Raising €87K in 20 Hours at the Project Europe x ElevenLabs Hackathon

Yongkang Zou · 2025-12-02 · hackathon · Creative AI

The 20-Hour Sprint

We raised more than €80k in 20 hours for our hackathon project.

I joined the team at the very last minute. When I first heard Aaron's idea about raising money during the actual hackathon, I didn't expect much. As a young dev, I had pretty low expectations about how much we would actually raise in such a short window.

Then we got our first investment. Everything changed.

The live investment tracker hitting €87,680 during the hackathon.

I have never felt this kind of energy during a sleepless 20 hours. I didn't even drink any coffee the whole time. Everyone worked incredibly hard to ship our product.

Shipping the Engine

In the end, we built and shipped a working MVP. It operates as a marketing research engine, creative thinker, and ad filmmaker combined into one platform.

• Scrapes trends across social media
• Analyzes brand identity
• Generates 100% original campaign ideas
• Runs A/B testing
• Delivers visual results as lookbooks and ad videos in multiple styles

The generated lookbooks and visual results from our creative engine.

You can check out the live project at buildineurope.com.

Huge shoutout to my amazing team: Aaron Jones, Alison Scorgie, Imaad Zaffar, and Moeed Chughtai. Massive thanks to ElevenLabs and Project Europe for organizing this incredible hackathon in Warsaw 🇵🇱. They even asked Santa to send us amazing food.

Photos