Ground Truth: The Live Agents Hackathon - powered by You.com

Event description

Every AI model you've ever used is stuck in the past. Ground Truth is a one-day hackathon where you fix that.

Join localhost:nyc, The Builder Series and You.com for 10 hours of building AI agents grounded in the live web. Real-time data, deep research, verifiable answers. Come build the kind of agent people would trust with a real decision.

Problem Statement

Every LLM is frozen at its training cutoff. It doesn't know what happened this morning, and when it doesn't know, it guesses, confidently. That's the gap between a cool demo and a product people rely on. Your challenge: build an AI agent that knows what's true right now. It searches the live web through the You.com API, reads the sources, reasons over them and shows its receipts.

The Challenge Tracks

Live Wire (real-time agents): agents that wake up when the world changes. Price moves, breaking news, a competitor launch, a policy change, a new job posting. If it happened in the last hour, your agent already knows and already acted.

The Analyst (deep research): pick a profession (VCs, lawyers, journalists, recruiters, doctors, policy staffers) and replace its 40-hour research memo with a 4-minute one, every claim cited.

Receipts (trust and verification): agents that fact-check claims, catch AI hallucinations, verify sources and show their work.

Best Content (open to every team): post about what you built, tag You.com, and win a dedicated prize.

What to Expect

A kickoff walkthrough of the You.com API: Search, Contents, Research and the hosted MCP server

Free You.com API credits for every builder

6 hours of building

Teams of up to 4, or solo if that's your thing

Team matching at kickoff if you're coming alone

Mentors from You.com on the floor all day

Live demos to judges at the end, plus food all day

Prizes

1st Place Overall: $500 cash & $1.75K you.com credits

Best Content: $150 cash

Judges

D. J. Patel - VC | 3x exited founder.

Pratyusha Duvvuri - Repeat founder with experience at Apple, Meta, and Galileo (acquired by Cisco).

Timo Fukar - Austrian Indonesia-raised founder and investor: Partner at Compassion Ventures, ex-DeltaGen co-founder ($0 to $500k ARR in under 5 months), early at 11x (backed by Benchmark, a16z and Sequoia), and ex-Golden Gate Ventures and Citi M&A.

Akhil Pothana - Building for developers @ You.com

Patrick Donohoe - AI Engineer | Caltech

Gabriele Muratori - Founder @ Roster | Make 7.2x more per creator

Femi Palmer - Managing Partner at Initio Capital an early-stage VC based in NYC.

Pradeep Dhananjaya is a seasoned technologist in AWS's Financial Services group, helping fintech startups and financial institutions build, scale, and innovate on the cloud.

Thanuja N - AI and Data Engineering professional specializing in Generative AI, agentic systems, multi-agent architectures, and intelligent enterprise automation.

Nikhitha Billa - Data Engineer passionate about Generative AI, cloud technologies, and building innovative AI-driven solutions.

Who Should Attend

Founders and aspiring founders building with AI

Engineers (full stack, backend, AI/ML)

Designers and product people who want to ship something real

Researchers and analysts who know exactly what a great research agent should do

You don't need a finished idea. Just show up ready to build.

Sponsors

You.com is the leading AI search infrastructure — built for developers. Our APIs let you build intelligent agents and applications that use live, factual data from the web, news, and research, in real time. With just a few lines of code, you can power your LLMs with up-to-date, citation-backed results instead of static training data.

Venue Sponsor

XDC is advancing AI agent infrastructure through open-model compute and blockchain-based payments, enabling agents to access services and transact autonomously.

House of 434 is a curated community bringing together founders, investors, operators, and researchers building the future of AI. Through intimate gatherings, thought-provoking conversations, and meaningful introductions, we connect the people advancing emerging technologies, from AI infrastructure and Physical AI to real-world applications. - https://houseof434.com/

Community Sponsors

Treg is OpenRouter for agent tools. One token gives AI agents 4,000+ API endpoints across 113 providers (web scraping, news, finance, company and people enrichment, social profiles and trends, SERP data and more), with no provider accounts or API keys to juggle. Most calls cost a fraction of a cent.

Hosts

localhost:nyc: Making NYC the biggest startup ecosystem in the world.

The Builder Series: A 60,000+ member community redefining what networking looks like — curating founders, operators, investors & more into intentional rooms built for experiences people remember and relationships that last. It's a direct line to the most ambitious builders, with a community that actually shows up.

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