In early 2025, @iamxxhe and I were pitching a sponsor for our first hackathon. Halfway through our deck, the sponsor interrupted: “Did you see that token? I think it’s gone up 10x since we started this call.” 🤯 We both went quiet. Seconds earlier, we’d been discussing how to support developers. Now we were scrambling to find the trading pair on our phones while trying to keep the pitch going. I found the wrong pair. My first brush with financial freedom, and I couldn’t even find the right button. Shafi and I met through @iclblockchain I was working on biosensors in the lab and trading perps on the side; he was deep into quant. Our first shared achievement? Losing all our pocket money. 😂 We believed in AI agents—and hoped they might improve our bank balances. We invested in a friend’s project, kept “buying the dip” while organising our first hackathon, and eventually lost everything we’d put in. But we kept building together. The money disappeared. The partnership stayed. And together, we built @imperialaisoc. One hackathon became two, then three, four and five. 67 soon. Over 18 months, those five events brought together: → 2,000+ builders → 200+ projects → More than $200,000 in combined announced prize pools → Millions of views online We’d gone from putting our money into tokens to bringing sponsor support to developers. This time, we could see things being built. This week, we brought founders, AI leaders and investors together at the House of Lords for @UKAIagents. Looking around the room, I kept thinking about how much had grown out of those early conversations. Members have taken on forward-deployed engineering projects, joined incubators, raised funding and met their co-founders. One community member shared an early idea with me. Two months later, he had raised $4 million and moved to San Francisco. Those achievements belong to them—their talent, work and decisions. We’re simply grateful to have provided a place where some of those connections began. And we want to help more of those stories continue beyond the event. Today, we’re officially launching @UKAIagents to take this community further. We’ll keep hosting high-quality events while helping our founders and fellows access small grants and early-stage funding, connect with the right investors, and find the compute resources they need to keep building. Sometimes the next step is a technical mentor. Sometimes it’s a first paying customer. Sometimes it’s one introduction to someone who understands what you’re trying to build. I’m so glad we’re in this wave together—with our incredible founders and the support of our partners and sponsors, we truly apperiate all the support from our amazing sponsors, partners like @LauraModiano , @davidgelberg and surrounded by top builders like @gary_yangge, our founding member and new @iclblockchain pres @may_tohoku and so many more, i can't wait to see what we build together. Check our cool event and projects here btw aiagentslab.uk/

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