JunctionX Lisbon

Founding EditionConcluded

JunctionX Lisbon 2025

The first JunctionX Lisbon event in Portugal, establishing the initiative and connecting students, universities and industry through collaborative innovation.

Dates
Location
Lisbon, Portugal
Venue
Técnico – Oeiras Campus (Taguspark)
Edition
Founding Edition · 2025
Meet the winners Explore the challenges

About

What was JunctionX Lisbon 2025?

An international 36-hour hackathon where teams of one to five people worked on technology projects with real-world impact. Participants chose from challenges set by partner companies and institutions, focusing on areas such as:

  • Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
  • Technology Serving Society

As the founding edition, it brought Junction, Europe’s hackathon series, to Lisbon for the first time. The winners earned tickets to Junction in Finland.

Collage of five photographs from JunctionX Lisbon 2025: the bright venue with palm trees and participants talking at a table, a team working on laptops, a speaker in a JunctionX Lisbon T-shirt presenting at a lectern, an audience seated in a lecture room, and participants smiling during a session.
JunctionX Lisbon 2025: the venue, teams at work and a speaker on stage.
Europe hackathon series
#1
time to build
36h
in prizes at Junction Finland, 14–16 November 2025
€50,000+
Gradient Descending – Associação

Organised byThe event was organised in partnership with Técnico and run by a non-profit association, Gradient Descending – Associação.

Winners

The first winners

The original website was last updated before the event. The results below come from coverage by Técnico, DEI and RTP, listed under Sources.

1st place · General and Peer Review categories

Três Mosqueteiros

Team
Duarte Pereira da Cruz, Daniel Borges, André PagaimeComputer Science and Engineering undergraduates at Técnico
Prize
€500 and a place at Junction 2025 in Finland

The team took on Albatroz Engenharia’s challenge with an AI tool that uses satellite imagery and georeferenced data to identify and predict the spread of invasive Acacia species in Portugal.

Técnico’s event report names the project Chega d’Acácias; its December 2025 article calls it Forest Guardian, an AI system that detects invasive acacias in drone and satellite imagery.

From Lisbon to Espoo

Winning JunctionX Lisbon took the team to Junction 2025 in Espoo, Finland, held from 14 to 16 November 2025 under the theme Utopia & Dystopia. There they built BetterMeeting, an AI meeting assistant for Snap’s Spectacles augmented-reality glasses, with real-time subtitles, transcripts, meeting summaries, automatic task extraction and a “podcast mode”, using ElevenLabs and Google Gemini. The project entered challenges run by Snapchat, Google and ElevenLabs.

On 18 November 2025, Antena 1’s programme Duas de Prosa (RTP) dedicated an episode to the students’ trip. Two of the team, Daniel Borges and Duarte Pereira da Cruz, went on to lead the organisation of JunctionX Lisbon 2026.

Read the full story in News

Sources

Challenges

What teams could build

Three challenges set by industry and research partners.

  1. Albatroz Engenharia logo

    01Albatroz Engenharia

    Save the Forest, chase invaders!

    Use multiple remote-sensing resources to chase the spread of forest invaders, specifically of the genus Acacia, in Mediterranean forests.

    Read the challenge description

    Climate change and world commerce have exposed Mediterranean forests to alien tree and shrub species that find good soil and weather conditions to thrive, with little to no natural counterbalance in the ecosystem. The spread of such invaders threatens local species, reduces local biodiversity and usually unbalances the pre-existing ecosystem, humans included, with unforeseen consequences and a new balance that is still unknown and likely of lesser ecological value.

    Species of the Acacia genus originate in the warmer climates of the Southern Hemisphere. They have been imported as timber, decorative trees and seeds, but they also arrive unwittingly in spores carried by ships. Moreover, there is an increased risk in Mediterranean forests because Acacias are pyrophytes.

    • World commerce → import of alien Acacia genetic material → new land for Acacias to prosper
    • Climate change → global warming → heat-tolerant Acacias prosper
    • Climate change → drier summers → forest fires → pyrophyte Acacias prosper

    So, it’s up to us, humans, to fix this mess.

