This is what came out of the Creative Data Hackathon we organised in San Francisco last Saturday with @krea_ai and support from @Lovable.
Builders spent the day finding new ways to make data something you can play with and explore, and we loved how different and original their directions were.
First place went to Chaeyeon Kim for The History Dump: a gesture-controlled archive that tells history through the objects left behind by political events, disasters and cultural moments around the world.
Dive into "the trashiest project of history" (in Chaeyeon's own words): chaeyeonkimscientist.github.…
This was our very first hackathon in SF. It won't be the last. What theme should we do next?
We're data nerds, and we love getting creative 🎨
On Saturday, Oct 10, we're co-hosting the Creative Data Hackathon with @krea_ai in San Francisco as part of SF @Techweek_ by @a16z, with support from @Lovable.
The brief is simple: find the most creative way to showcase data.
Spots are limited. Apply to join: partiful.com/e/4Nry0dbtCjTQv…
Pick a hackathon, one a month for three months. We cover flights, accommodation, and support along the way. You just show up and build.
📅 Apply until Sunday, September 13th
🔗 cala-ai.notion.site/6f71fd7b…
On Saturday, our office became a hidden beach in Barcelona where 60+ builders spent their day building, connecting, embracing creativity and skipping the data 🏄🏻
We were impressed by the talent and creativity behind the submitted projects, and we'll be posting about some of them in the upcoming days.
It was a pleasure hosting the very first @techeurope_ hackathon in Barcelona, with @OpenAI, @fal, @fastinoAI, @EntireHQ and @AikidoSecurity joining as well.
Can’t wait to do this again soon 🌊
🌊Cala means cove: a small, sheltered beach tucked into the rocks, easy to miss unless you know it's there.
On August 29th, you're invited to our particular cove in the middle of Barcelona, where we'll be hosting the final stop of @techeurope_'s summer hackathon series alongside @OpenAI.
If you're building with agents and want to spend the last Saturday of August shipping, apply to join: luma.com/barcelona-summer-lo…
Detect risk signals and relevant events on supervised entities in real time.
We collaborated with @Lovable to build an Entity Watch tool on top of Cala's finance data.
Add the companies or people you want to keep an eye on, and the matrix tracks them across public sources in real time: adverse media, regulatory actions, leadership changes, and other material signals, laid out entity by entity so you see what changed and where.
Lovable turned a plain description of the matrix, the entities, the signal types, the layout, into a working front end wired to Cala's data in a single session, no separate design pass, no backend to stand up by hand.
Try it: entity-watch-demo.apps.cala.…
Building an anti-money laundering screening tool usually eats up weeks of engineering time. We built one in hours on top of Cala's finance data using @DevinAI, @cognition's autonomous software engineer.
Trace ownership and control structures to identify sanctions and PEP exposure across an entity and its related parties. Review EU and UN designations, targeted PEP assessments, and sourced findings through an interactive investigation workflow.
What if we now want to add a CRM export button? Or a risk-scoring column that recalculates when new sanction data comes in? We just describe it to Devin and it plans the change, writes the code, tests it, and ships it. Cala has the data ready. No one touches the codebase.
Try it: aml-demo.apps.cala.ai/?utm_c…
Our community is already leveraging Cala for Finance.
No scraping, no five APIs stitched together, just our knowledge graph, queried directly.
🧵 Some examples:
Jeffrey Chang built a six-agent pipeline where each agent works a different data source, macro trends, supply chains via Cala's entity graph, sentiment, options flow, on-chain data, SEC filings. Work that normally takes three days of manual scraping and cross-referencing across multiple tools took him under two hours.
Link to demo 👉🏼 cala.ai/demos/simulated-year…
Mian Deng built Trace Intelligence, a decision tool that models contested real-world questions as a causal graph, with every contributing element traceable back to its source. For this demo, she focused on the Dutch housing market.
Link to demo 👉🏼 cala.ai/demos/trace-intellig…
Ask about a company. It talks you through the risk.
We built a voice-first adverse media screening tool with @elevenlabsio, running on Cala's finance data.
Thread 🧵
Cala returns findings as structured, verified entities. ElevenLabs turns them into a natural spoken walkthrough.
Wiring the two together took surprisingly little glue code. No custom structured → speech pipeline, no hand-scripting phrases.
Banks are putting AI agents to work. So are funds, fintechs and brokers.
Today we're making sure they all work on facts.
Introducing Cala for Finance — the data layer underneath: registries, filings, sanctions, ownership, courts, ratings.
cala.ai/industries/finance
Finance is an industry where a wrong fact isn't just an error, but a liability.
Onboarding, screening, monitoring, diligence: these workflows can't run on scraped web pages. They need data that's verified, typed, and traceable.
A few things teams can build on it:
→ KYC/KYB: complete profile of any legal entity
→ AML: trace ownership to surface sanctions & PEP exposure
→ Entity Watch: risk signals on supervised entities, in real time
→ Commercial DD: one pre-deal picture
Try it at: console.cala.ai
Tomorrow Thursday from 6.30pm, we're hosting a fintech hackathon at our office, in collaboration with @ElevenLabs and @soti_fam.
Personal finance agents, banking tools, or anything creative that fits the theme are all welcome. Cala is providing the financial data layer.
If you're into fintech and in Barcelona tomorrow, come build with us 🌊
Apply to join: luma.com/iidgd0eg?utm_source…
Cala Comets S26 is here ☄️
Cala Comets (we say /kəˈmɪts/) is a program where we sponsor builders from our community to attend one hackathon a month for three months. We cover the travel, amplify what they build, and we root for them. Not just at the finish line, but also along the way.
Introducing the Summer 26 cohort:
Elisa Mordenti - Closed two clinical pilots in Italy in under three months for a Parkinson's monitoring startup. Learned competitive strategy from her grandfather playing card games.
Noah Pham - Ten hackathon wins in a row. More importantly, everything he builds has a thread: tech that looks out for people.
Trushi Patel - Her name literally means curiosity. One of her recent builds: a legal risk agent running on graph memory. We love knowledge graphs.
Héctor Sanchís Pont - Nine years on the Spanish national team in trail running, now automating public procurement intelligence from Madrid. The kind of person who treats time pressure as a feature, not a bug.
This cohort was hard to pick. So many talented builders applied.
New cohorts open every three months. Know a builder who should apply? Tag them below.
