CloserAI wins AI agents hackathon
On a June Friday evening in Tallinn, 13 teams stood up to pitch at the end of a hackathon. Unusually, the participants didn’t have that dishevelled look of teams who hadn’t slept in beds for a few nights; this hackathon had a rather different vibe.
The Elnora and EFS (Estonian Founders Society) AI Agents Hackathon was a competition lasting only twelve hours. Earlier in the week, participants joined a couple of workshops on AI agents and how to get set up and ready for the Friday morning start.
Organised by Carmen Kivisild, founder and CEO of Elnora, which developed an AI agent that generates and optimises biomedical lab protocols for biotech and pharma teams, she had previously run a similar hackathon in San Francisco for scientists and then wrote about it in Fomo.Observer.
As the pool of scientific companies in Estonia is a lot smaller than the US she decided to open up the hackathon to all industries. “We designed the hackathon to be an opportunity for companies, especially founders, executives, high-level managers and their employees - people who have decision-making power, to try out agents, so they can go back to their organisations and make a real change.”
The hackathon came with a price tag, €449, with a discounted ticket for EFS members. “There's this concept that people think that hackathons have to be for free because it's something that is only for students, and students don't have money, but the concept here was it's not for students, it was meant for companies,” Kivisild says, making the case that companies pay for their employees' training, and that’s what they get at the hackathon.
The judges were Mart Habakuk from Estonian Business School, Triin Hertmann from the Estonian Founders Society, Lehar Kütt from Coop Pank AS, and Kivisild herslef. Teams used Vercel, Stripe and Claude Code to build their agents.
The winners
All thirteen pitches were impressive, solving accounting issues for sole traders, messy communications for busy CEOs, onboarding, and even school photography software. But one team stood out, Closer AI, which closes sales via WhatsApp, where AI agents take the customer and their purchase from conversation, through payment and shipping.
The team was made up of Brayden Olson, CEO of Spiritus, Inna Lipova, growth marketing manager at Scandiweb, Dmitri Borohhov, head of engineering at Migrevention and Siim Kostabi, CEO at Pageloot.
Olson was the person who pitched the idea. His company is due to launch a product in some Asian markets where small business owners make much of their sales via WhatsApp or other messaging tools. But that requires the seller to be available to chat 24/7 so they don’t miss a sales opportunity. “I thought there must be a better way,” he said.
“Lots of businesses actually start from social media, like Instagram DMs, WhatsApp, and everything, and they don't usually have resources to build e-commerce websites for themselves, for example. So we are also covering this gap,” said Lipova, who was first to jump on the project.
“It all has to fit together, or it doesn't work,” said Olson. It's got to be the full solution.” And that’s exactly what they produced. From conversation, to payment and then a link up with third-party logistics. “It's putting all of it together, so that people don't have to change behaviour, and it all works,” he explains.
What now?
“We're definitely going to be doing something,” said Olsen. This was a need for his company, so naturally, it will be rolled out within a few months. And Borohhov, who was taking part in his first hackathon, was already looking for an agent to take a customer through a workflow so that part of the solution could work for him, too.
“I'm pretty happy that Brayden posted a very clear idea with a call to action that we're launching in 90 days, so yeah. How can you not be excited about this?” said Kostabi.
Congrats to the winners. Not bad for a day’s work!
