The Thesis
We introduce builders to a form factor they already know and use every day — WhatsApp — as a gateway to understanding how agent products can be built. From there, we become the underlying infrastructure layer for the products they create on top of it.
Teams use the tools we provide to build platforms and products that fit real industries. When someone builds an accounting AI co-worker, or a sales AI co-worker, we provide the underlying tech and tools that keep that business running. We are the service provider that makes the whole thing work.
The hackathon is the top of the funnel. The infrastructure is the business.
The Business Model — Bot as a Service
- We provide the underlying infra layer for all of these services.
- We take 20% of the revenue of the products built on top of us.
- Target: roughly $10K / month recurring.
- The event seeds the projects that become the recurring infrastructure customers.
The Experience
The event should feel inspiring and generative — a room of people realising that they, too, can build.
- Day 1 — Inspiration. Speeches and conversations with founders open people’s minds to what is possible.
- Day 2 — Build. Teams pick an industry, read the brief, and build on our tools — with a builder happy-hour, brainstorming energy throughout.
In an ideal world, this is what happens.
Day One — Inspiration
300+ people come to the Day 1 event and get inspired by speeches and conversations with Clement, John Whaley, Quincy, and other founders.
Meet Jack. He is a non-technical business student at HKUST — a silver medallist at the International Math Olympiad, on a full scholarship from Jakarta, Indonesia, studying in Hong Kong. He has never written a single line of code in his life.
Listening to the founders on stage, Jack learns about open code and AI vibe coding, and realises that even he can build software. On the floor he meets Marcus — a young professional at Goldman Sachs and a backend engineer who maintains production systems. Jack’s sense for the business problem and Marcus’s engineering depth click immediately. They team up.
The Build
Together, Jack and Marcus read the challenge statement from Vision Co — a Hong Kong accounting and consulting firm serving small and medium businesses with bookkeeping, audit support, company-secretary work, tax, and advisory. Like most firms its size, much of the work is still painfully manual: receipts and invoices keyed in by hand, client documents chased over email, the same onboarding questions asked again and again.
They pick one slice — document-to-books. The goal: drop in a messy pile of receipts and invoices — photos, PDFs, scans, mixed Chinese and English — and get back clean, categorized ledger entries, with the source document linked to each line, so a junior accountant does in minutes what used to take hours.
They build:
- a WhatsApp bot using SendWhatsApp, powered by MentorMates, so an accountant can snap a photo of a receipt on the go and get it booked, and
- a web app on Shanye, powered by MentorMates, for reviewing and correcting the ledger at a desk —
- with every entry traceable back to the original document, so the work is trustworthy and easy to check.
The underlying data is stored on MentorMates — a wrapper around InsForge. Marcus drives the backend while Jack shapes the flow an accountant would actually use. When they hit problems with the code, mentors step in and the AI helps them debug their way through.
They submit via the CLI platform onto MentorMates and present a two-minute walkthrough on real, messy inputs. The judges score them on time saved, how well they handle photographed mixed-language Hong Kong documents, and how trustworthy and reviewable the output is — and send back a concrete list of goals and next steps.
After the Hackathon — the Flywheel
Jack is inspired to keep working on the project. Vision Co brings him on as an intern to co-design the experience with them.
They pay $10K HKD / month; $2K HKD goes to Edumame, and the Edumame team keeps meeting Jack weekly to guide him and unblock his project.
After Three Months — December
Jack now understands AI’s impact on the accounting industry and decides to build a startup supporting accounting firms across Southeast Asia — with Vision Co as his first client and Marcus alongside him as technical co-founder.
Edumame takes a 5% stake via an initial investment, connects Jack with mentors from the Bay Area, and he raises a $2M USD pre-seed round.
Why This Matters
This is the third arc of the hackathon model:
- First hackathon — prove I can run a hackathon.
- Second, in Hong Kong — prove the financial-sponsorship model.
- This one — the post-hackathon incubation and support layer.
The incubation piece is the priority: build the full ecosystem and follow-on system, so a builder like Jack goes from inspired attendee to funded founder — with Edumame and MentorMates as the infrastructure and equity partner along the way.
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