Highlights from HackMIT 2026! - Keynote by Grant Sanderson - 1000 hackers, 175 mentor/judges, 140 sponsor reps checked in - 11 Hack Week sessions, 5 workshops, 2 tech talks, 3 fireside chats, and 9 mini-events - Robot dogs, coffee carts, live serenades, laser tag - $100k in prizes given out - 300 projects in 24 hours Thank you to everyone who spent the weekend bringing incredible ideas to life. Here are some highlights from an unforgettable weekend!

Grant Sanderson's keynote speech at HackMIT 2026. "We no longer need to understand to build." "Are you learning in order to build?" "Or are you building in order to learn."

Announcing our Bronze sponsor challenges. Warp: Best Developer Tool 🏆 Prizes 🥇 1st place: Keychron mechanical keyboard for each team member OpenAI: OpenAI Challenge 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: One year of ChatGPT Pro + OpenAI backpack + OpenAI swag bundle 🥈2nd place: Six months of ChatGPT Pro 🥉3rd place: Three months of ChatGPT Pro Regeneron: Make Clinical Trials and Biostatistics Better! 🏆 Prizes: TBD

Announcing our Silver sponsor challenges. Espressif: Best Use of Espressif Hardware & Solutions 🏆 Prizes 🥇 1st place: 1× AI Pyramid Computing Box Pro 8GB (AX8850) + 4× S31 Korvo Boards ElevenLabs Challenge 🏆 Prizes: TBD Meta: Bringing People Closer Together with AI 🏆 Top 3 teams receive: - Invitation to Round 2 at Meta’s Menlo Park campus, with travel and accommodations provided - Meta swag bag Arrowstreet Capital: Best Textual Analysis Hack 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: $1,000 distributed among the team + interview with a Research team member for each winner + hoodie for each team member Deepgram: Build Something Worth Talking To 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: 1 Nintendo Switch for each member of the winning team

Announcing our Gold sponsor challenges. Dimensional: Best Use of Dimensional 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: Unitree Go2 per team + interview opportunity for internship or full-time 🥈2nd place: $500 cash per team + interview opportunity for internship or full-time Elastic: Find the Signal 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: Meta Quest 3S Headphones per team member 🥈2nd place: Bose QuietComfort Headphones per team member GiveCampus: Find the Hidden Dollars 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: Private lunch or dinner + $500 team donation to an education nonprofit + feature spotlight on GiveCampus LinkedIn or blog 🥈2nd place: 60-minute mentorship session 🌱 Best Beginner / Early Builder: Headphones or gift cards + 30-minute resume review Cursor: Make it Legendary with SpaceXAI 🏆 Prizes: TBD Dropbox: Turn Digital Chaos into Something Useful 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: AirPods Max 2 + fast-track interview process for a Dropbox internship 🥈2nd place: JBL PartyBox Encore Essential 2 Speaker + fast-track interview process for a Dropbox internship Ramp: Save Time. Save Money. 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: Nintendo Switch + Oura Ring + $100 per member 🥈2nd place: Nintendo Switch + sweatpants + $100 per member 🥉3rd place: Ramp swag (hoodie, sweatpants, Owala, frisbee) + $100 per member

Announcing our Platinum sponsor Cognition challenge. Best Use of Devin 🤖 Use Devin, the AI software engineer, to build something exciting. Ambitious ideas welcome: Devin plans, writes, tests, and ships the code alongside you, so aim bigger than a weekend normally allows. 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: $5,000

Announcing our Platinum sponsor Visa challenge. Reimagine Shopping Use Generative AI to craft smarter, effortless commerce experiences. 🛍️ Shopping is evolving from searching and browsing to conversing and collaborating with AI. Consumers expect AI-powered experiences that help them discover products, compare options, personalize recommendations, manage budgets, and complete purchases seamlessly. 💳 Your challenge is to design and build a commerce experience powered by Generative AI that makes shopping more intuitive, personalized, and frictionless while enabling secure and trusted payments. 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: $5,000

Announcing our Platinum sponsor Arduino challenge. Touch Grass: Build Something That Understands the Real World The most revolutionary software in the world is useless if it can’t feel the world. Code lives in the abstract. Light, temperature, sound, pressure, motion, humidity, that’s reality. Software has conquered the digital world. Now it’s time to build systems that understand the physical one. This challenge asks you to build the bridge between them. Using the Arduino® UNO™ Q, you’ll pull raw, messy, beautiful data from the physical environment around you and turn it into something that matters: a tool that helps someone, an experience that surprises someone, a system that understands the world a little better than it did before. The best projects won’t just visualize sensor data, they’ll transform it into meaningful, intelligent experiences. 🏆 Prizes: TBD

Announcing our Platinum sponsor Voloridge challenge. Signal in the Noise Build something interesting using one or more real-world public datasets. We’ll provide a curated selection of large, publicly available datasets spanning topics such as earth observation, healthcare, transportation, climate, genomics, economics, and more. Your goal is to extract insight, build a useful tool, discover an unexpected pattern, or create an application that demonstrates thoughtful use of data. 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: $5,000 distributed among the team + fast tracked interview Good luck, and happy hacking!

Announcing our Platinum sponsor Maximor AI challenge. Build an Agent for Financial Workflows Build an agent that learns to automate a real workflow in the Office of the CFO. Your agent should be able to execute a finance workflow, identify when and why it fails, and improve its own behavior over repeated runs. 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: $4,000 🥈2nd place: $2,000 🥉3rd place: $1,000