March 8th, 2026 @ San Jose, CA

BISV Hacks 2026

Let's build a better world, one hack at a time.

Event Ended Devpost
12
Hours
100+
Hackers
$20,000+
In Prizes

About BISV Hacks

What is BISV Hacks?

BISV Hacks is an inclusive, student-led hackathon organized by students at BASIS Independent Silicon Valley Upper School in San Jose, CA. The hackathon will last 12 hours on March 8th, 2026, hosting participants from many different areas.

Our Mission

Our event encourages creativity and collaboration by bringing together students of all experience levels. Participants will form teams or work solo to develop projects, solve challenges, and gain experience.

What to Expect

In addition to coding, attendees will hear from industry speakers and take part in hands-on workshops. Lunch, snacks, and refreshments will be provided throughout the day.

BISV Hacks Event
BISV Hacks 2026

Why Join BISV Hacks?

🏆

Amazing Prizes

Tech gadgets, cash prizes and subscriptions totaling $20,000+ as well as cash totaling $800 — we reward creativity and innovation.

🍕

Catered Meals

Lunch, dinner, and snacks will be available throughout the day so you can focus on building.

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All Skill Levels

No coding experience necessary — workshops and mentors will help you get started.

Prizes & Awards

$800+ in Cash, $20,000+ in Sponsored Prizes

FIRST PLACE (GRAND PRIZE)

  • $300 in Cash
  • Plushies (Crackd)
  • Featherless Scale Plan worth $300
  • Guaranteed YRI Admission
  • YRI credit $1.5k
  • ElevenLabs 3 months pro tier
  • codecrafters.io 2-year VIP membership
  • Opennote 1 Year of Scholar Subscription
  • .xyz domains

SECOND PLACE

  • $200 in Cash
  • Plushies (Crackd)
  • Featherless Scale Plan worth $150
  • Guaranteed YRI Admission
  • YRI credit $1.5k
  • codecrafters.io 1-year VIP membership
  • Opennote 3 Months of Scholar Subscription

THIRD PLACE

  • $125 in Cash
  • Plushies (Crackd)
  • Featherless Scale Plan worth $300
  • Guaranteed YRI Admission
  • YRI credit $1.5k (if available)
  • codecrafters.io 6 month VIP membership
  • .xyz domains

FOURTH PLACE

  • $75 in Cash
  • Plushies (Crackd)
  • Guaranteed YRI Admission
  • YRI credit $1.5k (if available)
  • .xyz domains
  • 6 Months of Unibee

FIFTH PLACE

  • $50 in Cash
  • Plushies (Crackd)
  • .xyz domains
  • 6 Months of Unibee

Special Awards

MOST CREATIVE

  • CleanshotX license for everyone
  • AoPS certificates
  • .xyz domains

MOST RELEVANT TO THEME

  • CleanshotX license for everyone
  • AoPS certificates (If available)
  • .xyz domains

Sponsored Track Awards

BEST PROJECT BUILT WITH

  • $50 in Cash
  • Opennote 1 Year of Scholar Subscription
  • AoPS certificates (If available)
  • CleanshotX license for everyone
  • .xyz domains

BEST PROJECT BUILT WITH

  • ElevenLabs 6 months of scale tier for everyone
  • AoPS certificates (If available)
  • CleanshotX license for everyone
  • .xyz domains

Participation Prize

ALL PARTICIPANTS

  • Free .xyz Domain ($15)
  • 1 Month of Opennote Scholar Tier
  • 1 Month of Featherless.ai Premium
  • 1 Month of ElevenLabs Creator Tier
  • 1 Month of Crackd Pro

Event Schedule

March 8, 2026

7:45 AM

Check-in

Arrival window

8:00 AM

Hacking Starts

Registration & Sign-in

9:00 AM

Opening Ceremony

Registration & Sign-in

12:00 PM

Lunch Break

We'll provide a Free Lunch

1:00 PM

Hackathon Resumes

Back to coding and building

6:00 PM

Dinner Break

Talks by Guest Speakers

6:00 PM

Hacking Ends

Submission Deadline on Devpost

7:30 PM

Closing & Awards Ceremony

End of the Hackathon

Our Sponsors

Interested in sponsoring BISV Hacks 2027?

Take a look at our prospectus and email us at [email protected]

View our Prospectus

Although we prefer cash contributions, we would still love in-kind contributions such as subscriptions, speakers, workshops, prizes, swag, and anything else your company can offer to make BISV Hacks a better experience!

Gold Sponsors 🥇

Opennote Crackd

In-Kind Sponsors ✨

Stellar Learning Unibee YRI Cleanshot X AoPS XYZ Interview Cake Code Crafters ElevenLabs ElevenLabs ElevenLabs Summit Education

Fiscal Sponsor 🏦

Hack Club

Venue Sponsor 🏫

BASIS Independent Silicon Valley

Thank you to our amazing sponsors who make BISV Hacks possible!

