Thinking Outside the Bot with 2025 Hackathon Winners

The 2025 Hackathon, hosted by Qdrant and held in Berlin, showcased innovative uses of vector search beyond traditional chatbot applications, with participants worldwide presenting projects that integrated vector retrieval into various domains. The competition awarded $10,000 in prizes based on creativity, technical depth, and Qdrant usage. First place went to Vector Vintage for its 3D e-commerce exploration experience using Neo4j; second place to RoboBank, an AI system for robotic safety; and third place to Spatio-Temporal NPCs, which created evolving non-playable characters using spatio-temporal memory. Additional awards recognized projects like ReMap for event discovery, CosmicTwin for a social platform matching users to cosmic twinmates, and Bachata Vibes for an AI choreographer of dance sequences. The hackathon highlighted the versatility of vector retrieval in applications ranging from robotics and gaming to social platforms and educational tools, emphasizing the power and creativity of the Qdrant community in exploring future technologies.