Founders lose hours every week on repetitive work: market scans, lead lists, meeting summaries, competitor tracking, and first drafts. The AI Agents for Founders Challenge invites higher-education students from around the world to build AI agents that take that work off their plate, giving them back time for what no agent should decide for them: judgment.
Your Mission Design and ship an AI agent that saves measurable time on one concrete step of an entrepreneurial project (ideation, customer discovery, market research, lead generation, go-to-market, investor preparation, etc.), while keeping a human firmly in charge of the decisions. Every agent must run on AI models that any participant can use for free, such as open-weight models or free tiers. No paid credits or premium subscriptions are allowed at runtime. The best agents are not the ones with the biggest budget, but the ones with the smartest design.
AI should not think for founders; it should free them to think better. That is why every agent must include at least one human checkpoint, and why the challenge rewards teams that design for critical thinking.
Who Can Join Higher-education students aged 18 or over, worldwide, may participate in teams of 2 to 4. No-code, low-code, and code-based projects are equally welcome.
Prizes The total prize pool is 1,000 EUR: * Grand Prize: 600 EUR * Runner-up: 250 EUR * Critical Thinking by Design Award: 150 EUR
Key Dates (Paris time, CET) * Registration opens: mid-October 2026 * Kick-off and submission period starts: November 16, 2026, 9:00 AM * Submission deadline: December 18, 2026, 5:00 PM * Judging: December 19, 2026 to January 8, 2027 * Winners announced: week of January 11, 2027
The challenge is hosted by HETIC, a Paris-based digital school, as part of its Master's program for future Chief Marketing Officers.