Autoresearch Systems Hackathon with Modal, OpenAI, Raindrop & Antler

On Saturday May 30th, join Modal, OpenAI, Raindrop and Antler for an Autoresearch Systems Hackathon, a full day dedicated to building the systems that enable agents to iteratively plan, search, and synthesize information over extended horizons.

We’re looking for teams ready to tackle research problems in data- or compute-intensive domains.

If research is now entirely the domain of autonomous swarms of AI agents running across compute cluster megastructures (Andrej Karpathy), then let this be the day we push the megastructure to its limit.

What to build:

• Agent Architectures & Control Loops – innovate on the core systems design of autonomous research agents. Improve performance and scalability by advancing planning, memory, coordination and control.

• Retrieval & Knowledge Synthesis – build systems that excel at finding, validating, and integrating information at scale. Develop pipelines for large-scale data ingestion, advanced retrieval, citation and structured knowledge extraction.

• Applied Autonomous Research – implement an end-to-end autoresearch agent tailored to a high-impact domain. We’re especially interested in applications in law, computational biology, coding and beyond.

Prizes include:

• $20k in Modal credits

• $5,000 in ChatGPT credits

• Guaranteed interview for the Antler residency

• $5k for coolest use case of Raindrop Workshop

Why attend:

• Build at the frontier of autonomous research systems, grounded in real-world challenges

• Spend the day at Antler alongside founders, researchers, and engineers pushing the boundaries of what's possible

• Hear directly from industry leaders about what they're building and learning

• Compete for cash prizes and credits

Schedule — May 30th, 2026 | 8:00 AM – 8:00 PM PT | Antler HQ, San Francisco

• 8:00 – 9:30 AM Registration & Breakfast

• 9:30 – 10:00 AM Kickoff & Ground Rules

• 12PM Lunch and Lighting Talks

• 6:15 PM Hard Submission Deadline

• 6:30 – 7:30 PM Dinner & Demos

• 6:30 – 7:30 PM Judging

• 7:30 – 8:00 PM Winners Announced & Closing

Speakers include:

• Erik Dunteman, CEO of Butter (acquired by Modal)

• Ben Hylak, CTO at Raindrop

• Rio Hodges, Director of Antler

• More to come...

RSVP to participate

Antler is a pre-seed fund, the first believer at inception stage, investing $500K+ as your first institutional check. You can apply for their NYC, ATX or SF residency here