On June 3, the international student AgriTech Hackathon came to a close. During the event, teams from Ukraine and Sweden presented their technical solutions to real-world challenges faced by Ukrainian farmers. The winners — the Ukrainian team Demetra and the Swedish team SnailoMat — will attend the international FAB25 conference in the Czech Republic.

The AgriTech Hackathon ran from April 25 to June 3, 2025, as part of the international project CRAFT (Co-cReating vAlue For enTrepreneurial engagement in Ukraine). The project is implemented in partnership by Ukrainian Future, a business incubator of the Junior Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Halmstad University (Sweden), the Lviv Institute of Management (Ukraine), and with financial support from the Swedish Institute. It is part of the ProActS research program, coordinated by Henrik Barth, Associate Professor at Halmstad University.

The first stage of the Hackathon took place on April 25 at the Ukrainian Future business incubator in Kyiv. At this stage, seven youth teams from Ukraine (on-site) and Sweden (online) presented their initial concepts for technological solutions developed in response to real requests from Ukrainian farms. The participants chose the challenges themselves and defined the areas they would work on throughout the program. Over the next month, the teams worked on their solutions in the laboratories of Ukrainian Future and Halmstad University.

A key stage of the Hackathon was the Design Thinking workshop led by Martin Bergman, an industrial engineer from Halmstad University (Sweden). Martin has worked on projects for Apple Inc. (USA), Getinge Group (Sweden), and Volvo Cars (Sweden). He helped participants understand how to create truly useful solutions for real users — through deeper insight into their needs and practical application of design thinking principles.

The final presentations of the AgriTech Hackathon took place on June 3 in a hybrid format — Swedish students presented offline, while the Ukrainian teams joined online. The jury, which included project coordinator Henrik Barth and head of the Ukrainian Future business incubator Iryna Bystrova, selected two winning teams.

The Ukrainian winners — Team No. 4 (Sofiia Osaulenko, Kyra Kyseliova, Bohdan Khytryk) — presented Demetra, a project offering an affordable solution for small farmers: a mobile sensor system that analyzes soil conditions and supports agronomic decision-making using AI.

The Swedish winning team — SnailoMat — developed an innovative system for the automated care of snails, aimed at increasing the efficiency of niche agricultural production.

Both teams created functional prototypes in the prototyping labs at Ukrainian Future and Halmstad University and won the main prize of the Hackathon — a trip to the international FAB25 conference, which will take place July 4–11, 2025, in Brno, Czech Republic. FAB25 is one of the largest global events of the FabLab network — a community of digital prototyping laboratories — expected to gather over 1,100 participants from around the world this year to explore innovations in digital fabrication.

Participation in FAB25 will give young inventors access to:

• insights into the most cutting-edge global practices in digital fabrication, through expert talks, workshops, and presentations;
• networking with Fab Lab community members from dozens of countries, working on engineering solutions for education, ecology, urban infrastructure, agriculture, and more;
• inspiration and collaboration opportunities that can help student projects grow — from idea to real-world implementation.

The trip to FAB25 in Brno is truly a unique opportunity for the winners to see how the world’s top prototyping labs operate — and become part of this global ecosystem.

It is also worth noting that all Ukrainian teams who presented their projects during the final pitch on June 3 received Certificates of Participation in the AgriTech Hackathon. In addition, members of three teams who demonstrated particularly strong results were awarded extra prizes — vouchers for services at the UF FabLab prototyping lab, which operates within the Ukrainian Future business incubator. This is a great opportunity for young innovators to continue developing their solutions and take them to the next level.