AI Competition Radar: June 21–28, 2026

Official winner lists are still thin. USAII held its awards ceremony on June 27, and a participant post says winners were announced there, but the public team list was not visible on Devpost or USAII's public pages as of June 28 Pacific time. 1 2 Band of Agents, CalHacks AI 2026, Global South AI Safety, Everyone Ships Now, ExecuTorch, and Microsoft Build AI India all remain in judging or have no public winner list yet. 3 4 5 6 7 8

For scouts, the usable signal is proxy-based. Band of Agents community votes reshuffled hard, with Novus and CIPHER AI overtaking last week's HireMate / AEGIS Fund tie. 3 ExecuTorch produced a full project set in on-device AI. 9 Active competitions show the clearest growth: AMD ACT II more than doubled from 5,674 to 11,912 registrations, H0 rose from 7,469 to about 9,678, and Qwen Cloud rose from 4,492 to 5,510. 10 11 12

Status board: results, proxies, and next checks

Event	Current public status	Scout read
USAII Global AI Hackathon 2026	Closing ceremony held June 27 at 7:00 AM Pacific time; winners were reportedly announced, but public winner names were not accessible as of June 28 Pacific time. 1 2	Monitor Devpost and USAII channels for team names before treating this as an investable winner list.
Band of Agents	391 submissions, 4,324 participants, 1,373 teams, and official judging still in progress. 3	Community votes now provide the strongest pre-results sorting surface.
CalHacks AI 2026	UC Berkeley's AI Hackathon has 400 Devpost submissions and no winner ranking applied yet. 4 13	Keep the project gallery on a daily watch; the SkyDeck-linked award will matter once winners appear.
Global South AI Safety	Apart Research said on June 24 that judges were reviewing every submission and that teams would hear back within 1–2 weeks. 5	Regional winners and Apart Fellowship invites are the lead indicators, not just the cash prizes.
ExecuTorch Hackathon	The Qualcomm × Meta on-site event ended June 28 with 22 projects shipped by 372 participants across 65 teams; judging is still in progress. 7 9	The shipped-project list is already useful for on-device AI sourcing, even before official awards.
Microsoft Build AI India	The hackathon runs May 5–June 30, finalists were announced June 19, and winners were not yet public before the event ended. 8	Recheck after June 30; finalist names may surface through Microsoft India or HackerEarth.
Everyone Ships Now	Mind the Product's hackathon ended June 20 with 1,328 participants and a $10,000 prize pool; Devpost still says winners will be announced soon. 6	The first public project gallery will matter more than the prize list because every submission used Novus.ai / Pendo analytics.

The pattern is simple: official results are delayed, but project-level breadcrumbs are starting to separate stronger teams from the crowd. Treat the next 7–10 days as an outreach-prep window rather than a completed-results window.

Band of Agents: community votes moved first

Band of Agents is still not an official winner source. The live dashboard says, "Judges are reviewing every finalist. Results will be published here as soon as judging wraps." 3 The community leaderboard still matters because it changed enough to reveal new attention around specific products.

Community rank	Project	What it does	Scout angle
1	Novus	Novus is a multi-agent platform that automates enterprise R&D workflows from duplication detection to grant proposal generation in under 3 minutes, using six specialized agents. 14	Enterprise R&D automation with a solo student builder and a concrete workflow chain.
2	CIPHER AI	CIPHER AI is a workflow orchestration platform where users visually design workflows, connect specialized AI agents, and monitor execution through one interface. 15	Agent workflow tooling with a collaboration layer; compare against Zapier-style and LangGraph-style orchestration.
3	HireMate	HireMate uses five agents for resume analysis, screening evaluation, task grading, final judging, and orchestration; the team claims SELECT / REJECT decisions with detailed breakdowns within 60 seconds. 16	HR automation is crowded, but the multi-agent audit trail and speed claim make it a diligence candidate.
4	AEGIS Fund	AEGIS Fund is an autonomous hedge-fund concept with 11 agents and a governance layer where risk and compliance agents have hard-coded authority that portfolio managers cannot bypass. 17	Financial-agent governance is the real signal; the fund wrapper is less important than the control architecture.
7	Juro	Juro is a health-insurance appeal tribunal where four agents debate in a shared Band room before a human delivers the binding decision. 18	Regulated workflow with human-in-the-loop design; verify legal-risk assumptions before outreach.
8	M.A.S.H	M.A.S.H is a hospital orchestration system with six agents distributed across three Band rooms for reception, clinical consultation, pharmacy, and inventory workflows. 19	Hospital operations is hard to sell into, but the project maps agent rooms onto real departmental boundaries.

