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 7/11 AI Education Hackathon
The Reinvented Education Hackathon, hosted by Beta University and TAL Education Group at Stanford, challenges founders to build pedagogically sound, scalable AI solutions for real-world learning environments. Winning teams will secure access to specialized accelerator programs, investor introductions, and potential enterprise pilot pathways to rapidly deploy their educational tools.
Saturday 7/18 Beta X AMD AI Agent Hackathon
The AI Agent Builder Challenge is a five-week intensive program that guides founders from ideation to production-ready AI companies, featuring technical mentorship from industry leaders like Alibaba Cloud and AMD. The sprint culminates in an August 15 Demo Day for the top 20 teams to pitch venture firms, with at least one startup guaranteed a $2 million investment from Beta Fund alongside comprehensive go-to-market support.
Friday 8/7 Snowflake X Beta Fund Agent & Token Economy Hackathon
This past Friday, Beta Fund packed AWS Builders Loft with builders shipping AI agents in real time. The brief was open: build a multimodal AI agent that ships. The bar was high. The crowd voted, the judges scored, and three teams stood out.
🥇 1st place — Clinical Trial Oracle
An AI agent that predicts a clinical trial’s probability of success before the readout moves the market.
Clinical trial results move biotech stocks dramatically — Summit Therapeutics swung from +200% on HARMONi-A topline data to −24% on the HARMONi-3 PFS interim miss. The team built an orchestrator-worker system: 7 independent agents across 5 models, one verdict. A Llama-based coordinator routes sub-tasks across Biology, Preclinical, Clinical, Trial Design, and Execution agents (running on qwen3, DeepSeek-v4, Llama-3.2), with a DeepSeek-R1 judge doing the weighted scoring. Input: an NCT trial ID. Output: success/failure prediction with a full evidence chain.
🥈 2nd place — ELI
AI Sales Agent. Physically Controlled.
Sales reps juggle tools, scripts, and context shifts during live calls — momentum dies. ELI is a DJ controller for sales reps: sample pads trigger AI agents and scripts on demand (Cold Open, Objection, Close, Discovery, Pricing, Follow Up, Escalate, Demo), and a physical slider adjusts the depth of context from beginner talking points to full expert mode. Live CRM sync. Shipped working hardware at the hackathon — not a slide deck.
🥉 3rd place — MRI (Market Research Intelligence)
An AI buying agent that searches live marketplaces, detects scams, and negotiates the best deal — so you never overpay or get burned.
Facebook Marketplace is a time sink and a minefield: overpriced listings, scam photos, no leverage in 1:1 haggling. MRI handles the whole buying workflow autonomously — turns a casual request into optimized search queries, flags crash history and stolen-bike indicators, ranks the top 3 by value/risk/fit, and negotiates with all 3 sellers in parallel within your pre-set rules. Final offers come back for review.
Other strong finishers worth following: #4 Agent Resources , #5 Launch Pad.
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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