The event awarded $10,000 in total scholarship prizes. Four $1,500 scholarships were awarded for how well teams leveraged AI to build the app; how they innovated through diverse areas of expertise; whether their app was a meaningful, realistic solution; and whether they created transparent, scalable workflows. The grand prize was $4,500 in scholarship funds and a guaranteed initial interview with AWS’ agentic AI team.
On hand were mentors affiliated with Kiro and Toptal, the world’s largest fully remote workforce who also sponsored the event.
“Part of ASU's secret sauce is working with industry leaders to help fuel innovation at ASU,” said John Rome, deputy chief information officer for Enterprise Technology. “And I'm really excited to have some of these industry leaders like Toptal and AWS here today to help our students get ready for the world of AI.”
TJ Urglavitch, director of cloud services at Toptal, gave inspiring introductory remarks at the event. “You're stepping into the future at really the right time. Not that very long ago, turning an idea into something real took a lot more people, a lot more money, a lot more time. Today, AI is changing all of that. The next generation will not be defined by waiting. It will be defined by building.”
Arnav Lohiya, who is earning a bachelor’s degree in computer science major in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, is a member of this next generation. He competed in 10 hackathons before attending the Kiro Spark Challenge. “I feel these hackathons will lead me somewhere, perhaps starting my own company,” he said. “It’s also exciting being here with like-minded people.”
At the culmination of the event, competitors submitted an open-source code repository for judging and testing, a text description that explained the features and functionality of their project, a pre-recorded pitch that included a demonstration video of their project, and a write-up on how Kiro was used.
Meet the winners
Aman Adhav, Arnav Lohiya and Tejas Shah earned big with $6,000 in total prizes for their app AllVoice, which boosts the accessibility of AI for the visually impaired by converting visual information into audio feedback. Prizes included $4,500 for the grand prize, $1,500 for Best build and a guarenteee interview at Kiro.
Brijesh Kumar, Reuben Roy Kochukudiyil and Shrey Bishnoi won the $1,500 Best Collaboration Prize for their app Ghosty, a unique networking platform that helps conference attendees optimize the number and quality of connections at events.
Aaditya Jindal, Gunbir Singh and Vishal Lakshmi Narayanan won the $1,500 Best Impact Prize for their app Meshrun, which creates infrastructures that split large AI models and their workloads across multiple computing devices, nodes or geographic locations.
Harshith Vijayan, Lei Johnson and Pratham Nanekar won the $1,500 Best Story Prize for their app Colosseum, which provides developers code-level risk signals plus isolated “what if I run this on the database?” rehearsal before they run a command.