Hi, Victor here, CEO of Onova.
As we close out an incredible 2024 and our 6th year of operation, I want to take a moment to reflect on how far we’ve come and share some exciting announcements about the year ahead!
In 2024, our business experienced significant growth, doubling in size and expanding our innovation programs to new levels, exemplified by hosting one of the largest private GenAI hackathons in the world. Hackathons have always been invaluable for experimenting with new technology; however, in the age of AI, their importance has further increased as mechanisms for business growth and large-scale employee upskilling. We’ve been hard at work crafting solutions that meet the evolving needs of our clients.
Here’s what we’re formally launching in 2025:
1. Two-Week Virtual Gen AI Hackathon
The rapid pace of AI advancements has left many companies wondering how to upskill their workforce and build solutions to stay competitive. That’s why we’re excited to announce our Two-Week Virtual Gen AI Hackathon— designed to scale across thousands of participants with just eight weeks of planning.
This program offers:
- 🌐 Global Reach: Bring together employees from around the world to collaborate on AI-driven projects.
- AI Upskilling: Equip your team with hands-on experience in cutting-edge generative AI tools.
- Innovation Culture: Build excitement and momentum around AI-driven solutions.
- 📊 Scalable Solution Development: Address your organization’s biggest challenges with immediate, production-ready outcomes at scale.
- Whether you’re preparing your workforce for the future or aiming to unlock new business opportunities, this hackathon offers unparalleled impact and ROI.
Check out our Two-Week Virtual Gen AI Hackathon Offering
2. Gen AI Bootcamps
At Onova, we’ve witnessed the success of large-scale hackathons. But not every innovation effort needs to be on a massive scale. That’s why we’re excited to introduce our nimble 2-day Gen AI Bootcamp, designed for 10-50 participants any hyper-focused on 1-2 critical use cases.
This intensive innovation experience is designed to:
✅ Accelerate Value Creation: Tackle critical use cases and amplify time-to-value.
✅ Boost Gen AI Skills: Increase familiarity and learning across your team.
✅ Align Stakeholders & Make Decisions: Bring all the right stakeholders together for rapid alignment and decision-making.
The Gen AI Bootcamp brings together business leaders, solution architects, data analysts, engineers, and developers at managerial levels and above to collaborate on solutions for your most pressing strategic areas. Whether you’re looking to explore AI use cases or inspire an innovation-first mindset within your team, the Gen AI Bootcamp is your perfect solution.
Smaller teams. Focused outcomes. Big impact. Let’s build the future together.
3. Introducing Earth: End-to-End Hackathon Management Platform
As hackathon experts, we’ve seen firsthand how running hackathons at scale isn’t easy. That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce Earth — our standalone hackathon management platform designed to take the stress out of organizing and executing hackathons of all shapes and sizes.
With simplicity and a beautiful user experience at its core, Earth makes collaboration effortless, feedback seamless, and organization a breeze:
🤝 Effortless Team Formation: Hackers can browse and form teams before the event even begins, fostering collaboration and synergy from day one.
💡Streamlined Judging: Judges can score projects effortlessly with intuitive sliders and leave meaningful feedback, giving teams the actionable insights they need to improve.
📊 Powerful Dashboards for Organizers: Real-time insights on popular use cases, team formation, and participant roles help organizers engage more effectively to maximize hackathon impact.
Say goodbye to clunky spreadsheets and tedious manual processes. With features like panel creation, real-time feedback tracking, and a fully managed judging process, Earth lets you focus on what really matters: unlocking innovation.
Earth isn’t just a platform; it’s your ultimate partner in running hackathons, so you can focus on doing what you do best.
4. A Brand New Look
We’ve redesigned our website to reflect how Onova has evolved since 2019. Explore case studies, learn about our range of services, and see the innovative projects we’ve delivered for clients like McDonald’s and HSBC. Whether you’re curious about hackathons or ready to collaborate, everything you need is just a click away.
Year in review
2024 was a big year for us, see below for a couple case study highlights from the year:
Capgemini Virtual Gen AI Hackathons:
This year, we proudly partnered with Capgemini, Google, Microsoft, and AWS in running three Gen AI hackathons aimed at driving business ROI by creating 100s of customer-ready AI sales demos, and upskilling 5,000+ employees on the latest Gen AI tooling.
Read more on each of those hackathons below:
- March: Google Cloud GenAI Hackathon
Focused on upskilling Capgemini employees on Gemini, this event empowered participants to explore cutting-edge generative AI solutions and apply them to real-world challenges.
This record-breaking event earned the title of the world’s largest private generative AI hackathon. With a spotlight on Copilot and Azure, it unlocked new possibilities for leveraging AI in enterprise solutions.
- September: AWS Global GenAI Hackathon
Wrapping up the year, this hackathon introduced Capgemini employees to AWS’s Gen AI capabilities, fostering both technical expertise and innovative use case development.
BMO In-Person Hackathon
In June, we facilitated BMO’s Destination Digital 2024, an event that achieved an unprecedented level of engagement, with a 96% attendance rate MISSING STAT-something about completion rates of submissions. The energy and engagement from participants made it a standout moment of the year, fostering a strong sense of community within BMO’s T&O. Spanning departments and bridging teams across Canada and the US, the event exemplified the power of collaboration in driving digital transformation.
Don’t forget to checkout the video we filmed on this exciting launch!
Let’s Build the Future Together
At Onova, we’re passionate about pioneering hackathon-led growth for some of the world’s largest companies. The solutions we’ve developed for 2025 are designed to help organizations unlock innovation, embrace generative AI, and create lasting impact.
If any of these new offerings resonate with your team’s goals, I’d love to hear from you. Let’s connect and explore how we can drive innovation together.
Here’s to a transformative 2025!
Book an introductory call with Victor Li, Founder & CEO of Onova.
