Zo House hosted Sarvam BuildIn' Hours, Sarvam AI's 12-hour in-person hackathon and the Bengaluru leg of Elevation Capital's Basecamp Week. Built and operated by hackathon platform HackCulture, the event was announced just 48 hours before it took place and still drew 6,272 applications, of which only 100 builders were selected to participate, an acceptance rate of roughly 1 in 62.
Over 12 continuous hours, the selected builders developed and shipped projects across four tracks: Voice AI, Document Intelligence, Multilingual AI, and AI Agents, all built on the Sarvam stack. Each team received ₹5,000 in Sarvam credits and access to mentors drawn from across the AI ecosystem, including Sarvam AI, IBM, Qdrant, Razorpay, and Google for Startups Accelerator. A prize pool of ₹5,00,000 was distributed across the top three teams, chosen by an expert jury that included AI and technology creator Arsh Goyal.
The winning projects
The three top-ranked builds reflected a shared focus on solving practical problems for Indian users:
Government Tender Discovery and Application for MSMEs, built on Sarvam Vision, a working prototype designed to simplify tender access for small businesses.
Storytelling for Kids in Indic Languages, an interactive approach to early learning in regional languages.
Setu, a tool that enables people who cannot speak to communicate visually.
Sarvam AI, Elevation Capital's Basecamp, and HackCulture each chose Zo House over a conventional venue, a decision that speaks to what the house has come to represent for India's builder community. Zo House is not a venue to be booked or a dorm to stay in. It is a running community of founders that does not pause between events, and for one Sunday, 100 builders walked into a community already mid-conversation and were invited to join it.
"Zo House was built to be the room where real building happens, not a space you book for a day and leave. When Sarvam, Elevation, and HackCulture chose to run something of this scale here, it reflected exactly what we set out to create: a living community of founders that does not pause between events. Watching 100 builders ship real solutions for India in 12 hours is the clearest proof of what this house is for," said Aviral Gupta, CEO, Zostel and Zo World.
Sarvam AI is building India's sovereign AI stack, including foundation models trained from scratch for Indian languages, speech models, and a consumer application already used at scale. The company was selected by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to help develop the country's sovereign large language model ecosystem. The hackathon was held during Elevation Capital's Basecamp Week, an initiative that brings founders and builders together, and was executed by HackCulture, a platform used by enterprises and ecosystem players to run outcome-driven hackathons.
Zo House Bengaluru continues to host a series of builder events across the AI and startup ecosystem, with a founder personal branding session, a women-only founders dinner, and a Superteam x Startup Village hacker house among those lined up next.
Zo House Bangalore is the first node in what Zo World envisions as a national network of permanent hacker houses, each designed not as short-term accommodation but as a long-term lifestyle choice for founders who want to build in the right ecosystem. The network sits within the larger Zo World universe, which has built India's most recognized community-first travel and living infrastructure over the past decade.
With India producing an increasing number of early-stage founders competing on the global stage, Zo House positions itself as the missing piece between a great idea and the environment needed to execute it at speed.
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