Proof of Usefulness Hackathon Final Winners Announced 🎉

Once you discover truly useful software, it’s hard to ignore. It finds its way into your life and workflow, helping you answer a nagging question, finish tasks more efficiently, make faster decisions, or solve a problem that existing tools made more complicated than it needed to be. Before long, you might even start to wonder how you ever got by without it. When we launched the Proof of Usefulness Hackathon in January, we wanted to give the people building these kinds of solutions a platform, along with a share of $150,000 in cash prizes and software credits to help them keep building. Alongside Bright Data, Neo4j, Algolia, and Storyblok, we invited builders to show us what their projects could do and provide the evidence to back it up. And boy, did they show up. Over the course of the hackathon, we received hundreds of submissions and published just shy of 300 stories on the #proof-of-usefulness-hackathon page. Behind those numbers are builders who took the time to share their work, explain the problems they were tackling, and put their progress out there for others to examine. To everyone who submitted a project, published a report, or spent time discovering what others had built: thank you for making this hackathon's inaugural edition a success. In May, we announced our first set of winners, recognizing projects across all five award categories. Today, we’re closing out the hackathon with the final round of winners. This round covers the remaining $118,000 in prizes, comprising $12,000 in cash and $106,000 in software credits, distributed across the following categories: AWARD CATEGORY FINAL-ROUND PRIZE POOL Bright Data $60,000 in software credits + $6,000 in cash Algolia $40,000 in software credits. Neo4j $6,000 in software credits. Storyblok $3,000 in cash. HackerNoon $3,000 in cash. Now, without further ado, let’s meet the projects taking home the final Proof of Usefulness Hackathon awards: Bright Data Awards $60,000 in Software Credits ($20,000 each for 3 projects) Visby Read Visby’s full Proof of Usefulness Report here. FoxPlug Read FoxPlug’s full Proof of Usefulness report here. Siiqo Read Siiqo’s full Proof of Usefulness report here. $6,000 in Cash Prizes ($1,000 each for 6 projects) Autonomous Company Deep Research Agent Read Autonomous Deep Research Agent’s full Proof of Usefulness report here. Cofoundr Read Cofoundr’s full Proof of Usefulness report here. Ella’s AI Agent Read the full Proof of Usefulness report for Ella’s AI Agent here. TransactionLink Read TransactionLink’s full Proof of Usefulness report here. Visual MCP Gateway Read the full Proof of Usefulness report for Visual MCP Gateway here. hello.cv Read hello.cv’s full Proof of Usefulness report here. Algolia Awards For products built around fast, meaningful search and discovery. $40,000 in Software Credits ($10,000 each for 4 Projects) HOL Guard Read HOL Guard’s full Proof of Usefulness Report here. Siiqo Read Siiqo’s full Proof of Usefulness report here. Cofoundr Read Cofoundr’s full Proof of Usefulness report here. Visual MCP Gateway Read Visual MCP Gateway’s full Proof of Usefulness report here. Neo4j Awards For systems where relationships between data points drive the product. $6,000 in Software Credits ($2,000 each for 3 projects) HostLens AI Read HostLens’ full Proof of Usefulness report here. FlowMind Read FlowMind’s full Proof of Usefulness report here. Cofoundr Read Cofoundr’s full Proof of Usefulness report here. StoryBlok Awards $3,000 in Cash Prizes ($1,000 Each for 3 Projects) FoxPlug Read FoxPlug’s full Proof of Usefulness report here. Developer Farm Read Developer Farm’s full Proof of Usefulness report here. theCloaq Read theCloaq’s full Proof of Usefulness report here. HackerNoon $3,000 in Cash Prizes ($500 Each for 6 Projects) PMB - Local Memory for AI Coding Agents Read PMB’s full Proof of Usefulness report here. tenv Read tenv’s full Proof of Usefulness report here. Tinky Town Read Tinky Town’s full Proof of Usefulness report here. Snatch Guard Read Snatch Guard’s full Proof of Usefulness report here. AIOProductOS Read AIOProductOS’ full Proof of Usefulness report here. Claude Code Organizer Read Claude Code Organizer’s full Proof of Usefulness report here. Congratulations once again to all our winners. We can’t wait to see you scale! How to Claim Your Proof of Usefulness Hackathon Prize Contact asher@hackernoon.com and yes-reply@hackernoon.com with the email ID linked to your winning project. We will validate your claim and share a form requesting your details for reward distribution. Cash prizes will be disbursed within 1–3 weeks after completing the form. Software credits will be fulfilled directly by the respective sponsors. Fulfillment timelines may vary. Please note that you must contact us within 60 days after the winners’ announcement date. Bright Data: Bright Data is the leading web data infrastructure company, empowering over 20,000 organizations with ethical, scalable access to real-time public web information. From startups to industry leaders, we deliver the datasets that fuel AI innovation and real-world impact. Ready to unlock the web? Learn more at brightdata.com. Neo4j: GraphRAG combines retrieval-augmented generation with graph-native context, allowing LLMs to reason over structured relationships instead of just documents. With Neo4j, you can build GraphRAG pipelines that connect your data and surface clearer insights. Learn more. Storyblok: Storyblok is a headless CMS built for developers who want clean architecture and full control. Structure your content once, connect it anywhere, and keep your front end truly independent. API-first. AI-ready. Framework-agnostic. Future-proof. Start for free. Algolia: Algolia provides a managed retrieval layer that lets developers quickly build web search and intelligent AI agents. Learn more.