The leaderboard shift is the main development. Novus reached 146 votes and CIPHER AI reached 141, while HireMate had 107 and AEGIS Fund had 106. 3 Last week, HireMate and AEGIS Fund were the visible top community picks; now both have been passed by workflow and R&D automation projects. 3

Two filters should guide follow-up. First, favor projects with a named workflow buyer, such as R&D, recruiting, healthcare appeals, or hospital operations. Second, separate demos that use agents as product architecture from demos that only list many model APIs. CIPHER AI's public stack includes Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Hugging Face, and Qwen, but the diligence question is whether the orchestration layer improves reliability rather than whether the stack list is long. 15

ExecuTorch: shipped projects are the signal before awards

The Qualcomm × Meta ExecuTorch Hackathon was small compared with Devpost megacompetitions, but it produced a cleaner domain signal. The event concluded June 28 in San Francisco with 22 shipped projects by 372 participants across 65 teams. 7 The judging criteria put 40% weight on technical implementation, 25% on innovation, 15% on local processing and privacy, 10% on deployment, and 10% on presentation. 9

Theme	Visible projects	What to screen for
Accessibility	EchoWalk, OBSERVA, SixthSense. 9	Real-time performance on device and whether the team tested with blind or low-vision users.
Privacy-first AI	SafeScreen AI, PrivateDoc, Toddle AI. 9	Whether local processing is a product need or only an event requirement.
Offline and field use	Lodestar, Beacon, Project Hermes. 9	Survival, translation, and mesh-style use cases need latency and battery evidence.
Medical and operations	Scribend, HALO, Electric Safe, Data Center Ops. 9	Regulated or industrial workflows require stronger validation than a weekend demo can provide.

The low community-vote count also matters. ExecuTorch had only seven total community votes visible, with SnapOn at three votes and Lodestar at two. 7 Do not read that as weak demand. Read it as a poor ranking mechanism for this event; the project set and judging outcome will be more informative than hearts.

Active pipeline: where participation accelerated

Event	Latest count and movement	Deadline or result date	Scout action
AMD Developer Hackathon ACT II	Registrations rose from 5,674 to 11,912, a 109.9% increase, with 2,389 teams forming. 10	Starts July 6 at 8:00 AM Pacific time and closes July 11 at 8:00 AM Pacific time. 20	Pre-map teams building around AMD Instinct MI300X, ROCm, and Fireworks AI APIs. 20
H0: Hack the Zero Stack	Participants rose from 7,469 to about 9,678, a 29.6% increase. 11	Submission deadline is June 29 at 5:00 PM Pacific time. 11	Watch for B2B app and million-scale app winners because the prize pool combines $80,000 cash with $80,000 AWS credits. 11
Qwen Cloud Global AI Hackathon	Participants rose from 4,492 to 5,510, a 22.7% increase. 12	Deadline is July 9 at 2:00 PM Pacific time. 12	Screen MemoryAgent, AI Showrunner, Agent Society, Autopilot Agent, and EdgeAgent track submissions. 12
Google Cloud Rapid Agent	The winner date is July 16 at 2:00 PM Pacific time, correcting the earlier July 13 tracker date. 21	Submissions closed June 11 with 14,509 participants. 21	The six partner tracks are Arize, Elastic, Fivetran, GitLab, MongoDB, and Dynatrace. 21
Splunk Agentic Ops	Splunk had 2,385 participants, essentially flat from 2,391 last week. 22	Judging runs June 26–July 10, with winners on July 17. 22	Focus on agentic operations and observability workflows rather than raw participation growth.
FIND EVIL!	FIND EVIL! had 4,421 participants, nearly unchanged from 4,420 last week. 23	Winners are scheduled for July 15. 23	The SANS Institute sponsor context makes incident-response teams easier to sort by security credibility. 23
Build with Gemini XPRIZE	The count moved from 14,937 to 14,852, likely from registration cleanup rather than new momentum. 24	Deadline is August 17 at 1:00 PM Pacific time, with a $2,000,000 prize pool. 24	This is a longer-cycle deal-flow source because teams must build AI businesses with real users and revenue. 24

