A Night with AI Builders, Startup Stories & Community -- Celebrating One Year of the SVAI Hub

Builders who came here for a hackathon weekend and are still shipping Stories from startups who built their companies right inside these walls Plus food, music, a photo booth, community trading cards, and more! The SVAI Hub was built on one conviction: the best AI doesn't get built in isolation. It gets built by communities — developers leveling up together, founders stress-testing ideas with peers, researchers colliding with practitioners in the same room. In September 2025, we opened our space in the heart of Silicon Valley. Not for vendor pitches. Not for product demos. For the conversations and connections that actually move the field forward. One year in, the numbers tell part of the story: 100+ AI community events 10,000+ developers, founders, and executives through our doors 6 hackathons that launched real projects and real careers The numbers tell part of the story. The conversations tell the rest. Come for the milestone. Stay for the momentum, connections and networking! Registration requires approval and space is limited. If this sounds like your room, request your spot now! The Humans at the Mic 🎤 Built Here. Still Building. — Hackathon Winners Spotlight Victoria Duan — OrchestrAI | Llama Lounge Hackathon, 1st Place Victoria built the core agentic framework for OrchestrAI, took first place, and hasn't stopped building since — she's now deep in AI developer tooling and exploring how AI changes the way software gets made. Abraham Bhatti, Rishit Sai & Yash Sanghvi — ToolForge | Llama Lounge Hackathon, 2nd Place They built an AI agent that creates its own tools, won together, kept competing together, and are now in early customer discovery to turn it into a real product. Panel: Build Together — The Advantage of Community in AI Jeremiah Owyang (moderator) — VC at Blitzscaling Ventures, global keynote speaker, and founder of Llama Lounge — the Bay Area's most popular AI startup event series, drawing hundreds of founders, investors, and builders every month. Grace Gong — Founder of Smart Venture Media, host of two top-ranked VC podcasts (Smart Venture Podcast and Venture with Grace), angel investor, and founder of Smart AI Summits — a LinkedIn Top Voice in Finance with a front-row seat to where AI and venture capital intersect. Swagata Ashwani — AI Tech Lead & Manager at Boomi, co-lead of the Women in Data SF chapter, and a LinkedIn Top Voice in AI — a technical builder who brings a practitioner's view of how community helps people stay sharp, learn faster, and grow with AI. Sheena Tu — Co-founder of TechEquity Ai, a Silicon Valley nonprofit expanding access to AI through practical learning, industry collaboration, and community-driven programs, including forums, workshops, hackathons, and its annual Summit, reaching thousands of participants across the Bay Area and beyond. Startup Showcase — Stories from the Hub Every week, a group of startup founders work from the SVAI Hub. Two of those companies will share what they're building, how this community changed how they built it, and where they are now — in three minutes, no pitch deck. Ivan Lee — Founder and CEO, Datasaur Ivan sold his first startup to Yahoo, built AI systems at Apple, and has spent the last seven years focused on the problem most AI vendors don't want to talk about: what happens to your data after you hand it over. At Datasaur, he helps enterprises in financial services, healthcare, legal, and government deploy fully air-gapped private LLMs — frontier-model capability, zero data leaving the building. His version of the future: the most powerful AI is the one you fully control. Mayank Kumar — Founding AI Engineer, DeepTempo Over the last decade Mayank has built safety-critical systems, trained large-scale AI models, and served communities through his social entrepreneurial ventures. At DeepTempo, he is building the Intelligent Defense Platform. Attackers are already using AI to move faster than the teams defending against them, and those teams are working with tools built for a slower era. The platform is his answer to that gap: LogLM is the intelligence layer, a foundation model that learns what normal activity looks like across many kinds of security data and flags what does not belong, and Vigil is the investigation layer, an open source system where AI agents take those signals and work out what actually happened. His bet for the next few years: defenders need to operate at machine speed too. The Rundown 🗓️ 5:00 PM: Doors open. Grab some food and drinks, hit the photo booth, and make your own trading card 5:30 PM: Welcome and Year in Review 5:45 PM: Built Here. Still Building. — Hackathon builder spotlights 6:00 PM: Panel: Build Together — The Advantage of Community in AI 6:30 PM: Startup Showcase — Stories from the Hub 6:40 PM: Closing remarks and community toast 6:45 PM: Open networking, happy hour, and custom trading cards until 8:00 PM Is This Your Crowd? 👀 This event is designed for the AI community — and that means all of it. If you are an engineer or developer actively building with AI, a researcher pushing the field forward, a founder scaling an AI startup, or an executive figuring out where AI fits in your organization's future, you will find the conversations and the people in the room directly relevant. We also welcome those who are earlier in the journey — someone looking to break into AI, learn from practitioners, or understand what is actually happening beyond the headlines. Whether you are shipping AI products in production, growing a company you started at a hackathon, running community programs that bring builders together, or ju