New York – November 04, 2026 -- Nearly 3,000 developers worldwide entered Qloo's Global Agentic Hackathon, building functional AI applications on the company's Taste AI infrastructure, with finalists set to pitch live on Jason Calacanis's This Week in Startups podcast on November 5.
Qloo offers $25,000 in prizes plus a separate $25,000 investment pledge
The competition, hosted on Devpost, pays $15,000 for first place, $6,000 for second and $4,000 for third. Calacanis, an entrepreneur and angel investor, has separately pledged a personal $25,000 investment in his favorite project, giving one team a route to early-stage backing.
The judging panel includes Calacanis, actor Cedric the Entertainer, OpenAI board member Nicole Seligman, Eldridge Industries co-founder and CEO Todd Boehly, Live Nation Entertainment EVP of Strategic Initiatives Michael Abrams, and Qloo CTO Mike Diolosa. Qloo founder and CEO Alex Elias will join Calacanis and Cedric in questioning finalists during the livestream.
Entrants had to ship working applications, not prototypes
Participants had to submit externally hosted applications that integrate Qloo's API, along with public code repositories and documentation. Qloo said the aim was to find practical uses of cultural intelligence in real-world consumer experiences.
Preference data targets a gap in agentic commerce
The event comes as technology companies test AI agents that search for products, compare options and complete purchases for consumers. Qloo argues that understanding individual taste remains the hard part, especially when an agent has little information to start from. An AI travel agent can find flights and book restaurants, but choosing the hotel or restaurant a person would actually enjoy requires a different layer of intelligence.
Qloo's Taste AI draws on a cultural knowledge graph of more than 600 million entities across music, film, dining, fashion and travel. Developers and enterprises can add taste-based context to applications at scale without relying on personally identifiable information.
"That's where taste intelligence becomes essential infrastructure," said Diolosa, adding that developers are building agents that decide based on individual preferences even with minimal starting data. He said the hackathon response shows demand for that capability and for businesses built around it.
The November 5 broadcast will also examine whether the finalist applications can evolve into commercial products and companies.