Welcome to this week’s Beta Update 👋
*Note: You’re receiving this update because you previously registered for a Beta University–hosted or co-hosted event via our Luma calendar and opted in to receive communications from the hosts.
Saturday 6/26 Consumer Agents Hackathon
Build agents that can: Compare products across retailers, Find coupons, discounts, or bundles, Track price drops, Detect fake reviews, Recommend products based on user preferences, Handle returns, refunds, or warranty claims
Saturday 7/26 Reinvented Education Hackathon
Reinvented Education system with AI Agent in one day at Stanford.
Saturday 7/18 Beta X AMD AI Agent Hackathon
On June 20, Beta Fund, Antler, Twillio brought 200+ builders, engineers, founders, and operators to SF.
After ranked-choice audience voting and feedback from VCs and senior operators in the room, three teams emerged as the top finishers — and the rest of the field shipped working products in categories that ranged from industrial inspection to elderly care.
🥇 EHS Agent — Ray & Bobby won first place with an AI safety inspector built for industrial environments. Workers walk through a facility with a phone or AR camera, and the agent guides them through inspection routines in real time — checking equipment, flagging hazards, generating compliance reports. The kind of task that today requires a certified EHS professional, compressed into a workflow any frontline worker can run. Their tagline landed harder than any other team’s: “Less hours in the office. More time keeping everyone safe.”
🥈 Kinesthetic AI — Alexan, Cody & Prudhvi took second with the hardest technical work in the room. The team built a complete Vision-Language-Action (VLA) pipeline for the SO-101 robot arm in a single day — a static trash-disposal environment, an open LeRobot/VLA dataset, a trained policy, and the arm executing autonomously. The achievement isn’t that they built a robot that picks things up. It’s that they built the entire training-to-deployment loop in eight hours, and made it reproducible.
🥉 SwarmSLAM — Tvisha closed out the podium with three robots, one shared brain, and no map. Tvisha solo’d this one — multi-agent SLAM is the kind of problem normally tackled by full research labs, and she built a working demo by herself. The robots coordinate through a shared spatial model that updates in real time, allowing them to explore environments and act collectively without pre-mapped terrain or central control.
Other strong finishers worth following: #4 Chekin, #5 Senior Guardian, and #6 SafeAI. The full field shipped working products across industrial inspection, robotic arm manipulation, multi-agent coordination, elderly care, and safety monitoring. Physical AI isn’t a research lab concept anymore — it’s becoming product.
Join the Builders Club, the official Discord hub for future Beta Fund Hackathons.
We are centralizing a high-signal community of founders and engineers. This isn’t just another chat server—it is the direct pipeline to our investment team and ecosystem partners.
What’s on the line:
Direct Investment: On-the-spot investment checks for exceptional projects.
Hardware & Capital: High-tier prizes including Cash, Mac Minis, and more.
GTM Support: Direct access to Beta Fund’s resources to help you scale and move from hack to startup.
If you are building at the edge, join us to connect with mentors, find co-founders, and secure the backing your project needs.
Cheers,
Beta University Team
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