    Full brief (PDF)

  2. Glintt Global logo

    02Glintt Global

    ContextBridge – The Missing Link Between AI and Enterprise Systems

    Build an open-source semantic middleware that allows Large Language Models (LLMs) to connect seamlessly and privately to enterprise data systems, enabling contextual, traceable and privacy-preserving AI interactions.

    Read the challenge description

    Enterprises increasingly want to deploy internal AI assistants to support daily operations, from generating client reports and analysing internal tickets to preparing financial summaries and extracting insights from documents. While tools like LangChain, LlamaIndex or Flowise help build context-aware applications, none provides a fully integrated, traceable and on-premises solution that allows real enterprise systems (like SAP, SharePoint or CRMs) to interact safely with AI models.

    The lack of a secure, dynamic context orchestrator prevents organisations from using LLMs effectively, as they cannot easily control what data is exposed, how it is combined, or whether the model’s responses can be traced back to verified sources.

    This challenge invited participants to design ContextBridge: an open-source middleware layer that connects enterprise systems to LLMs in a controllable, extensible and privacy-focused way.

    Full brief (PDF)

  3. Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine (GIMM) logo

    03Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine (GIMM)

    Multi-Source AI for IP & Market Intelligence: From patents to product!

    Build an AI pipeline that aggregates heterogeneous IP, scientific and market sources to generate actionable intelligence reports, identifying exploitable assets and mapping them to realistic market opportunities.

    Read the challenge description

    The “Multi-Source AI for IP & Market Intelligence” challenge invited teams to create an AI system that unifies diverse innovation data (patents, scientific publications and market indicators) into clear, evidence-based intelligence reports. The goal was to automate how organisations detect exploitable innovations and align them with commercial opportunities. By combining data fusion, natural language processing and structured reasoning, participants would prototype next-generation tools for technology transfer and strategic decision-making in R&D and investment.

Partners

Partners

Challenge partners

  • Glintt Global

    A leading tech consultancy driving digital transformation in healthcare, financial services and public sectors across Europe and beyond.

  • Albatroz Engenharia SA

    A Portuguese innovator in AI-powered inspection systems and UAV technologies for the electric power industry.

  • Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine

    GIMM is dedicated to fostering a dynamic, collaborative and sustainable research environment that spans disciplines from basic to clinical research.

Community partners

  • Comudel

  • Jane Street

  • Pointer5

  • Domino's Pizza

In collaboration with

  • Técnico Lisboa

According to Técnico, the event was also supported by Técnico’s Oeiras Campus and Oeiras City Council.

Programme

Schedule

Saturday

  1. Registration
  2. Opening Ceremony
  3. Coding Starts
  4. Lunch
  5. Workshop by 641
  6. Dinner

Sunday

  1. Breakfast
  2. Pitch Sessions
  3. Roundtable
  4. Winners Announcement
  5. Closing Ceremony
  6. Venue Closing

Organisers

Meet the team

The people behind the founding edition of JunctionX Lisbon.

The original website also invited companies to become partners and people to join as volunteers, through lisbon@hackjunction.com, which remains the contact for JunctionX Lisbon.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

As published for participants before the event.

What are the benefits of the hackathon?

Build fast, learn from mentors, network with partners, get feedback and win prizes. The winner will get tickets and a chance to participate in Junction Finland, taking place from the 14th to 16th of November, where there are more than €50,000 in prizes!

Do I need to bring a team?

Come solo or form a team on-site. Both are welcome.

Will there be a remote option?

The event is in-person in Lisbon for this edition.

Do I need coding experience?

Technical and non-technical roles are welcome. Projects need at least one technical member.

Where is the event?

The event will be at Técnico’s campus in Oeiras. The address is Av. Prof. Dr. Cavaco Silva, 2744-016 Porto Salvo.

What should I bring?

Laptop, charger, and anything else you need to hack!

Is food provided?

Yes, all meals and snacks will be provided during the event.

How to get to the venue?

Address: Av. Prof. Dr. Cavaco Silva, 2744-016 Porto Salvo, Oeiras, Portugal. Open in Google Maps

Media

Video and photos

Promotional video featured on the original JunctionX Lisbon 2025 website (and reused on the 2026 website).
Photo galleryPhotographs of JunctionX Lisbon 2025Published by Técnico on its photo gallery. Opens on gallery.tecnico.ulisboa.pt.

Resources

Documents and links