But then Fortune 500 companies approached Devpost with a tough ask: recreate this magic, but only with their employees. How do you spark the same level of creativity in a closed ecosystem?

Devpost’s first attempt completely missed the point. We copied over all our public platform features - collaboration tools, the voting system, everything - but something was missing. Teams stuck to their usual groups and played it safe with ideas. When our customers looked at their first internal hackathon results, it was pretty clear: 90% of what teams built were just small tweaks to projects that already existed.

Then the real challenge became clear: what if we could help employees tap into all the knowledge that was already inside their company? We believed that building a Large Language Model (LLM) could be exactly what we needed - a way to find and connect insights that were just sitting there unused, and turn them into big product bets that help companies stay competitive.