The Grand Prize is awarded to the team whose project demonstrates exceptional innovation, functionality, and overall excellence. This category encompasses projects that excel in various aspects, including creativity, technical complexity, impact, and execution. It recognizes the team that has pushed the boundaries of what is possible in 36 hours and built something incredible.

The Most Creative prize celebrates the team that shows the highest level of originality, imagination, and ingenuity in their project. This category rewards innovation and unconventional thinking, honoring projects that showcase unique approaches to problem-solving or introduce novel concepts and ideas.

The Most Impactful prize recognizes the project that has the potential to create the most significant positive change or address a pressing societal issue. Whether through addressing environmental concerns, improving accessibility, or tackling social injustices, among many other possibilities, this category highlights projects that aim to make a tangible difference in the world.

The Most Technically Complex prize is awarded to the team that exhibits outstanding technical skill, sophistication, and complexity in their project. This category celebrates projects that push the boundaries of technological capabilities, demonstrating mastery in areas such as algorithms, data structures, machine learning, or other advanced technologies.

The Best Hardware Hack prize honors the team that demonstrates excellence in integrating hardware components into their project. From IoT devices to robotics, this category celebrates projects that leverage physical computing elements to create innovative solutions and interactive experiences.

The Best Beginner Hack prize recognizes the outstanding achievement of a team with limited prior experience in coding or hackathons. This category celebrates the journey of learning and discovery, rewarding teams that demonstrate impressive creativity, effort, and progress in their first hackathon endeavor.

Sponsored by Liquid AI. We’re looking for groundbreaking demos of AI deployed at the edge: laptops, phones, or any other device you can think of. Show us how you leverage unique model architectures or modalities (language, diffusion, etc.) to achieve something innovative and useful under resource constraints.

Sponsored by Liquid AI. Focus on our Track 2 challenge by optimizing some of key operators for next-gen architectures—convolutions and recurrences—on the Samsung Galaxy S24. We’ll measure both peak memory and latency using our profiling scripts. The most optimized implementation (memory, latency across given input sizes) that still delivers accurate results will be crowned the champion. $5,000 Cash for the winning team for each operator: convolution, recurrence
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MeG4Sm6rpG9slDKbdawPBAqJ2mbU-X3YRjuY9jwqgQY/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.4qzyp82k2w2v

Sponsored by EigenLayer. Technical prowess, completeness, usability, and overall wow-factor. We’re looking for robust agents that can plan, act, and verify. Bonus points if you integrate EigenLayer or other advanced off-chain services in a meaningful way.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MeG4Sm6rpG9slDKbdawPBAqJ2mbU-X3YRjuY9jwqgQY/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.4qzyp82k2w2v

Sponsored by EigenLayer. Boldness, novelty and creativity. Show us something that nobody would have expected the use of AI to do—something that redefines the boundaries of on-chain and off-chain interactions.

Sponsored by Terra API. TSS - Terra Super Solder Program. BOOM. Build the ultimate performance-enhancing hack inspired by Captain America’s legendary transformation. Use Terra’s wearable data (e.g., steps, heart rate, sleep, etc.) to create the most innovative hack that could be used by the military to improve any aspect (of a soldier’s, a military unit’s, or even larger-scale) performance—whether in training, on the battlefield, or elsewhere. Meta Ray Ban Smart Glasses x4

Sponsored by Tesla. Current state-of-the-art VLMs struggle with real-world knowledge (geometry, semantics, actions, etc.) as well as high frame rate video understanding. For this hackathon, Tesla is releasing a real-world driving multiple choice question dataset to showcase this challenge. The award will go to the team with the highest score submission. Eligibility: Awarded to the team whose model achieves the highest accuracy in understanding real-world driving contexts using Tesla’s dataset. Additional terms and conditions apply.

