sprintd Zurich: what 45 builders built in 36 hours

On 9 October, 45 builders walked into Bluelion in Zurich for the first sprintd innovation sprint. 36 hours later, 13 projects were on stage.

Two companies brought real problems. Not toy challenges, problems they had not solved yet. Here is what happened.

The cases

Equans Switzerland asked: how does a public tender become a priced offer, without a week of manual work? Team SPAM² won the case with BanTender, which takes a tender all the way to a priced offer.

Inventx, together with Outcept, asked whether every bank advisory call can be checked for fraud and compliance, instead of a sample. Team Sodium Secure won it with Sherlock Phones, a self-hosted system for Swiss German calls. Their own measurement on the 60 case recordings: 49 classified correctly, and 0 false alarms on the 28 clean calls. Their results are public.

The podium

The jury ranked all projects across both cases. First: BanTender by SPAM². Second: Sherlock Phones by Sodium Secure. Third: Favon, also on the Equans Switzerland case, with a simple promise: tenders in, clear air out.

All three demos are on the sprintd Zurich recap page.

What the partners said

Equans Switzerland set the bar high on purpose: "What the teams managed to build in just 36 hours went beyond our expectations." (LinkedIn)

Outcept, after five teams worked on their case: "Diese Ansätze fliessen jetzt in den MVP ein." The approaches from the weekend are now going into their MVP. (LinkedIn)

That is the part I care about most. Not a nice weekend, but work that keeps going on Monday.

Thank you

To Equans Switzerland and Inventx × Outcept for trusting a first edition with real cases. To Piñata Pitch for co-hosting, and to Bluelion for being our home for 36 hours.

To our jury, Reto Laemmler, Nelson Zürcher and Elke Arend-Heidbrinck, and our mentors, Silvan Häfeli and Mateusz Wojdylo. To Exoscale, ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Anthropic, MAD and n8n for backing the builders. And to our volunteers, who held the whole weekend together.

Most of all, to the builders. You made the first one count.

The whole weekend, the demos and the photos: see the sprintd Zurich recap.