AI Agents for Founders Challenge — HETIC 2026

Founders lose hours every week on repetitive work: market scans, lead lists, meeting summaries, competitor tracking, first drafts. The AI Agents for Founders Challenge invites higher-education students from around the world to build AI agents that take that work off their plate, and give them back time for what no agent should decide for them: judgment.

YOUR MISSION

Design and ship an AI agent that saves measurable time on one concrete step of an entrepreneurial project (ideation, customer discovery, market research, lead generation, go-to-market, investor preparation...), while keeping a human firmly in charge of the decisions.

WHAT MAKES THIS CHALLENGE DIFFERENT: EQUAL ACCESS TO AI

Every agent must run on AI models that any participant can use for free: open-weight models or free tiers. No paid credits, no premium subscriptions at runtime. The best agents are not the ones with the biggest budget, but the ones with the smartest design.

WHY IT MATTERS

AI should not think for founders. It should free them to think better. That is why every agent must include at least one human checkpoint, and why we reward the teams that design for critical thinking.

KEY DATES (Paris time, CET)

- Registration opens: mid-October 2026

- Kick-off and submission period starts: November 16, 2026, 9:00 AM

- Submission deadline: December 18, 2026, 5:00 PM

- Judging: December 19, 2026 to January 8, 2027

- Winners announced: week of January 11, 2027

PRIZES: 1,000 EUR

- Grand Prize: 600 EUR

- Runner-up: 250 EUR

- Critical Thinking by Design Award: 150 EUR

WHO CAN JOIN

Higher-education students aged 18 or over, worldwide, in teams of 2 to 5. No-code, low-code and code-based projects are equally welcome.

ABOUT THE ORGANIZER

The challenge is hosted by HETIC, a Paris-based digital school, as part of its Master's program for future Chief Marketing Officers.