6-months use of a Tesla Model 3 or Model Y with Supervised FSD (Estimated Value: $7,400 total)

Zoom is proud to sponsor the Education Grand Prize, celebrating the most creative and impactful solution that redefines how we learn, connect, and grow. This track is all about leveraging cutting-edge technology to break down barriers, foster engagement, and create inclusive, accessible learning experiences for students everywhere. From reimagining classrooms to empowering lifelong learners, we can’t wait to see how your ideas transform education for the better!

How well does the hackers' solution solve the pain point of the user from one of the provided sustainability challenges? We will be asking the users themselves to rate this and then we'll select.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jT2DE8QIyF8oLrZ3GunYzmfuHvPXJmHY4QpN9H8ljTY/edit?tab=t.0

Which team exhibited the best prototyping process, including multiple iterations with user feedback, identifying what hypotheses they want to test with each prototype, and using the quickest/cheapest prototyping process to test those hypotheses.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jT2DE8QIyF8oLrZ3GunYzmfuHvPXJmHY4QpN9H8ljTY/edit?tab=t.0

Satisfying the user's pain point is crucial, but so is considering the other broader contexts that can make a solution viable or not [e.g. regulatory constraints, purchaser vs user considerations, strategic design to facilitate word-of-mouth growth, ensuring equitable access, designing to prevent unintended impacts of using the solution, etc.}. How well has the team incorporated these broader contextual considerations into their solution design?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jT2DE8QIyF8oLrZ3GunYzmfuHvPXJmHY4QpN9H8ljTY/edit?tab=t.0

Best use of NVIDIA AI or accelerated computing.

1st place: RTX 5090 GPUs (up to 4, 1 of which is signed by Jensen Huang)
2nd place: RTX 5080 GPUs (up to 4)

Best use of NVIDIA tech in robotics, computer vision or edge AI.

Recognizing outstanding contributions, Tesla will also award three additional prizes to top submissions based on a combination of key criteria.

Evaluation Criteria:
- Score on leaderboard
- Inference latency
- Interpretability of model
- Creativity of approach
- Scalability of approach

Build your application using the Gemini family of model. Choose the lightning-fast Flash 2.0, explore new multimodal outputs, and unleash the power of native tool use. With Gemini you can get started in minutes and build dynamic applications with real-time audio and video streaming.

Prize: $1,200 in Vercel Pro Credits ($200 a month for 6 months) split between team members

This prize recognizes the most innovative and impactful application built using Zoom’s API. Whether it’s enhancing collaboration or powering AI-driven insights, this track celebrates projects that push the boundaries of what’s possible with the Zoom Developer Platform. Show us how you can harness Zoom’s tools to connect people, solve real-world problems, and unlock new potential!

The Mission: Provide Squad-Level Insights for Strategic Decisions. Commanders need squad health insights to make mission-critical decisions. Your goal is to build a health command center that helps commanders understand the health status of their soldiers or squads.
You will be given:
~2.8k 1-minute recordings of PPG waveforms
optionally, access to Terra API
Key Considerations:
Squad health monitoring: Use the PPG and meta data set provided to build a team-wide health monitoring tool to identify trends in heart health and readiness
Optional: personalized cardiac risk scoring system. Develop your own cardiac risk scoring system based off the attributes provided in the recordings and metadata, and any more characteristics you can identify from the waveforms based on your own research
Optional: Thresholds & alerts - Set automatic alerts when a squad falls below mission-ready conditions.

This prestigious award recognizes the most outstanding Web3 project that demonstrates exceptional innovation, technical execution, and long-term potential. Whether pioneering new blockchain infrastructures, redefining decentralized applications, or setting new standards for scalability and adoption, this accolade honors the project poised to make the most significant impact in the evolving Web3 ecosystem. Prize: up to 4 units of "Deeper Network Air" (a powerful decentralized VPN (dVPN) device that enhances online security, privacy, and censorship resistance while enabling participation in Web3 infrastructure.) and 1 unit (for the whole team) of "NGRAVE Zero" (world's safest hardware wallet).

