DNHacks 2026

Submissions close Sun, Sep 6, 12:37 PM EDT

Awards & Prizes

Winners

Grand Prize

$25,000

$5,000 prize
$20,000 grant conditional on continued work

Bedrock AnalyticaTyler Sacharow, Ronith Lahoti, Aaditya Kadam, Yuki Qian

Runner Up

$10,000

$2,500 prize
$7,500 grant conditional on continued work

Track prizes

Defense

Energy and Industrialization

Health and Public Service

Open Category

Best in Design

Winner$3,000
ALICETheo Berk, Merek Soriano, Jared Viani, Xavier Pazos, Alexander Daoud
Runner Up$1,000
FlexCastAryaman Tiwary, Shubhan Bhattacharya

Best Use of AI

Winner$3,000
RosettaEmmett Smith, Travis Hodges
Runner Up$1,000

Wondering how projects are scored? See the judging criteria

Project Showcase

38 projects · winners announced

Open the full showcase

Energy and Industrialization — 1st Place

Bedrock Analytica

Making concrete self-sensing to industrialize American infrastructure at scale.

Tyler Sacharow, Ronith Lahoti and 2 othersEnergy and Industrialization

Health and Public Service — 1st Place

Adoption Assist

Empowering our public service to adopt more foster children into loving homes

Luca Gandrud, Christopher SimsHealth and Public Service

Health and Public Service — Runner Up

Campaign Commons

See you funded your elections

Albert Chen, Eric Li and 1 otherHealth and Public Service

Defense — Runner Up

Project Hale

We fine-tuned backdoors into the weights of foreign, open-source LLMs

Nathan Wang, Perry ZhangDefense

Best in Design — Winner

ALICE

Localized agentic monitoring for critical infrastructure outages

Theo Berk, Merek Soriano and 3 othersEnergy and Industrialization

Best in Design — Runner Up

FlexCast

America needs datacenters and the grid can't yet carry them. FlexCast predicts next week's grid load and prices and optimizes datacenter wor

Aryaman Tiwary, Shubhan BhattacharyaEnergy and Industrialization

Best Use of AI — Winner

Rosetta

AI for Obscure Programming Languages

Emmett Smith, Travis HodgesHealth and Public Service

<$100 Autonomous Kill Chain

Cost Effective GPS-Denied Autonomous Kill Chain

Nicholas Irving, Gavin RauhDefense

ARBITRAS

Trustworthy positioning & spoofing correction for autonomous ground vehicles

Hyunseung CHo, Max Fan and 1 otherDefense

ARGUS

AI-powered incident detection and autonomous drone response system for industrial plants

Aaron Chua, Evan Zhang and 3 othersEnergy and Industrialization

B(V)est Practices

Custom AI Glasses for Tradespeople

Henrik Gombos, Gabe Meredith and 3 othersEnergy and Industrialization

Caddy

CAD designed with ITAR, not against it

Charlie Haywood, Diego Raygada and 1 otherDefense

Cipherence

Fully encrypted AI Inference

Griggs Diemar, Eduardo Michelsen and 3 othersOpen Category

CompOS

A Palantir Foundry Missile component sourcing application integrating AIP to streamline replacing military grade with dual-use components

Sunya Afrasiabi, Lorenzo Santos and 2 othersEnergy and Industrialization

Continuity

Empowering emergency response and defense teams to put people, power and connectivity where the mission needs them most.

Martin Palencia-Gomez, Brendon BazzaniEnergy and Industrialization

David Neural Hardware

Inference hardware for one model, on purpose

Sebastian D'Alessio, Juan Jose Freydell VelezEnergy and Industrialization

Deadlight

An offline agent execution & safety harness for the AI-first maritime fleet.

Brennan Haynes, Andrew Wu and 3 othersDefense

Echo

Independent proof that AI compute is real, local, and operating.

Shaunak Pandey, Thomas Papavramidis and 1 otherEnergy and Industrialization

Flux

Causal Graph Energy Grid Model

Ghadi Khoury, Guillaume Fradet and 3 othersEnergy and Industrialization

Greenfield

Agricultural Intelligence in context

Benjamin Samuels, Shreya VikramHealth and Public Service

GridHawk

Safeguarding the American Power Grid

Miles Higman, Landon Moceri and 3 othersEnergy and Industrialization

HerdProof

A lender can't count a herd from an office. HerdProof makes the photo evidence behind a count reviewable. Farmers

Lucas ZhengEnergy and Industrialization

iris

drones for everyone

Wyatt Sell, David JohnsonOpen Category

L.I.R.A.

Landscape Intelligence for Rescue Assistance

Philip Kim, Chiemeka Chukwu and 1 otherHealth and Public Service

Magellan

Affordable supply chain intelligence for American builders

Cormac Kennedy, Donte TruongOpen Category

Orrey

A proving ground for drone swarm doctrine

John Apessos, James Xiao and 2 othersDefense

Policy Sim

Public policy sandbox

Shawn Chen, Mason Liu and 2 othersHealth and Public Service

Rare Earth Potential in US Coals

Machine learning prediction applied to rare earth potential

Miles Moore, Anthony Viverito and 1 otherEnergy and Industrialization

RIPPLE

AI-powered vertical supply chain management for medicine

Taha Rawjani, Shaurya Jeevagan and 3 othersHealth and Public Service

Robin Intelligence

Hyper-Aware Law Enforcement Sidekick

Alexis Fair, Joe McNiff and 2 othersHealth and Public Service

ShadowHive

Saving Lives Through Stealth

Jun Park, Gabriel Irazabal and 1 otherDefense

SiteGraph

A field engineer for every homeowner

Joshua Chung, Arek Plate and 2 othersOpen Category

SkyMesh

Acoustic detection system: SkyMesh

Justin Hong, Mark Hrytchak and 2 othersDefense

somnio robotics

adapting deployed robots to every environment

Max Zhao, Caleb Han and 1 otherOpen Category

Stranded Compute

Turn spare computing power into shared AI infrastructure

Kevin Rusagara, Abel Adugna and 1 otherOpen Category

TinyDoNetsk (GTA7)

Reconstructing and simulating an active warzone (Donetsk, Ukraine) in a game engine using satellite and topology data for ML training.

Andrew Falcon, Divyash NathDefense

Verity

Integrity Before the Payment Goes Out.

Ishaan Samantray, Sahaj Satani and 2 othersHealth and Public Service

Wake.ai

Making Dark Ships Visible

Guru Bazawada, Andrew Wang and 2 othersOpen Category