Guest Speakers, Judges, & Mentors

Interested in judging or speaking at BISV Hacks 2027?

Email us at [email protected]!

Abhigyan Arya

Abhigyan Arya

Guest Speaker & Judge

Abhigyan Arya is a co-founder and CTO of Opennote (YC S25), a student-founded AI-powered edtech startup building interactive, personalized learning tools that integrate advanced AI infrastructure with note-based study workflows, drawing on his experience in full-stack development, AI systems, and technical product engineering.

Rishi Srihari

Rishi Srihari

Guest Speaker & Judge

Rishi Srihari is a co-founder and CEO of Opennote (YC S25), a student-founded AI-powered edtech startup building interactive, personalized learning tools that integrate advanced AI infrastructure with note-based study workflows, drawing on his experience in full-stack development, AI systems, and technical product engineering.

Anne Lee

Anne Lee

Guest Speaker

Anne Lee is the Program Director of Summit Education, which hosts virtual STEM summer programs for high-achieving students in grades 8-12. To date, Summit has supported 1,000+ alumni across 60+ countries. Anne earned her B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, completing her degree in 2.5 years (eight academic quarters). In high school, she attended the Research Science Institute (RSI) and was named a Cameron Impact Scholar (full-tuition, merit-based scholarship).

Michael Chen

Michael Chen

Guest Speaker

Michael Chen is the Head of Business at Applied Compute, an AI startup in San Francisco. Prior, Michael was the Head of Voice/Speech and Cofounder of the International Public Sector at Scale AI, opening Scale's offices in the Middle East. Michael received his B.A. in Math and Economics from Harvard University, where he started Evera, a startup delivering at-home medical care. In high school, Michael raised over $100,000 for charity.

John Qian

John Qian

Guest Speaker

John Qian is a cofounder of Matrices, where he is focused on building the company for the foreseeable future. Previously, he worked in engineering and design roles at Adept, Weights & Biases, and Google. He has a particular interest in concise writing and creating smooth, well-crafted user experiences.

Andy Austin

Andy Austin

Judge

Andy Austin is a performance-first growth marketer and founder & CEO of Adsora, where he leads paid acquisition and growth strategy across high-intent, direct-response categories. He has managed $20M+ in paid media profitably across multiple verticals and scaled Adsora to a $6M annual run rate in three years, working purely on a performance basis with partners.

Him Raj Singh

Him Raj Singh PayPal

Judge

With over 15 years of experience in quality engineering and automation framework design across finance, healthcare, and retail domains, Him Raj Singh leads high-performing testing teams and manages end-to-end testing processes. He is proficient in automation and RPA tools such as UiPath, Selenium, and IntelliJ, and skilled in programming languages including Java, JavaScript, and VBScript. He also has hands-on experience with Generative AI technologies, leveraging LLMs like GPT models, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude to enhance test case generation, automate test data creation, accelerate regression testing, and integrate AI-driven agents using the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Maanasa Gadey

Maanasa Gadey

Judge

Maanasa Gadey is an Engineering Manager at Workday, where she leads the Machine Learning organization for Higher Education. With over a decade at Workday, she has grown from roles in automation and software engineering to leading teams that build scalable AI and ML-driven systems for enterprise applications. Her work focuses on bringing practical, responsible AI into real-world products that improve experiences for institutions, students, and administrators. Maanasa is passionate about building high-impact teams, mentoring engineers, and supporting the next generation of innovators through hackathons and community initiatives.

Prabir Vora

Prabir Vora

Judge

Prabir Vora builds conversational voice AI at Retell AI, helping businesses automate and scale customer interactions. He previously co-founded Alayna AI, an AI teaching assistant adopted by over 500,000 K–12 educators across 30+ countries. He's spent several years shipping full-stack AI products from zero to scale.

Ramadevi Nunna

Ramadevi Nunna

Judge

Ramadevi Nunna is a Senior Data Engineer with 12+ years of experience in .NET and Azure cloud technologies. She specializes in building secure, scalable enterprise applications and data platforms within the financial services industry. She brings strong expertise in cloud architecture, DevOps, and data engineering, with a focus on delivering high-performance, reliable, and secure technology solutions.

Abhi Ram Salammagari

Abhi Ram Salammagari

Judge

Abhi Ram Salammagari is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Workday with 10+ years building production AI systems across big tech and startups. Founded an edtech startup; currently designing AI agents and multi-agent systems. Published patents in NLU/NLP. End-to-end builder—from infrastructure to LLMs—with experience leading ML teams. Hands-on with RAG pipelines, LangGraph, and large-scale model deployments.

