Qloo's Global Agentic Hackathon Draws Nearly 3,000 Developers, as Jason Calacanis pledges to invest in winner
NEW YORK, Nov. 4, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Qloo, a leading artificial intelligence company providing taste intelligence for AI agents and consumer experiences , today announced that nearly 3,000 developers worldwide participated in its Global Agentic Hackathon, building functional AI applications powered by Qloo's technology. The competition will culminate November 5, when the finalists present their applications live on entrepreneur and investor Jason Calacanis's This Week in Startups podcast, where judges will select a winner.
The competition's judging panel brings together prominent leaders across technology, investment, entertainment, and business, including Calacanis, entrepreneur and angel investor; Cedric the Entertainer, actor and comedian; Nicole Seligman, member of the OpenAI Board of Directors; Todd Boehly, co-founder and CEO of Eldridge Industries; Michael Abrams, EVP of Strategic Initiatives at Live Nation Entertainment; and Mike Diolosa, CTO of Qloo.
Hosted on Devpost, the Qloo Agentic Hackathon challenged developers to build functional AI agents and applications using Qloo's Taste AI infrastructure to understand consumer preferences and deliver more personalized recommendations. The competition awarded $25,000 in prizes across the top three submissions: $15,000 for first place, $6,000 for second place, and $4,000 for third place. Separately, Calacanis has pledged a personal investment of $25,000 in his favorite project, creating an opportunity for a participating team to secure early-stage backing and take its application beyond the competition.
Unlike traditional hackathons that may focus on concepts or prototypes, the competition required participants to submit functional, externally hosted applications integrating Qloo's API, along with public code repositories and documentation. The goal was to identify practical applications demonstrating how cultural intelligence can make AI agents more useful in real-world consumer experiences.
The hackathon comes as technology companies explore how AI agents can move beyond answering questions to making decisions and completing purchases on behalf of consumers. While agents can increasingly search for products, compare options, and carry out transactions, understanding individual preferences remains a significant challenge, particularly when limited information is available.
For example, an AI travel agent may be able to find flights, compare hotels, and book restaurant reservations. But determining which hotel, restaurant, or experience best matches an individual's tastes requires a different kind of intelligence. Preferences are shaped by everything from entertainment and dining habits to cultural interests and lifestyle choices, and those connections are not always apparent from a single request.
Qloo's Taste AI technology is designed to address this challenge. Its proprietary data and AI models identify relationships across consumer interests, drawing on a cultural knowledge graph spanning more than 600 million entities across music, film, dining, fashion, travel, and other categories. This infrastructure enables developers and large enterprises to incorporate taste-based intelligence into applications at scale without relying on personally identifiable information, giving AI agents additional context to inform recommendations and decisions based on what consumers are likely to enjoy.
As AI agents increasingly become intermediaries between consumers and businesses, understanding individual preferences could become a critical component of agentic commerce. An agent may be able to execute a transaction, but its ability to understand a consumer's cultural preferences can determine whether its recommendations are relevant in the first place. Qloo's technology provides the taste intelligence layer for those decisions , helping developers build agents that understand not just what consumers ask for, but what they are likely to value.
"AI agents are getting better at completing tasks, but there's still a big difference between knowing how to book a trip and knowing what kind of trip someone would actually enjoy," said Michael Diolosa, CTO of Qloo. "That's where taste intelligence becomes essential infrastructure. We're seeing developers use Qloo to build agents that can make decisions based on individual preferences, even when they have very little information to start with. The response to this hackathon shows the appetite for that intelligence and the opportunity to build new businesses around it."
The finalists will present their applications, answer questions from Jason Calacanis, Cedric the Entertainer, and Alex Elias (founder and CEO of Qloo) , and learn the results during the November 5 livestream on This Week in Startups. The event will showcase how developers are applying cultural intelligence to emerging agentic AI use cases and explore the potential for these applications to evolve into commercial products and businesses.
For more information about the competition, visit https://qloo.devpost.com/.
About Qloo
Qloo is the AI company building the intelligence layer for understanding and predicting consumer taste. Founded in 2012, Qloo combines proprietary AI models with a cultural knowledge graph spanning more than 600 million entities across entertainment, dining, travel, fashion, brands, and consumer products. Through its API-first platform, Qloo powers personalization, discovery, audience intelligence, and grounding for AI models and agents. Its customers include American Express, Netflix, Match Group, Live Nation, and Michelin. Qloo's privacy-first technology enables inference without relying on personally identifiable information. Learn more at www.qloo.com.
SOURCE Qloo Inc.
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