---
title: "AI BEAVERS – a global AI community Hamburg; largest AI hackathon in Germany to date"
sdDatePublished: "2026-09-16T04:06:00Z"
source: "https://startupcity.hamburg/news-events/news/ai-beavers-a-global-community-from-hamburg"
topics:
  - name: "artificial intelligence"
    identifier: "medtop:20001298"
locations:
  - "San Francisco"
  - "Bexleyheath"
  - "Kiel"
  - "Berlin"
  - "Hamburg"
  - "Ukraine"
---


AI BEAVERS – a global AI community Hamburg; largest AI hackathon in Germany to date

AI BEAVERS – a global community from Hamburg
    |

    Startup City Hamburg

AI BEAVERS – a global community from Hamburg

Founded in Hamburg in 2025, the AI BEAVERS have grown into an international community that has organised Germany’s largest AI hackathon and now extends as far as San Francisco. In this interview, co-founder Vladyslav Nyzhashchyy explains how this came about and what we can still expect from these eager beavers.

First of all, tell us a little bit about you! What is your background and what are you doing?

I'm Vladyslav Nyzhashchyy, co-founder of AI BEAVERS. I grew up in Ukraine and studied applied arts there, which is not the usual path into tech. After moving to Hamburg I built a handmade jewellery brand, ran it solo for almost four years and got it to 120.000 euros a year before I shut it down. In 2022, I switched to software: a bootcamp, then two and a half years as an engineer at a Kiel agency, building platforms for clients like EA SPORTS and Borussia Dortmund. On the side me and Dennis Han, my co-founder, built calmi, an AI mental health companion. It grew to more than 150,000 users. Today I spend my time on AI BEAVERS and on running AI courses about building AI products with my co-founder Alexander Zakharov.

What is AI BEAVERS and what was the reason to establish it?

Alex started it in March 2025 in a cafe, on Sundays, with a handful of people who wanted to build with AI tools. I joined after he ran a Cursor meetup. I had spent time in San Francisco and missed the way people there sit in one room, work, and help each other. Back in Hamburg I was building alone in my flat, and for founders Hamburg was quite dead. That's how build fridays came to life: a place where founders and people working in AI meet to build, at the most unusual time of the week, on a Friday evening. The first one had 17 people. Today it runs in several cities worldwide, including Berlin, London and San Francisco.

What are the current activities of AI BEAVERS?

The core event is build fridays in Hamburg, every week from 4pm: founders and builders work side by side, ask each other for help, and demo at the end. Around that we run Cursor meetups, a monthly agentic coding session for advanced builders, and AI day-to-day, an evening format with practical knowledge for specific industries. Our biggest event so far was the AI hackathon in January 2026: more than 400 participants over two days, free, open to all levels, with OpenAI, Cursor, Google, ElevenLabs and others as sponsors and judges from companies like Amazon, Apple and Netflix. It was the largest AI hackathon in Germany to date. Since the start the community has grown to more than 9,000 members across 14 countries and over 90 events. Hamburg is still the home base.

Two things. First, more city chapters. Berlin, London and San Francisco are already running and more cities are joining. All cities gets their own local hosts, we call them 'dam keepers', who run the events with their own teams and venues. We stay in the background and help.

Second, 'Keystone', our training programme for business teams. Most companies already have people using ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot, but the usage is uneven and the results are often poor. Keystone is a one-month live cohort that teaches non-developers to shape a problem so AI can solve it, judge the output, and build habits their team can reuse. It's how we take what we learned from hundreds of builders and our own experience into companies.