Prasenjit Sinha

Prasenjit Sinha

Judge

Prasenjit Sinha is a Lead iOS/macOS Engineer at Gusto with expertise in systems architecture, performance optimization, and AI-driven platform design. With prior experience as manager at Verizon (BlueJeans) and Apple, he has led initiatives across mobile, real-time communication, and enterprise-scale applications. He brings deep technical insight into scalable system design and product execution.

Partho Sarthi

Partho Sarthi

Judge

Partho Sarthi is a Senior Systems Software Engineer at NVIDIA, specializing in the Spark RAPIDS Accelerator. He architects distributed tools and optimization frameworks that automate the migration of Apache Spark workloads to GPUs, significantly improving processing speeds and cost-efficiency. With a background in query optimization at Microsoft Research India, Partho holds an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin and a B.E. from BITS Pilani.

Pranav Nitin Motarwar

Pranav Nitin Motarwar

Judge

Pranav Motarwar is a data engineer specializing in AI-driven data systems and scalable data platforms. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science from New York University and previously worked as a Product Engineer at American Express. His research on machine learning and large-scale data systems has been published with Springer, IEEE, Elsevier, and Wiley. Pranav also serves as a peer reviewer for Springer journals and recently presented at DeveloperWeek 2026 on agent-based AI systems for real-time data governance. His work focuses on the intersection of AI infrastructure, data engineering, and responsible data systems.

Vignesh Ravichandran

Vignesh Ravichandran

Judge

Vignesh Ravichandran is an Engineering lead specializing in PostgreSQL and cloud databases at internet scale. At Cloudflare, he led a globally distributed team owning the Postgres and storage platforms serving ~55M requests/sec for over 20% of the Internet. He designed multi-region PostgreSQL infrastructure with cross-region replication, automated failover under 30 seconds, and PoP-aware traffic routing. He established SLOs and incident response across 100+ teams. Previously a Database Engineer at Ticketmaster managing MySQL, DynamoDB, and Aurora. He co-founded Omnigres (20+ Postgres extensions), MyClone and speaks at QCon SF and Postgres Conference.

Youting Wang

Youting Wang

Judge

Youting (Andrew) Wang is a Senior Software Engineer and Tech Lead at Meta. He currently leads the Instagram Meta AI Search and Discovery Team, where he builds innovative products leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI to help users discover content. Recently, Andrew drove the launch of the Meta AI Discovery Content product and successfully onboarded Meta's first Video Understanding model into production. Prior to his work in AI search, he led engineering teams to build end-to-end products that drove millions in revenue. Andrew holds a Master's degree in Information Systems from Northeastern University. He is deeply passionate about crafting exceptional user experiences and actively mentoring junior engineers. He is thrilled to be a judge and can't wait to see the innovative solutions the hackers build!

Meet the Team

Nicholas Wang

Nicholas Wang

Co-President

Nicholas Wang is a junior at BASIS Independent Silicon Valley who has been coding since 6th grade and enjoys exploring technology and building projects. He works with a variety of tools and frameworks, including Svelte, TailwindCSS, Python, and Flask, among others. Nicholas likes experimenting with AI tools, APIs, and creative coding projects. He is also the founder of Stellar, an AI-powered platform aimed at providing free, engaging education. In his free time, he enjoys building websites, learning new technologies, and participating in hackathons.

Anderson Lu

Anderson Lu

Co-President

Anderson Lu is a sophomore at BASIS Independent Silicon Valley who has been actively engaged in computer science for over five years. He works with image processing in the machine learning field and has experience in making websites. In his free time, he plays basketball and strives increase his knowledge in machine learning.

Charan Sridhar

Charan Sridhar

Former President

Charan Sridhar is a senior attending BASIS Independent Silicon Valley who is passionate about computer science. Charan's life goal is to use computer science to ensure improved quality of life and equality for everyone, especially marginalized communities. He founded and leads the Data Science and Machine Learning Club at his school and used this club as a platform to start this hackathon, the first at BASIS.

Nitai Goswami

Nitai Goswami

Former Technology Lead

Nitai Goswami is a sophomore at BASIS Independent Silicon Valley who has been interested in artifical intelligence since 7th grade. He has, over the years, learned about machine learning, neural networks, large language models, and he strives to learn more. He is also the technology officer for Charan's Data Science Club and now one of the organizers of this hackathon. Outside of school, he learns more about AI and plays basketball.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Can I submit projects from other hackathons? +

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Do I need a team? +

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Is there going to be food? +

Let's Connect

Have questions? We'd love to hear from you!

📧

Email Us

[email protected]
📱

Follow Us

@bisv.hacks
💬

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