsormaxxing
Amazon Echo Show
Most Questionable Use of 36 Hours
Inflatable Dinosaur Costume
Fetch.ai: OmegaClaw Skill Forge powered by Agentverse
1st Place: $1,500
2nd Place: $1,000
Build a new specialist skill/capability for OmegaClaw using Agentverse.
In this track, participants will expand what OmegaClaw can do by connecting it to specialist intelligence through Agentverse. In many cases, this will mean building a specialist agent for a specific use case, registering it on Agentverse, and then creating the OmegaClaw skill or integration layer that allows OmegaClaw to discover, invoke, and use that agent when needed. If a strong existing Agentverse agent already fits the use case, participants may choose to integrate that instead.
Full Description: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UUGL6gIclHfp4pvvkJaT_65rNHrrDBLCHCXjpesWsgQ/edit?tab=t.0
Fetch.ai: Best Use of ASI:One
Fetch.ai Late Add-on challenge
ROBLOX Civility Challenge
1st: $2000
2nd: $1000
3rd: $500
Build for 144M+ Daily Players: We invite you to build Roblox games that redefine what it means to learn about digital well-being, safety, and civility. This is your chance to move beyond a "cool demo" and create a project with impact that could be featured on the Roblox Learning Hub and seen by millions of families worldwide.
The Challenge: Build a game that makes learning about digital well-being, safety, and civility feel like playtime. We encourage you to explore:
- Civility & Life Skills: Reward kindness, media literacy, and scam prevention.
- Digital Literacy: Gamify real-world skills like AI fluency and phishing defense.
- Arts & Well-being: Use music and self-expression to explore mental health.
- Early Learning: Create co-op adventures for kids and parents to learn together.
- Real-World Impact: Empower players to navigate the online world safely.
Full Description: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14iaZ-K3n2CJ93ah4R_awvzRdpkqV_cVlyZgf5WIw9Qs/edit?tab=t.0
Cognition Company Challenge
1st Place: $3,000
2nd Place: $2,000
3rd Place: $1,000
Top 3: 1,000 Devin ACUs + conversation with engineering team
Honorable Mention: Cognition Swag Pack
All Winners: 1 year of Windsurf Pro
AI coding agents can write code, run tests, and open PRs — but they still hit walls. Build a tool, integration, or product that makes AI coding agents measurably more capable, or eliminates developer/professional toil that agents can't yet handle on their own.
What we're looking for: Something a real engineering team would actually
use. Some concrete directions (not exhaustive):
- Better verification for AI-generated code. Agents write code and run CI, but catching subtle bugs, visual regressions, or behavioral drift is still hard. Build tooling that closes this gap.
- Smarter context retrieval. Agents waste time and tokens searching for the right code. Build something that gives them faster, more precise access to the parts of a codebase that matter for a given task — architectural patterns, data flows, implicit constraints.
- Agent plugins. Build an MCP server, skill, or integration that connects agents to a new tool or service they can't access today — design tools, databases, monitoring, internal APIs, etc.
- Human-AI collaboration tooling. The handoff between human and agent is clunky. Build something that makes it seamless — better specification formats, progress dashboards, context transfer, or session replay.
- Eliminating professional toil. Take a tedious, repetitive workflow in any knowledge work domain (not just coding) and automate it end-to-end with AI agents.
Full Description: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MvgGiSwNU3OIqRu9r3ERNMV4NDQuHzSzrK5CkGLviws/edit?usp=sharing
Figma Make Challenge
6-10 Teams will be highlighted by Figma Edu and receive Figma plushies for all team members!
Show us how you used Figma Make as part of your workflow this weekend. We're not looking for a finished product built entirely in Make. We want to see how you used it to think faster, test ideas, and iterate your way to something better.
Maybe you mocked up a feature before writing a single line of code. Maybe you used it to pitch your idea to your team at 2am. Maybe it helped you throw away a bad idea early and save yourself three hours. Whatever it was, show us the process.
What we're looking for: Creative use of Figma Make at any point in your process: ideation, prototyping, iteration, or pitching. No design experience required!
