The Future Innovators Hackathon: A Road to START Hack

About the Challenge

The Future Innovators Hackathon is a high‑intensity, 24‑hour innovation sprint jointly hosted by Unicorn Factory Lisboa and START Lisbon. It is designed to help you take bold ideas from concept to MVP with real‑world potential.

Over two days, you will move through ideation, validation, prototyping, and pitching, working side‑by‑side with talented peers in technology, design, and business. Expect a focused but high‑energy environment that keeps you motivated, accountable, and pushing your ideas further.

Whether you are a first‑time hacker or an experienced builder, this is your chance to experiment, learn fast, and create something you would be proud to showcase at START Hack and beyond.

Teams

• Team size: 2–4 participants.
• You may register with a full team or apply individually; in that case, we will help you form a team on‑site during the team‑forming session.
• Interdisciplinary teams (tech, design and business) are strongly encouraged.

Event language

• All communication, workshops and pitches will be held in English.

Tools & tech stack

You will be encouraged to leverage powerful developer tools that help you ship faster and focus on what matters: your solution and your users.

• Cloudflare Workers for scalable, globally distributed backends and APIs.
• Lovable for rapid full‑stack prototyping, iteration and refactoring.
• Any other modern tools, frameworks or libraries that fit your stack (web, mobile, AI, data, hardware, etc.).

Workshops and mentors will help you get started quickly, so you can spend more time building and less time configuring.

Mentorship and support

You will not be building alone. Throughout the Hackathon, you will have access to:

• Founders who have built and scaled successful startups and can challenge your product and go‑to‑market thinking.
• Investors and VCs who can advise you on what makes a pitch fundable and what they look for in early‑stage teams.
• Business coaches to help you validate your market, refine your value proposition, and structure your business model.
• Engineers and technical mentors who can help you troubleshoot your prototype, make key architecture choices, and accelerate your build.

In addition, expert‑led talks and office hours will run throughout the event to guide you from idea to pitch‑ready MVP.