This award celebrates the most innovative and forward-thinking security solution in the Web3 space. Honoring a project that creatively fortifies smart contracts, enhances privacy, or builds cutting-edge security tools, this accolade recognizes the hackers who are safeguarding the future of decentralized technology with bold and ingenious security solutions. Prize: up to 4 units of "Deeper Network Air" (a powerful decentralized VPN (dVPN) device that enhances online security, privacy, and censorship resistance while enabling participation in Web3 infrastructure.) and 1 unit (for the whole team) of "NGRAVE Zero" (world's safest hardware wallet).

This accolade is dedicated to the project leveraging Web3 technology to drive meaningful social impact. From financial inclusion and decentralized identity solutions to sustainability initiatives and humanitarian applications, this award honors the most transformative project that harnesses blockchain’s potential for the greater good. Prize: up to 4 units of "Deeper Network Air" (a powerful decentralized VPN (dVPN) device that enhances online security, privacy, and censorship resistance while enabling participation in Web3 infrastructure.) and 1 unit (for the whole team) of "NGRAVE Zero" (world's safest hardware wallet).

Otsuka is dedicated to innovating in the pharmaceutical and nutraceutical space, always striving to better understand our users. With the launch of ekkomi®—a matcha and meditation brand inspired by the Japanese tea ceremony—we’ve created an app where users experience guided meditations while making matcha. This prize will be awarded to the hack that best leverages advanced visual or audio technologies to capture and analyze user feedback. We’re looking for solutions that provide deeper insights into user experiences—such as tracking emotional responses, engagement levels, or physical interactions.

Award Criteria:
- Utilizes advanced visual or audio technologies (including but not limited to biometric sensing, gaze estimation/eye tracking, AR/VR, wearables, voice emotion analysis, movement tracking, speech analysis, audio sentiment, etc.) to gather, interpret, and analyze user feedback.
- Bonus points for tying the solution to improve the ekkomi® user experience, such as demonstrating how guided meditations within the app can help reduce stress, track emotional well-being, or foster mindfulness over time.

At VALUENEX, our highly-visualized panoramic view and predictive analytics tools help to create strategy. We are looking for the best hack to visualize large amounts of complex data (images, audio, text etc.) to enable novel methods of generating analysis and insights.

InterSystems IRIS Vector Search is our new vector store feature within the IRIS Data Platform! But we're not a "vector database" just like we're not a "string database" or "integer database" -- embedding vectors are just another SQL datatype for us. Build your groundbreaking solution on InterSystems IRIS data platform, which gives you the tools to seamlessly integrate GenAI, tabular AutoML, data interoperability, using simple SQL or Python LangChain/Llamaindex connectors. The most innovative solution that leverages GenAI using InterSystems IRIS will win cash prizes! Quick Start: https://developer.intersystems.com/challenge-treehacks2025/

Awarded to the project that best utilizes Perplexity's Sonar, Sonar Pro or Sonar Reasoning APIs. $250 gift card per hacker and a visit to the Perplexity headquarters in SF to meet the team.

Awarded to 3 teams that used Perplexity during their development process (selected at random). Make sure to explain how you used Perplexity when you submit your project in Devpost. $50 gift card per hacker

Build an AI application with Chroma Cloud. We will give participating groups API keys for our new hosted service, and the challenge is to build an AI app powered by Chroma. Prize: $200 per team member for the winning team. We will give them a Visa gift card via email.

This prize celebrates projects that integrate generative AI with code and software engineering. Whether generating apps from scratch like v0, providing developer assistance like Cursor, or some other creative application of LLMs to transform the experience of building software, this prize will go to the team that demonstrates excellence in code generation. Use of the Codegen SDK is encouraged but not required.