Full Description: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jEZ_NcL3acSJh5H2YwzfTYL8gAuj73k_Bsj9Y5uVWVg/edit?tab=t.0
World U: Build for the future of the internet with World
1st place: $1,500
2nd place: $900
3rd place: $600
All Winners: Plus a chance to access World Build and a TFH Engineer Fellowship interview.
Build a Mini App with MiniKit or use IDKit to create a product for real humans on the internet.
The best submissions should show a clear use case where proof of human makes the product better. That could mean more trust, better safety, fair access or something entirely new.
Build with tools designed to help you ship quickly and create products that can reach World App’s 38M+ users across 160+ countries.
Full Description: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e5Jn0V_835auxomY3IoW5ICa31eTj71hp5RMw5XDyro/edit?usp=sharing
Cloudinary Company Challenge
$500 Amazon Giftcard For Each Member
For this challenge, your mission is to leverage Cloudinary’s React AI Starter Kit to create a groundbreaking application.
Your app must demonstrate how Cloudinary’s powerful media platform can be used to build beautiful, performant, innovative web experiences.
Framework: Use the React AI Starter Kit - jump on the free tier via this tool:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/create-cloudinary-react
Focus: Create a highly functional, production-ready app.
Theme: Demonstrate innovative uses of Cloudinary's media capabilities.
And…Tell us about your experience!
ASUS Company Challenge
Prizes: 1st Place: ASUS Ascent GX10 supercomputer + ASUS Zenscreen portable monitors ($4000+ value), 2nd Place: ASUS ROG Gaming Mice ($600 value)
Up to 40 teams will get the chance to use our Ascent GX10 hardware to build a solution or experience that is surprising, meaningful, or impactful.
We encourage you to think beyond what’s expected:
What becomes possible when AI runs locally instead of in the cloud?
How can you create faster, more responsive, or more private experiences?
What would feel truly incredible to the end user?
At ASUS, “Design Thinking” matters. The ASUS “In Search of Incredible” philosophy starts with people. The winning project will not only showcase technical execution, but also thoughtful design and real human impact.
Full Description at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fkBT2PwNROVeiSGC6xtY8bR5gAZ5WxHVdaSClBP49qU/edit?usp=sharing
Happy Hacking Keyboard: Type Beyond - Rethinking Interaction Through the Keyboard
HHKB Hybrid Model Keyboards [Charcoal]
The keyboard is one of the most powerful tools we use everyday- yet most software treats it as secondary. Build a new experience where the keyboard is the primary medium of interaction, enabling new ways to create, play, communicate, or explore. This challenge is about going beyond traditional typing and uses of keyboards, but creatively transforming keystrokes into something more expressive, interactive, and meaningful.
Design and build a project where:
- The keyboard is central to the experience
- Interaction is driven primarily through keystrokes, shortcuts, or novel input systems
- The experience feels intentional, immersive, and well-crafted
Your project can be anything! From games to tools to entirely new interfaces, as long as it reimagines what typing can do.
Full Description: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tbib3MzxXJLq-aJg_Q3c7CHhkAsq_vmrfDSys9NFxzs/edit?tab=t.0
Zetic Company Challenge
1st Place: $1000
2nd Place: $600
3rd Place: $400
All winners will receive 3 months of Melange Pro+ subscription and interview opportunities with ZETIC.
ZETIC builds an infrastructure for running AI on the edge devices which is fast, efficient, and private.
Melange is our dev tool that enables developers and builders to select, benchmark, and deploy AI models directly on the end-user’s smartphone within minutes, across CPU, GPU, and NPU.
In this challenge, you will build an AI-powered application using Melange (https://melange.zetic.ai/) to run AI models locally on real devices.
Your application must run its primary functionality on-device. Cloud inference may be used only for secondary tasks such as heavy computation or fallback.
Strong submissions will:
- Run core functionality directly on-device
- Clearly separate on-device and cloud responsibilities
- Deliver real-time, low-latency interactions
You can build applications across domains such as Healthcare, Education, Productivity, and Accessibility.
