The VAST Builders Challenge is a three-city technical event series bringing together founders and engineers across New York, London, and San Francisco to build production-ready AI systems.

Spend the day building agents to unlock the value of video. Because video is hard to search and analyze,  most of it stays in storage, unwatched and underused.

Experiment with the latest AI infrastructure, collaborate with other ambitious builders, and turn your ideas into shippable prototypes - with access to expert guidance, compute, and the tools you need to ship.

Hosted with VAST Data in collaboration with NVIDIA, SpaceXAI, CoreWeave and Weights & Biases.

Note: Registration closes on September 29th.

Prizes

  • 1st place: NVIDIA DGX Spark™

  • HuggingFace Microduck

  • Cursor Credits

  • Cash Gift Cards

The Builders Stack

Here's what you get out of the box, a lightning-quick setup:

  • Video understanding: reason over a video clip with NVIDIA Cosmos.

  • Semantic search: find moments across hours of footage using natural language.

  • Object detection: real-time detection and tracking across frames with YOLO.

  • General-purpose LLMs: models from Weights & Biases to power your application logic (e.g. video agents).

The VAST AI OS orchestrates the video ingestion and data layer, models are served on CoreWeave GPUs, and builders ship with Cursor.

Build your own video agent or something no one’s thought of. We'll share the videos to get you started on building video agents.

Judges

Hassan Moustafa - TME, Multimodal AI @ NVIDIA

Adam Ryason, Ph.D. - Product @ NVIDIA

Ram B. - Sr. Developer Advocate @ VAST Data

Brian Verkley - Director, AI Data Platform @ VAST Data

Anushrav V. - Solutions Architect, Physical AI Lead @ CoreWeave

Arnav Verma - Field Engineer @ SpaceXAI

Who should attend

Developers, ML/AI engineers, agent builders, and data engineers, from startups to enterprise teams working with video or multimodal AI.

While individuals are welcome, we encourage teams of up to four members and will prioritize team applications. You can form a team on the day of the event or arrive with one already assembled.

Applications are required. Space is limited. Registration closes one week prior to the event.

Please register using the same email address associated with your Cursor credits. The email you use to register will also be used for the Builders Challenge prerequisites.

Agenda

9:00am Doors Open + Breakfast 9:30am Opening Keynotes10:00am Build Begins1:00pm Lunch5:00pm Demos7:00pm Closing & Awards

Note: This event will be photographed and filmed. By attending, you consent to appearing in photos and videos that may be used for social media and promotional materials.

All guests must be 18+ and present a valid government-issued physical photo ID at check-in (digital IDs will not be accepted). Scooters and bikes are not permitted in any Amazon building with no on-site parking available.

Sponsors

VAST Data: A unified AI data platform that provides the foundation for managing, processing, and activating data for AI workloads

CoreWeave: AI cloud infrastructure that delivers high-performance GPU compute for training, fine-tuning, and inference workloads.

SpaceXAI: AI-assisted software development tools that help developers move from idea to implementation faster

NVIDIA: Accelerated computing and AI software that enables developers to build and deploy advanced AI applications

Weights & Biases (A CoreWeave company): AI developer tools for experiment tracking, model evaluation, and collaborative ML development

See what’s possible.

Follow us on X · LinkedIn · Newsletter