This prize celebrates projects that leverage software to understand software. Example projects include codebase analytics dashboards, code security scans, codebase visualizations, large-scale code scraping/aggregations, and applications for generating synthetic LLM training data from codebases. Use of the Codegen SDK is encouraged but not required. (Codegen.com)

This prize encompasses all possible developer tools, whether they integrate generative AI, advanced static analysis, interesting UI features and beyond. Use of the Codegen SDK is encouraged but not required. (Codegen.com)

The team who use Windsurf to build their project in the most creative or valuable way will enjoy a 1 year subscription to Codeium Pro Ultimate, which gives the ability to use Windsurf and Cascade Codeium Pro Ultimate for 1 year

Awarded to the project which demonstrates the most useful end-to-end workflow (AI employee workflow) done by but not limited to an LLM agent. Use of the Context API / context engine is suggested but will not influence decisions. $2500 Cash and $2500 Context API credits.

This award spotlights the most outstanding AI agent services designed to empower users with seamless access to autonomous digital assistance and workflow automation. Celebrating innovations across personal productivity tools, business process automation, multi-agent systems, autonomous task execution, and human-AI collaboration frameworks. The award recognizes solutions that demonstrate exceptional capability in business use case, personal productivity, workflow and business automation, memory and storage use, reliable task completion, context awareness, and integration with existing digital ecosystems. Special consideration is given to platforms that advance autonomous decision-making, adaptive learning, and responsible AI deployment while maintaining high standards of security, privacy, and user control. The winning solution should showcase breakthrough approaches in areas such as agent orchestration, knowledge synthesis, or workflow optimization that meaningfully enhance human capabilities and organizational efficiency.

Awarded to the team that develops the most effective browser-based agent experience, demonstrating practical task execution and seamless online interaction.

Awarded to the project that demonstrates excellence in application security.

Awarded to the project that combines exceptional frontend implementation with clear, effective interface design.

Elasticsearch is the most widely deployed search engine and vector database. Use the playground built into Kibana to develop prototypes for RAG in minutes and run it on Elasticsearch Serverless without worrying about the operations. The prices are for teams who use Elasticsearch and Kibana in an innovative way — examples include RAG, powerful search, visualizations, or geo problems

Awarded to the project that best leverages ElevenLabs technologies—whether through text-to-speech, Conversational AI, or any of our other products. We’re looking for the most creative and impactful hack that pushes the boundaries of what’s possible with AI voice technologies.

1st Prize: 11M ElevenLabs credits ($1,320). Apple AirPods Max (for each team member).

2nd Prize: 8.11M ElevenLabs credits ($1,000). ElevenLabs merch.

3rd Prize: 5.11M ElevenLabs credits ($700). ElevenLabs merch.

Whether your passion lies in AI, education, healthcare, sustainability, or beyond, we invite you to bring your vision to life with FlutterFlow — a visual, AI-powered development platform that enables you to build high-quality, customized mobile and web apps. Create an awesome experience with FlutterFlow’s drag & drop UI builder, and develop a powerful app with our database and API integrations. For this prize, we’re looking for the best use of FlutterFlow!
Go to bit.ly/fftreehacks for templates & resources to speed up your building process, and access the FlutterFlow pro plan for free here: https://flutterflow.typeform.com/to/FxDJDUP8

1st place: $2,000 + meeting with co-founders of FlutterFlow (Abel Mengistu & Alex Greaves, Stanford BS 2015 & MS 2016)

2nd place: $1,500 Cash

3rd place: iPad 10.9” (per team member)

Build a creative and interactive multimodal app powered by Groq. Projects are judged based on number of modalities powered by Groq (text, vision, audio), how innovative it is to solve a real world problem, UX, and design. $1,000 of credit to the Groq swag store

Effective use of data is important to the decisions we make at Hudson River Trading, and we’re always looking for innovative new ways to strategize with data. This prize will be awarded to the hack that best integrates the use of data into their project.

Given to the project we think makes the best use of LangChain (and/or LangGraph and LangSmith) to build an agentic system.