The strongest near-term sourcing move is AMD ACT II. A 109.9% registration increase in one week, before the July 6 build start, suggests the participant pool is still forming and reachable. 10 H0 and Qwen Cloud are also above the 20% growth threshold, but H0 is at the submission deadline while Qwen Cloud still has time before July 9. 11 12

Demo days and finals to put on the scout calendar

Date	Event	Why it belongs on the calendar
July 2–3	CISPA European Cybersecurity & AI Hackathon Championship Grand Finale brings top teams from six European qualifying cities to Saarbrücken, Germany for a 24-hour final. 25	The funnel is narrow, academic, and security-heavy; first prize is €4,000, second is €2,000, and third is €1,200. 25
July 6–11	AMD Developer Hackathon ACT II runs online with a $10,000 prize pool and AMD Developer Cloud credits for participants. 20	Registration momentum makes this the best near-term open online pool to watch before submissions land.
July 7	Animoca Brands and HKSTP host the Build East Agentic AI Demo Day at Hong Kong Science Park, with eight Hong Kong-based agentic AI teams and a US$10 million investment pool. 26 27	Good fit for scouts tracking the Web3 / gaming / agentic AI crossover in Hong Kong.
July 7	Brightlands Summer AI Summit and Demo Day runs at Brightlands Smart Services Campus in Heerlen, Netherlands. 28	The Venture Vault Award and first AI Incubator cohort review create a compact European B2B AI scan. 28
July 9	ITU AI for Good Innovation Factory Grand Finale runs during the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, with more than 200 startup finalists and four winners to be awarded. 29 30	This is the strongest policy-plus-startup funnel in the next two weeks.
July 10–16	MLH Global Hack Week: Season Launch runs as a worldwide digital event. 31	Better for student-talent discovery than immediate startup sourcing.
July 15–16	Google for Startups Korea and Brazil accelerator demo days are scheduled for July 15 and July 16, respectively. 32	These are higher-trust accelerator signals because Google says its 2026 global accelerator program spans 2,011 startups across 88 countries. 32

July 7 creates a real allocation problem. Animoca / HKSTP runs in Hong Kong, Brightlands runs in the Netherlands, and ITU's summit week is already live in Geneva ahead of the July 9 finale. 26 28 29 If the scout mandate is mission-driven AI or international public-sector buyers, Geneva has the broader funnel. If the mandate is agentic AI in Hong Kong's startup network, Build East is the cleaner bet.

Outreach queue

Pre-screen Novus and CIPHER AI before Band of Agents official judging finishes; their community-vote jump is the clearest project-level change in the window. 3 14 15
Build an ExecuTorch shortlist around accessibility, privacy-first local AI, and offline field use; those categories match the event's local-processing emphasis. 9
Keep July 15–17 open for Google Rapid Agent, FIND EVIL!, and Splunk results, because those three events publish winner lists on July 16, July 15, and July 17, respectively. 21 22 23

Coverage window: June 21–28, 2026, Pacific time. Cover image: CISPA European Cybersecurity & AI Hackathon Championship promotional graphic from CISPA.