Announcements
The world’s AI giants just handed Singapore’s next-gen coders US$400,000 of support to keep building
5 Nov 2025 · 8 min read
For the winning teams, the recognition means walking away not only with resources but with something harder to earn: the endorsement from the leaders building the future of AI.
SINGAPORE, 5 NOV 2025: After bringing 14 AI industry titans together under one roof, Singapore’s AI hackathon movement continues with 10 global sponsors awarding over US$400,000 in total resources, mentorship, and support to help builders keep building.
“Every hackathon ends with demos, but this one ends with momentum. In 24 hours, our builders shipped nearly 150 working products… the kind of output that normally takes six accelerator cohorts to produce. The titans of the AI industry were clear that awarding these products was less about ranking ideas and more about resourcing them while giving new builders something to aspire to. It’s really simple: when builders feel seen, they keep showing up. That’s the real return on investment,”
— Sherry Jiang, Cursor Ambassador and event co-organiser of the Cursor Hackathon.
This latest wave of backing from industry signals a broader shift: the world’s AI companies are showing up in Singapore by investing in its builders.
Built to push the boundaries of what each AI tool can do, the sponsored challenges encouraged builders to experiment freely and it showed. A full list of builds selected by each AI company can be found in the award appendix below.
Each of the products created revealed a builder culture that’s creative, fun, and deeply human, including:
- An AI auntie who reminds you to take your meds with humour only a Singaporean voice could deliver.
- A voice agent trained like a dental nurse built into an industry-intuitive 3D dentistry trainer.
- Making different AIs rap battle against each other in real time.
- Turning a spreadsheet speedtest into art: visualising database performance as ASCII motion.
- A hackathon simulator to see what ‘living’ AI agents could build if given the same parameters.
Over 150 projects from the 24-hour Cursor Hackathon were reviewed and validated by engineers and product leads from companies such as Cursor, Gemini, Groq, ElevenLabs, Supabase, Smithery, Fal, Exa, Convex and Mem0. Making it a rare moment where the leaders shaping frontier AI technology evaluated solutions built by individual coders or teams comprising of families, tech veterans, students, startup founders and more, all spanning the ages of 13 to 62 years old.
As global leaders explore how to make AI more open and participatory, Singapore has become a live testbed for what that future looks like: collaboration over competition, access over exclusivity, and communities that code for progress.
END OF PRESS RELEASE
For press enquiries and requests, please contact: Rachael De Foe ([email protected])
Media assets: event photos and footage can be downloaded here.
About the Cursor Hackathon#
The spirit of inclusion that defined the event continues to anchor its mission. The Cursor Hackathon grew from a zero-budget experiment into Southeast Asia’s largest AI building event, gathering over 1,000 applications and 300 participants on-site at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD).
AI companies backing the event included: Cursor, DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, ElevenLabs, Supabase, Smithery, Fal, Exa, Convex, Mem0, JigsawStack and PrimeIntellect.
The event was independently organised by local technology community leaders including: Sherry Jiang, Agrim Singh, Ivan Leo, Gabriel Chua and Kaspar Hidayat.
Hackathon awardees of Cursor Hackathon 2025#
Overall Winners#
“Look mum, no mouse!” Named after the inventor of the computer mouse, this AI art generator turns finger gestures into brushstrokes… literally translating hand movements caught on webcam into unique pieces of digital art.
A web game that pits humans against AI in lightning-fast logic, math, and word puzzles… a playful take on testing how “human speed” stacks up against the world’s fastest AI models.
A video generator that makes corporate training feel more like Netflix… transforming dry onboarding content into bingeable, story-driven learning experiences.
Gemini
A video generator that makes corporate training feel more like Netflix… transforming dry onboarding content into bingeable, story-driven learning experiences.
A Telegram bot where elderly parents can simply snap a photo of their medical reports and get immediate advice from a ‘familiar peer’… AKA a generated Singaporean auntie. She scolds you when your numbers are off, and she showers you with warmth when you’re doing well.
A Telegram bot that serves as a lightweight Venmo clone with more functionality powered by Gemini.
Groq
Imagine rerunning the hackathon entirely inside an AI. Recursor did exactly that: an autonomous team of agents given the same brief, rules, and deadline as human hackers. They planned, coded, and demoed a product from scratch, turning what could ‘live’ inside Cursor itself into the experiment: a hackathon within the hackathon, testing how far agent cooperation can really go.
A web game that pits humans against AI in lightning-fast logic, math, and word puzzles… a playful take on testing how “human speed” stacks up against the world’s fastest AI models.
ElevenLabs
A 3D oral health visualizer powered by a voice agent that responds like a trained dental nurse in real time.
Astrology meets AI. A tongue-in-cheek “vibe-based” hiring experience blending humour, voice, and algorithmic matchmaking.
Supabase
“Look mum, no mouse!” Named after the inventor of the computer mouse, this AI art generator turns finger gestures into brushstrokes… literally translating hand movements caught on webcam into unique pieces of digital art.
Smithery
Memory in the human brain evolves with the context of time; AI memory doesn’t. Each interaction builds without a sense of how info stored “before” should be reinterpreted by what’s shared “today”. Mcpmem helps AI add this persistence, letting AI store, retrieve, and reinterpret context across sessions: a test of what happens when machines can finally remember and refine like the human brain.
An MCP-powered tool that can manage your ad campaigns directly through natural language.
A tool that clones your digital identity using MCPs to generate your own “AI twin” that both looks and thinks like you.
Fal
Draw a doodle, watch it come to life — a viral experiment in real-time multimodal AI.
Lets users insert themselves into nostalgic Vine videos: an old-school internet throwback meets new-age tech.
Generates dream-like scenes using multimodal input for therapeutic storytelling.
Exa
A browser extension that flags scam messages in real time by scraping for ground truth across multiple sources.
A live fact-checker that calls out misinformation the moment it’s spoken.
Convex
Before pixels, computers painted with letters. DB Bench revived that idea, feeding a video into Convex’s database and turning its output into flickering text-made images inside a spreadsheet (a tribute to early ASCII art). In doing so, the team turned raw computation into something visible: speed you could actually watch.
What if AI was in a rap battle with another AI? This build answers this question with multiplayer rap battles between AIs using Gemini models, generated lyrics, and real-time audience voting.
Mem0
A Telegram bot where elderly parents can simply snap a photo of their medical reports and get immediate advice from a ‘familiar peer’… AKA a generated Singaporean auntie. She scolds you when your numbers are off, and she showers you with warmth when you’re doing well.