Global Innovation Build Challenge (GIBC) V2 is a fully online, student-led international hackathon designed to bridge the gap between getting code to run and building systems that work at scale under real constraints. Building on the success of V1, which gathered 552 participants worldwide, V2 features three distinct tracks, an international judging panel, and an expanded sponsor lineup.
The event runs over a 10-week build period from July 11 to October 1, 2026. Participants may register at any time during this window and choose to build solo or form a team of up to six members. Projects are reviewed by industry professionals and academic experts, with winners announced at a virtual closing ceremony on October 8, 2026.
Challenge Tracks:
Track 01: TECH (Foundational LLM Development) Participants must build and train a language model capped at 50 million parameters. Teams design the architecture, curate the data, and write the training loop to maximize capability within these strict limits. Example directions include domain-specific assistants for legal or cryptographic text, models optimized for on-device inference, or small generative models trained on narrow technical corpora without commercial APIs.
Track 02: Applied (Medical Technology & Finance) This track requires building data-driven systems on real, empirical datasets to solve problems in healthcare or finance. Submissions can include predictive models, diagnostic pipelines, or automated financial systems backed by robust data engineering. All datasets must be public or de-identified, and prototypes must not be deployed on real patients or real money.
Track 03: Open (General Technical Invention) Teams build functional prototypes demonstrating technical novelty and cross-disciplinary engineering. There are no architectural limits or resource constraints. Examples range from IoT-connected physical infrastructure and full-stack applications for environmental problems to advanced software stacks and autonomous generative algorithms.
Submission Requirements:
To be eligible for judging, teams must submit a fully functional prototype along with six required components on Devpost: 1. Project Description: A clear explanation of what was built and how it works. 2. Source Code: A link to a public repository (GitHub, GitLab, etc.) with a README containing setup instructions. 3. Demo Video: A 2–5 minute video showing the project in action with English audio or subtitles. 4. Built With: A complete list of technologies, frameworks, libraries, and hardware used. 5. Team Information: Real full names of all members, each requiring a Devpost account. 6. Screenshots: At least three high-quality images of the interface, data pipelines, or technical setup.
Judging is based entirely on the Devpost submission; no additional presentation is required after the deadline. Winners will be recognized with official certificates and prizes including Nord Security subscriptions, Saily data credits, CodeCrafters memberships, and Featherless AI credits.