What 32 Teams Built for the World Cup in One Day

On May 23, 2026, with kickoff week just around the corner, we opened the doors for the Google I/O Kickoff: Pre-World Cup Hack, a one-day hackathon where developers competed to build the most compelling AI-powered product inspired by the tournament. The rules were simple: use RocketRide, Google AI, or GMI Cloud (or all three) and ship something remarkable before the final whistle.

549 people registered. 32 teams made the cut. 10 judges from NVIDIA, Meta, Netflix, eBay, Google, and beyond had the hard job of picking a winner. The total prize pool was $3,000. And Tunisia took home the trophy.

The Challenge

The inspiration was the World Cup 2026, the first-ever 48-team tournament spanning three countries: the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Developers leaned all the way in. Every team adopted a World Cup nation as their identity and built products that either served the tournament directly or drew from its scale, its logistics, and its billion-strong global fanbase.

Judging used a simple but demanding rubric: 10 judges, 5 scoring criteria (Impact, Innovation, Execution, Use of AI, and Presentation), 60 points maximum per judge, 600 points total. Projects also earned separate credit for using RocketRide, Google AI, and GMI Cloud. The gap between the podium and the honorable mentions was tight.

And the Winners Are...

🥇 1st Place · $2,000 · Spike (Tunisia)

Stephen Kelly · Andrew Firek · Rafael Sánchez

Trash Patrol gamifies municipal litter cleanup as a live soccer match. Users photograph trash on their phone; a backend built on RocketRide dispatches a physical robot "Striker" to collect it; progress is tracked in real time on a custom 2D soccer-field interface with full sports-themed scoring. The combination of IoT, multi-agent orchestration, and genuinely fun UX scored 490 out of 600 points across ten judges, the highest total of the day.

• App Repo · Orchestration Repo · ▶ Watch the demo

🥈 2nd Place · $800 · World Stage Scout (Jordan)

Sayem Wani · Apeksha Maithal · Tanmay Bagaria

A talent discovery platform built to surface football prospects from underserved regions and route them into global scouting pipelines. 486 points.

• 🔗 GitHub

🥉 3rd Place · $200 · Master Coach (Egypt)

Blas (blasmoreno.dev)

A local-first AI coaching tool: drop in a match video clip and receive animated tactical diagrams, broadcast-style overlays with positional arrows, and AI-generated counter-play suggestions, all running entirely via Google Gemini with no cloud upload required. 480 points.

• 🔗 GitHub

Honorable Mentions (Ranks 4–10)

Seven more teams scored high enough to earn special recognition from the judges. The competition was close at the top of the field:

‍

‍

Builds Worth Talking About

Here are a few more projects that turned heads during the demo round:

🇺🇸 VARify (USA)

An AI referee assistant that analyzes match clips to issue card decisions: upload a short video, and the pipeline (Gemini + GMI Cloud) returns RED_CARD, YELLOW_CARD, or NO_CARD with confidence scores, timestamps, and annotated evidence moments. The VAR room, automated. GitHub →

🇨🇭 FIFA 360 (Switzerland)

A mobile-first PWA designed for the expanded 48-team, 16-city, 3-country 2026 format. It answers four questions for every fan: where to watch, how to get there, what's happening live, and venue ratings. Its standout feature: an AI voice agent that calls venues on your behalf to RSVP. Try the live demo →

🇪🇸 What If (Spain)

Ask "what if?" at any moment during a live match, a different pass, an alternative goal, and receive a generated video clip showing that alternate outcome alongside the broadcast. One of the more technically ambitious ideas in the field. GitHub →

Ghost Scout (Zero Byte)

AI-powered scouting reports for underserved regions. Describe a player in natural language; GMI Cloud + Gemini benchmark the stats, find comparable pros, and draft academy outreach emails in multiple languages. GitHub → · Watch →

🇲🇽 SeatView (Mexico)

Augments stadium crowd recordings with AI-generated activity heatmaps, inferred chant-volume overlays, and multilingual speech bubbles. Upload a video from the stands; watch the crowd come alive with data. GitHub →

🇩🇪 Trionda Assist (Germany)

GitHub → · Watch demo →

The Full Field: All 32 Teams

Every team that entered the bracket, in submission order:

‍

‍

The Judges

Ten senior engineers, founders, and investors scored every project across five dimensions: Impact, Innovation, Execution, Use of AI, and Presentation, with an additional flag for use of each sponsored platform.

• ​Abhinav Balasubramanian, Staff AI Engineer @ NVIDIA‍
• ‍Magne Jul Pedersen, VC @ Exponential VC
• ‍Sachin Gupta, E-Commerce Engineering Leader @ eBay
• ‍Joe Maionchi, Co-Founder & COO RocketRide‍
• ‍Roan Weigert, DevRel AI Engineer @ GMI Cloud
• ‍‍William Viet Tran, ML/GenAI @ Meta
• ‍Francesca Sala, GDG Newport Beach Lead
• ‍Jose Escoto, Senior Engineer @ City County San Francisco
• ‍Francis Ma, Tech executive, ex-google
• ‍Francis Oledibe, Software Engineer @ Netflix

Partners Who Made It Happen

• GMI Cloud: High-performance GPU cloud built for AI inference and training
• RocketRide: Agent orchestration platform for real-world AI applications
• GDG Newport Beach: Local Google Developer Group chapter, event host
• NVIDIA: Powering the GPU infrastructure behind modern AI

What We Took Away

A few things stood out by the end of the day.

The winning project didn't just use AI; it connected AI to the physical world. Trash Patrol's loop from phone camera to robot dispatch to 2D field tracker is the kind of end-to-end integration that most teams wouldn't attempt in a week, let alone a day.

The range of verticals was impressive: football coaching, talent scouting, referee automation, fan travel planning, crowd analytics, startup fundraising, IT support simulation. The World Cup was the container; the ideas inside went far beyond sport.

Want to Build on GMI Cloud?

Every team at this event had access to GMI Cloud's GPU infrastructure for running inference and building AI pipelines. If you want to do the same, without a hackathon, sign up here.

And if you want to be the first to know about the next event, follow us on Luma.

‍