About the challenge

Venture capital moves billions of dollars a year on spreadsheets, warm intros and PDFs. On October 24, 150 founders and engineers will spend nine hours fixing that, in front of the VCs who live with these problems every day.

Deal Flow is NYC's first VC hackathon, hosted by localhost:nyc with VCLab at Betaworks. Every track comes straight from problems NYC VCs and LPs told us they would pay to solve. Partners from Everywhere Ventures, Wischoff Ventures, Forum Ventures and other NYC funds judge live, so your judges are also your first customers.

This is not a weekend side-project hackathon. Before build day, every team does the founder work: customer interviews, market research and a business model. On the day, you only build. We're looking for products a fund would pay for every year, not clever demos that end when the event does. Build a company, not a project.

Get started

Pick one of the four tracks, read its problem statement and talk to at least five people who have the problem before October 24. The full problem statements, interview questions and data sources are in the Deal Flow Problem Tracks doc.

• Track 1, Sourcing: surface exceptional founders before they raise, from public signals, with a clear reason each one deserves a meeting.
• Track 2, Diligence: take a deck or data room and return the market signals, the right comps and the red flags in the financials and metrics.
• Track 3, Portfolio: turn scattered portfolio updates into early warnings, with agentic check-ins or a firm-wide open-source model on portfolio data.
• Track 4, Funds: read K-1s and quarterly fund reports, diligence GP teams and price LP stakes on the secondary market.
• Wokelo's award: bring outside data into any track with the Akta API and compete for Best Use of External Data.

Schedule (Saturday, October 24)

Judging criteria

• Problem and customer evidence (25%): Is this a real, painful problem for a specific buyer? Judges want to hear what your interviews said and see that you built for one customer, not everyone.
• Product and technical execution (30%): Does it work? Judges look for a working product that handles the core workflow end to end, not a front end over a mock.
• Business potential (25%): Who pays, how much, and can this become a venture-scale company? A clear price and a credible way to reach buyers beats a big market slide.
• Demo and clarity (20%): Can you tell the story in three minutes so that a partner would repeat it to their team on Monday?

• Design (5)