Announcing the Winners of the You.com Agentic Hackathon 2025!

The You.com Agentic Hackathon 2025 has officially wrapped—and what an incredible journey it’s been! Over the past week, developers from around the world came together to build the future of AI enterprises using You.com’s powerful APIs.

The hackathon was a vibrant showcase of innovation, bringing together developers, designers, and creators to build the next generation of AI-powered tools. Over an action-packed 4-day event, teams collaborated, brainstormed, and raced against the clock to turn bold ideas into working prototypes.

The atmosphere (and Discord) buzzed with creativity and camaraderie as participants tackled real-world challenges and pushed the boundaries of what’s possible. Thank you to everyone who participated and a big thank you to our winning teams.

The 2025 You.com Agentic Hackathon Winners

After days of intense effort and inspiring teamwork, it’s time to celebrate the standout projects and announce the winners who truly embodied the spirit of the hackathon.

Track Winners & Honorable Mentions

Best Use of You.com API

Project: RAG Pipeline V2

Developer: Anubhav Sharma

Organizations waste hours manually extracting key data from scattered PDFs, Word, Excel, and images. RAG Pipeline V2 automates this by unifying multi-format document parsing, advanced retrieval, and accurate answer generation with citations. It reduces hallucinations, boosts numerical accuracy, and handles noisy metadata, streamlining workflows for Accounting, Legal, and Financial teams.

Honorable Mention

Project: YouCredit

Developer: Rishyanth Reddy

Accounting firms currently spend 4-6 weeks and $15,000-$50,000 per R&D tax credit claim, with most work done manually. This creates a significant friction point in the industry, leaving billions in credits unclaimed annually.

We built TAXLY as an MVP to demonstrate how AI can streamline this process. Our proof-of-concept integrates with select HR platforms like Clockify to pull employee and time data, then uses You.com APIs for AI reasoning, compliance checking, and template generation to automate the most tedious tasks: questionnaires, evidence organization, and report generation. The system creates audit-ready documents and allows firms to export results to PDF and Excel.

In initial testing, this pipeline processes claims in under two minutes with early accuracy around 85%.

🥉Third Place

Project: Hacksmith

Developer: Saif Ali Shaik

Hacksmith helps users to browse less and guide them right within their CLI. This so happens by triggering an AI agent into AI tools like Claude Code.

You.com helps hacksmith craft the right resources and context using its contents and search APIs. This allows Hacksmith CLI to frame and trigger the right instructions to define an AI agent. More details are in the demo.

🥈Second Place

Project: DeepRadar

Developer: Noemi Titarenco

DeepRadar helps users stay in the loop of what is happening in your industry and what is relevant to your role through a daily report looking at fresh news and press releases. It's an AI-enabled industry monitoring system. It autonomously scans for new relevant news, filters noise, identifies duplicates, synthesizes what matters, and delivers concise, shareable updates that keep the entire organization in the loop.

Key Strengths:

Solves real information overload with meaningful, noise-free insights
Strong autonomous AI execution (filtering, deduping, summarizing)
Delivers immediate value through daily, shareable reports
Clear potential to scale across teams and industries

🥇First Place

Project: MINA

Developer: Summer Chang

Mina is a startup research assistant built during a 4-hour hackathon using V0 and the You.com Web Search API. The project explores how AI can simplify startup scouting by turning messy web data into clean, real-time insights.

The problem Mina addresses is that founders, investors, and creators waste time searching across multiple sources for startup trends, funding activity, and new product launches. Mina solves this by offering three research modes—Trend Research, Startup Radar, and Funding Research—that summarize recent articles into structured insights with verified links and sources.

Built with React, V0, and You.com API, the system filters out unreliable data, ensuring only credible results appear. The interface keeps everything on one page for faster discovery, using expandable cards for article summaries, tags, and source links.

Though an early prototype, Mina demonstrates how AI-driven research tools can improve startup intelligence and decision-making. The project highlights accuracy, speed, and user-centric design as key differentiators in transforming startup data into actionable knowledge.

Key Strengths:

Addresses a real pain point in startup and trend research
Smart, simple interface that speeds up insight discovery
Focuses on credible, structured data — not just aggregation
Strong foundation for growth into a full research intelligence tool

Evaluation Criteria

With these incredible hacks, among many others, four judges evaluated each hack on six different—weighted—criteria: innovation and originality, technical implementation, impact and relevance, user experience, and presentation and documentation.

Below is a breakdown of the weight of each criterion and how they were scored.

HTML Table

Criterion	Weight	Description & Scoring Rubric
Innovation & Originality		Novel API use/creativity (1–10: Generic=1; Breakthrough agentic twist=10).
Technical Implementation		API integration, scalability, code quality (1–10: Basic calls=1; Secure RAG pipeline=10).
Impact & Relevance		Solves enterprise pain (e.g., workflow efficiency; 1–10: Niche=1; Scalable for 1000s users=10).
User Experience		Intuitive design/demo (1–10: Clunky=1; Polished UI=10).
Presentation & Documentation		Clear video/repo (1–10: Vague=1; Reproducible=10).

Hackathon Highlights

This hackathon brought together over 300 developers, builders, and AI enthusiasts from around the world to explore what’s possible when creativity meets real-world technical challenges.

From real-time research companions to enterprise-ready AI agents, the range of projects showcased the limitless potential of our API ecosystem. Across multiple days of prototyping, brainstorming, and late-night debugging sessions, participants worked on solutions spanning:

RAG & search pipeline optimizations
Developer workflow automation
Intelligent assistants / AI agents
Context-aware chat and retrieval systems
Framework integrations & SDK experiments

We kicked things off with a live onboarding workshop, followed by open office hours and community mentorship support. Participants asked great questions, collaborated in the Discord channels, and shared progress updates throughout the build window.

The energy was collaborative, welcoming, and highly technical—exactly how we like it.

Keep the Momentum Going

Huge congratulations to our winners and finalists! All finalists will receive 1:1 mentorship sessions with the You.com leadership team along with an invite to our developer experience program. Winners will receive an email with next steps to claim their prizes.

Once again, a massive thank you to everyone who participated, mentored, and supported this event. Your passion and ingenuity are what make the You.com developer community so special.

We’ll have more contests coming up, so stay tuned. We can’t wait to see what you build next!

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