Venture Capital firm Kalaari Capital’s seed programme for startups, Kstart, concluded its 24-hour hackathon, Kreate at 11 am on Sunday in Bengaluru. Around 60 teams comprising over 160 participants were formed from the over 2,000 registrations the hackathon garnered.

Addressing the gathering of developers, Saurabh Gupta, developer associate at Digital Ocean, welcomed participants for the challenge to solve real-time problems.

The programme, which commenced on October 19, saw the teams of developers and coders ideating and working on nine problem statements. They were provided by Kalaari Capital’s portfolio companies Vogo, CureFit, Winzo, Moneyonclick, Mall91, and Elastic Run, and were specific to their respective areas of operation.

Along with cloud platform Digital Ocean, they also sponsored the prize money of Rs 5 lakh, where winners and runners-up for each problem statement receive Rs 50,000 and Rs 25,000, respectively.

Satwik Gonika and Vibhor Agarwal, who are part of data science team at CureFit, judged around 10 teams working on solutions to auto-track fitness progress of CureFit’s clients and motivate them. Aditya Yadav, Pritesh Dwivedi, Rajat Jain, and Alok Yadav of Team Konoha were named winners, followed by Team Atankwadi.

Commenting on what made these two teams stand out, Satwik said,

“What we really liked about their solution was that they could find time to balance between all stages involved in an industry research problem. They had read up on present and past research work and were able to close in on a viable approach. What really set them apart is their ability to work with messy data and produce tangible results at the same time.”

Members of Team SudoAlliance--Vipin Srinivastav, Ankush Srinivastav, Vinay Verma, and Shwet Mishra--won the first place for their solutions to identify spam content for Mall91, a vernacular social commerce platform.

The judges appreciated their end-to-end solutions, which was production-ready. They had also implemented text-based models and computer vision model, a team member said.

Deepak Kumar and Himanshu Tanwar are full-stack developers at online pharmacy startup Pharmeasy. Teaming up at the hackathon, the duo’s Team Avengers worked on app updates process for WinZO Games and won the first place.

Skillenza was the organising partner for the hackathon.

Kstart is a seed programme launched in February by India’s leading venture capital firm Kalaari Capital. An early stage and technology-focused firm, startups in its portfolio include Milkbasket, Instamojo, MedPlus, and Cashkaro, among others.

(Edited by Evelyn Ratnakumar)