Singapore Hackathon Sees 40 Teams Build Real AI Solutions

When 144 developers gathered at Singapore's Shopee building on June 6, they had just one day to turn AI ideas into real working products.

The inaugural Sea x OpenAI Regional Codex Hackathon attracted more than 1,200 applications for just 40 team spots. That eight-to-one ratio shows just how hungry developers are to work with cutting-edge AI tools like Codex, OpenAI's coding agent.

The hackathon marks a major milestone for Southeast Asia's tech scene. This is the first time OpenAI has partnered with a company on a regional hackathon series in Asia Pacific, with events planned next for Indonesia, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Malaysia.

Teams worked against tight deadlines to create AI solutions focused on three areas: agents that operate without constant human oversight, products where AI is the core feature rather than an add-on, and industry-specific tools that solve concrete problems. OpenAI experts provided technical guidance throughout the day as participants navigated challenges and refined their builds.

The competition was fierce. Judges evaluated projects on problem framing, build quality, originality, real-world value, and how effectively teams used Codex. They looked beyond polished presentations to examine technical decisions around latency and data privacy.

Third place went to Team Techbros, who built an AI co-host for live shopping streams that learns as it goes. If a human host answers a question about product warranty, the AI remembers and can field similar questions later without help.

Team TripCanvas took second place with an AI travel planner that creates itineraries based on Instagram Reels or TikTok videos. The platform goes further by recommending flights and hotels and even handling bookings and payments.

The grand prize went to Team Untitled.ai for Evoloop, a training model for video game AI. Instead of playing against a predictable computer opponent, Evoloop enables game AI to learn and adapt during play, creating more challenging and realistic competition.

The Ripple Effect

This hackathon represents more than 40 teams building cool demos. It's building what David Chen, Sea's co-founder and Shopee's chief product officer, calls an "AI-native culture" across Southeast Asia's developer community.

By bringing OpenAI's frontier AI tools directly to Asian developers and providing hands-on expert guidance, the partnership is democratizing access to technology that was once limited to a handful of tech giants. The overwhelming application response suggests thousands more developers are ready to build the next generation of AI solutions.

As this hackathon series expands across the region in coming months, it's creating a foundation for Southeast Asia to become not just a consumer of AI technology, but a creator of it.