At Luma AI, we're pushing the boundaries of what's possible in visual content creation. Our foundation models enable seamless transformation between text, images, and video, empowering creators to bring their visions to life. We challenge you to explore how generative AI can revolutionize visual storytelling, content creation, and interactive experiences.

Awarded to the top team that uses Mistral AI API.

Product: Build something people want. Market Size: Address a significant opportunity. Team: Founders would consider committing for long-term. Prize: airfare + accommodations for your team to visit a summer retreat with Neo scholars, startups, and veteran mentors.

Awarded to the top three teams that use OpenAI API most creatively.
OpenAI SF HQ lunch + visit with OpenAI researchers and engineers and
OpenAI swag.

At OrbStack, we think about systems problems all day. How do we maximize performance and minimize CPU cycles and memory usage? So naturally, we lean towards Rust, the systems programming language that's quickly taking over the space. Build something interesting and (ab)use features like the Rust type system, unsafe code, async runtimes, proc macros, or other fun intricacies! PRIZE: $1000

Build something that works with spreadsheets or has a spreadsheet in the application! Bonus points for beautiful UX.

Award for the hacks that have the deepest customer insights and are solving real pain points. 1st Place: A final round interview with Pear for a $25,000 Uncapped SAFE investment, and Office Hours with Pear VC Partners. 2nd Place: Office Hours with Pear VC Partners.

To qualify for this award, your team must build a system that leverages large language models to complete a complex workflow specified via natural language. More specifically, qualifying teams must leverage techniques including some of (but not limited to) context fetching, prompt orchestration, output validation, or tool calling to perform some unit of work for the end user. Teams will be judged on technical complexity, creativity, functionality, and UI/UX design.

Teams are required to submit a concise write-up description as part of their submission. Teams can optionally submit a system diagram as part of their submission as well. Write-ups and diagrams must be submitted within 2 hours of code submission. Write-ups and diagrams can be submitted part of the devpost submission (publicly available url), or by emailing alex@rox.com with with subject line `[TreeHacks] `

Scrapybara gives your AI a computer. We host Ubuntu/Windows/Mac/Browser instances for computer use agents like Operator CUA. The Capy Prize recognizes the craziest and most sci-fi use of Scrapybara. Make us say "holy-sh" to the best of your ability, and we will bring you to see real capybaras in Japan.

1st place: Join us on company offsite to Japan in March/April to see capybaras and cherry blossoms, $1,000 OpenAI/Anthropic credits, Scrapybara Pro 6 months for all team members

2nd place: $500 OpenAI/Anthropic credits, Scrapybara Pro 3 months for all team members

3rd place: $100 OpenAI/Anthropic credits, Scrapybara Pro 1 month for all team members

Vision Language Models (VLMs) can be defined as multimodal models that work on both text and images. These models can be used to extract meaning from images, like in https://blog.vespa.ai/visual-rag-in-practice/. There are many more usages, like finding images with similar pieces of content, captioning, and creating abstracts. This prize is for the best hack using a VLM! $500 Amazon gift Card (per team member)

Build a hack that focuses on improving the developer experience in some meaningful way - this could be tackling any part of the development lifecycle (creating, modifying or testing software). Sponsored by Warp (but you don't need to use Warp in your hack - we'd love for you to try it out while building - https://www.warp.dev/!) Keychron Keyboards for each team member.

The Grand Prize is awarded to the team whose project demonstrates exceptional innovation, functionality, and overall excellence. This category encompasses projects that excel in various aspects, including creativity, technical complexity, impact, and execution. It recognizes the team that has pushed the boundaries of what is possible in 36 hours and built something incredible.

The Grand Prize is awarded to the team whose project demonstrates exceptional innovation, functionality, and overall excellence. This category encompasses projects that excel in various aspects, including creativity, technical complexity, impact, and execution. It recognizes the team that has pushed the boundaries of what is possible in 36 hours and built something incredible.