Qdrant Hackathon 2026

The Qdrant Hackathon 2026 ("Think Outside the Bot") is closed: submissions shut at 11:59 PM Pacific Time on 1 June 2026, and winners were announced on 11 June 2026. The official page marks submissions as closed and announces no next hackathon. It was a global online competition run by Qdrant GmbH of Berlin, with US$10,000 in cash prizes (about ₹9.5 lakh) and a top prize of US$5,000 (about ₹4.75 lakh). It was open to developers in India, was not India-only, and ran remotely. Use this guide to prepare for the next one.

What the program offers

Three cash prizes were offered: US$5,000 for first place, US$3,000 for second and US$2,000 for third, which add up to exactly US$10,000. The page says prizes are paid as gross amounts, winners are responsible for taxes and fees, and the organiser may withhold payment in certain cases such as suspected fraud or missing documentation. Winners were announced on 11 June 2026 at Vector Space Day in San Francisco and online, with email notice afterwards. There is no mention of funding, equity or mentoring for entrants, so this is a prize competition, not a grant.

Who can apply

Entrants must be at least 18 at registration. Participation is global, but people must follow local law and cannot enter where it is prohibited. You could enter alone or in a team of up to four. Employees, directors and officers of Qdrant GmbH and its affiliates, and their immediate families or households, were not eligible.

This suits developers, students and small startup teams who already know, or want to learn, vector search. It does not suit anyone who wants to submit existing work, because all code had to be written during the hackathon period and earlier projects led to disqualification.

How to apply

You registered and submitted through the form on the hackathon page. A submission needed:

1. A GitHub repository (public or private) with the project code, shared with the organisers.
2. A README covering the project description, installation and run instructions and third-party dependencies.
3. A single demo video of three minutes or less, hosted on Loom, YouTube, Dropbox or similar.
4. Basic code comments for documentation.

The project had to use Qdrant as a material part of the build. LLMs, agents and AI tools could be used to build it, but submissions that were only chatbots were not allowed; the idea was new ways of interacting with vector search beyond simple question answering. Sharing work with other teams was not allowed, and third-party code needed proper attribution and licence compliance. A practical tip: write the README as if a judge will run your project from scratch, because it is the quickest way for them to see what works.

How applications are judged and what happens next

The terms say judges score functionality, originality and user experience; the page's FAQ words it as technical functionality, creativity, innovative use of technology and overall usability. Judges' decisions are final except where law requires otherwise. After the deadline, winners were announced on 11 June.

About Qdrant

The organiser is Qdrant GmbH, based in Berlin, Germany. The page links to the Qdrant GitHub repository, quickstart guides and its Discord community, where the #vsd-hackathon channel handled questions, but it does not describe the company further. The event ran in the run-up to Vector Space Day, a San Francisco event on retrieval, vector search infrastructure and agentic AI.

Things to check before you apply

• Participants keep ownership of their submissions but give Qdrant a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use them for marketing and other purposes, with no end date.
• Winners' names, likenesses and materials may be used for promotion unless the winner declines in writing.
• German law governs, and disputes go to the courts in Berlin.
• The organiser may cancel, change or suspend the event and its terms.
• Indian winners should check tax treatment of foreign prize money with an adviser.