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COMING UP

SXSW 2026
(Mar 12 - Mar 18)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Gary Event 
With Vasilije Markovic (Founder/CEO, Cognee), Elizabeth Siegle (Dev Advocate, DigitalOcean), Daniel Scott (Principal AI Researcher, Cognee), Thierry Damiba (Dev Advocate, Qdrant).
Venue, To Be Announced, San Francisco
Mar 07 (Sat) , 2026 @ 09:00 AM
FREE
 
Register
 
 

 
DETAILS

AI-Memory Hackathon #1
This hackathon is for developers who want to build AI with real memory & context awareness.

$4,500+ Prize Pool
Main Prizes

Prize: $1,200 cash
Prize: $900 cash
Prize: $500 cash

Special Prize

Best use of Distil labs: $1,000 SLM training credits
Best use of Qdrant: $1,000 cash

Build Something Awesome
You'll work with a local model + a prebuilt knowledge graph over realistic finance & operations data (vendors, invoices, payments, discounts). The core challenge: turn question-answering into useful agents, tools, or workflows that solve concrete problems. Think:

Finance or ops agents that reason over transactions

Auditing, anomaly detection, vendor analysis, or internal QA tools

Interfaces or automations powered by structured + free-text answers

Systems that combine memory, retrieval, & inference locally

Show us what you got
You'll have 3 minutes to stand out:

Present your powerful ideas & strategy using any tools you like

Run a live-demo that show-cases your disruptive application

Schedule
9:00 AM - Doors open + breakfast & coffee

10:00 AM - Opening remarks + partner demos

10:30 AM - Hacking begins

1:00 PM - Lunch

4:00 PM - Project Submission Deadline - finalists selection

5:00 PM - Finalist presentation & judging

5:30 PM - Awards ceremony

6:00 PM - Event wrap-up & doors close

Technology & Venture Partners
distil labs

Qdrant

Pebblebed Ventures

Vermillion Ventures

Judges
Vasilije Markovic - CEO & Founder of Cognee

Daniel Scott - Principal AI Researcher @Cognee & Brown University

Thierry Damiba - Developer Advocate @Qdrant

Elizabeth Siegle - Developer Advocate @DigitalOcean

About Cognee
Cognee is an open-source AI memory engine that transforms unstructured data into a persistent, queryable knowledge graph. It allows AI agents to store, retrieve, & reason over information across time. Rather than one-off RAG, Cognee provides a unified memory layer for building reliable, stateful AI systems.

About Pebblebed

Pebblebed is a technical early stage VC founded by Pam Vagata (cofounder of OpenAI, ran AI for Stripe, inventor of FBLearner Flow); Keith Adams (founded Facebook AI Research, was chief architect at Slack, 20th engineer at VMWare) & Tammie Siew (former Sequoia Southeast Asia investor, former Sequoia & Notable Capital backed founder)
 
 
 
 
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