Full Description: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Uu3UqMqloS2k4splQ6J4zChCTMOE8LCITC3_LBGx_Oo/edit?usp=sharing
Arista Networks: Connect the Dots Challenge
1st: Claude Pro 12 month Subscription + Bose QuietComfort headphones + Logitech MX Master 3S
2nd: Claude Pro 12 month Subscription
3rd: Logitech MX Master 3S
Arista Networks is the leader in building scalable high-performance and ultra-low-latency networks for today's data center and cloud computing environments. For this challenge, we want you to apply networking to build a software solution that improves everyday life.
Build a web, mobile, or desktop application that successfully connects people to resources, or routes useful data to solve a problem in daily life. Your team may build a platform that networks students together, or pull data from public APIs to create a unified dashboard, or anything else that connects and moves data.
Full Description: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1orkaxJJMpOLONU3Pa4ubLfp_7WgB0s_Cii2-L9bu9FY/edit?tab=t.0
MLH: Best Domain Name from GoDaddy Registry
Digital Gift Card
GoDaddy Registry is giving you everything you need to be the best hacker no matter where you are. Register your domain name with GoDaddy Registry for a chance to win some amazing prizes!
MLH: Best Use of MongoDB Atlas
M5Stack IoT Kit
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.
MLH: Best Use of Gemma
Google Swag Kits
It’s time to push the boundaries of what's possible with AI using Google Gemma. Check out Gemma to build AI-powered apps that make your friends say WHOA. So, what can Gemma do for your hackathon project?
Understand language like a human and build a chatbot that gives personalized advice
Analyze info like a supercomputer and create an app that summarizes complex research papers
Generate creative content like code, scripts, music, and more
Think of the possibilities… what will you build with the Google Gemma this weekend?
MLH: Best Use of ElevenLabs
Wireless Earbuds
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.
Integrate fully autonomous audio experiences into your hack with ElevenLabs and give your project a voice, along with giving your team the chance to win some wireless earbuds!
MLH: Best Use of Solana
Ledger Nano S Plus
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.
Harness Solana's core advantages like blazing fast execution and near-zero transaction costs to make your hackathon ideas become real world projects. With Solana, the possibilities are endless.
Create a game, social app, or consumer product that relies on instant, high-frequency transactions.
Design a sophisticated trading, lending, or decentralized exchange (DEX).
Build a prototype for supply chain, identity, or payments that can handle massive, real-world volume.
Show us how you can innovate with Solana for a chance to win some cool prizes for you and each member of your team!
MLH: Best Use of Vultr
Portable Screens
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!
Sign up for a Vultr account today and claim your free cloud credits! Take your next hack to the cloud with Vultr for a chance to win some awesome portable screens for you and your team!
MLH: Best Use of Auth0 AI Agents
Wireless Headphones
Auth0 wants your applications to be secure! Why spend hours building features like social sign-in, Multi-Factor Authentication, and passwordless log-in when you can enable them through Auth0 straight out of the box? Auth0 is free to try, doesn’t require a credit card, and allows for up to 7,000 free active users and unlimited log-ins. Make your new account today and use any of the Auth0 APIs for a chance to win a pair of wireless headphones for you and each member of your team!
Devpost Achievements
Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:
Judges
LA Hacks Judges
Judging Criteria
-
Technical Depth
How technically sophisticated is the project? We look for clear engineering effort, thoughtful system design, and meaningful technical implementation. Does the team go beyond simple integrations or templates to demonstrate real technical understanding? -
Product Thinking & Impact
Does the team clearly understand the problem and the user? Strong projects show thoughtful product design, a clear use case, and a believable real-world impact. -
Execution & Polish
How well was the idea executed during the hackathon? Judges look for working functionality, a smooth demo, and a cohesive product experience. -
Originality & Insight
Does the project present a fresh idea or perspective? We look for creative thinking, clever implementations, or unique insights that make the project stand out.
Questions? Email the hackathon manager
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