In June 2025, Team TechVerse — under my leadership, with Saksham Gupta and Raman Shukla — won 1st prize at BYTEBATTLE, a hackathon organised by MeetKats, against 15+ competing teams and 60+ individual participants. Our project was Annapurna, a food-sharing platform connecting donors, NGOs and volunteers.
Why this one felt different
By this point Annapurna wasn't a fresh idea assembled overnight — it had already been through earlier iterations. Winning BYTEBATTLE meant defending a product against the sharpest scrutiny it had faced yet, from judges who had seen a lot of food-tech pitches that quarter.
The team split that made it work
I led vision and execution, Saksham owned backend logic, Raman owned UI/UX and product logic. Three people, three clear lanes, zero time lost negotiating who does what mid-hackathon — decided before the clock started, not during it.
To win a hackathon like this is more than a title — it's validation that Tech + Purpose = Power.
Where this started
GenAI engineer and AI product builder with 2+ years shipping production-grade AI systems: RAG pipelines, fine-tuned LLMs, hybrid retrieval and multi-modal apps across vision, speech and OCR, architected end to end from ingestion to deployment. Leads engineering for SCULT INDIA's 14-member team, founded the 500+ member TechVerse Enclave community and has mentored 200+ students. Three hackathon first prizes: Changethon 2025 (IIT Roorkee), Product Genesis at Vividhotsava 2025 (CSJMU Kanpur) and BYTEBATTLE (MeetKats).
Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges. Email pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.
