Vista Equity Partners Names Winners of Agentic AI Hackathons

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Vista Equity Partners (“Vista”), a global technology investor that specializes in enterprise software, today announced the winners of its 9th Annual North America and Global Hackathons.

Vista’s two independent business innovation competitions provide an opportunity for developers and engineers across the Vista portfolio to connect with peers and compete to advance enterprise software solutions.

This year, North American and Global teams took on two distinct challenges. North American teams reimagined their company as an agentic AI native startup, tearing down a core business function and rebuilding it from scratch as a coordinated, multi-agent system. Global teams started with a workflow they already run today, engineering a multi-agent system that is reliable, has clear human checkpoints and effective guardrails, and is cost-effective enough to run in production.

"This year's Hackathons demonstrated how quickly agentic AI is moving from an emerging technology to a defining force in enterprise software," said Robert F. Smith, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Vista Equity Partners. "At each event, our companies reimagined the core of their own businesses around agentic AI and turned its promise into working solutions. That is the power of the Vista ecosystem at work: accelerating innovation, expanding capability and driving impact at scale."

The Hackathons brought together 59 teams and over 275 participants from more than 30 Vista portfolio companies. Each competition was judged by a panel of Vista value creation and product and technology experts during separate, 24-hour competitions held in Scottsdale, Arizona and Bangalore, India. Submissions were judged based on innovation and originality, feasibility of productization and deployment, potential business impact, completeness of vision and clarity of presentation.

The North America Hackathon included 16 students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (“HBCUs”) who worked alongside the portfolio teams. Amazon Web Services, HCLTech and Dell Technologies served as sponsors of the event.

North America Hackathon Winners

• First Place: Avalara
  Avalara's agentic solution handles VAT tax returns automatically for online sellers, an area where compliance is normally slow, manual, and requires outside consultants across dozens of countries. Eight coordinated agents compile, validate, reconcile and file the returns, with deterministic tax logic and human sign-off required before anything is submitted. The team estimated the approach could file a return roughly 320 times more cheaply than manual processing.
  
  
• Second Place: KnowBe4
  KnowBe4's agent replaces one-size-fits-all security training by reasoning over each employee's real-time behavior and history, then deciding whether to coach automatically or escalate to a specialist, with human approval required above a set risk threshold. The team estimated the approach meaningfully reduced organization-wide security risk within 30 days, resolving 96% of decisions with no human effort.
  
  
• Third Place: InvoiceCloud
  InvoiceCloud's solution builds a fully customized payment portal for small billers, such as independent insurance agencies and local governments, who normally face prolonged setup timelines or are too small to service economically. Eight coordinated agents handle the setup in a single day, with a human check-in whenever the system changes anything sensitive. The team sized the expanded opportunity at over 500,000 unserved billers.
  
  
• Honorable Mention: Duck Creek Technologies
  Duck Creek's solution addresses a common insurance problem: legal rate filings and the software that actually charges customers can quietly drift apart, leading to overcharges and costly refunds. Their tool turns a legal filing directly into working pricing software within minutes, then continuously checks production systems against that filing to catch drift before it causes downstream errors.

Global Hackathon Winners

• First Place: InvoiceCloud
  InvoiceCloud's system routes every customer service request to the right resolution path automatically, with advisory agents proposing actions while deterministic code enforces approval gates and keeps a full audit trail. The team estimated the approach could cut average resolution time from 3.4 days to about 1.2 hours.
  
  
• Second Place: Infoblox
  Infoblox's four-agent system helps security analysts figure out how dangerous a network alert actually is, automatically tracing the entry point, mapping attack paths, scoring real-world exposure and recommending a fix before a person has to touch it. Every step is grounded on a fixed, verified map of the network so the agents can't guess or invent facts. The team estimated the approach could all but eliminate the cost of triaging a single finding.
  
  
• Third Place: Sonatype
  Sonatype's system gives engineering teams an automated way to handle customer-reported bugs, a process that normally requires an engineer to manually reproduce the issue, trace it through the codebase, and write and verify a fix. Agents reproduce the defect, apply a bounded fix, run security and validation checks, and check their own work twice over before opening a pull request for a human to review, never merging code automatically.
  
  
• Honorable Mention: PowerSchool
  PowerSchool's agent automates the work of getting a new customer live on its Curriculum & Instruction product, a process that normally means a person manually reading years of curriculum documents and mapping thousands of data points, taking months before the system is ready to use. It reads the documents itself, completes the confident matches on its own, and flags only the genuinely unclear cases for a person to review. The team estimated the approach could shrink go-live timelines from 8 to 12 weeks down to two days.

About Vista Equity Partners

Vista is a preeminent investor in enterprise software and AI, with over $100 billion in AUM as of June 30, 2026. For over 25 years and across multiple technology cycles, Vista has been pioneering new approaches to software investing, delivering consistent and compelling results at scale. Today, we're applying that expertise to harness the full transformative potential of AI to redefine how work gets done. Further information is available at vistaequitypartners.com. Follow Vista on LinkedIn, @Vista Equity Partners, and on X, @Vista_Equity.