Call for Challenge Partners – Hack Apertus: Bring a Real-World Challenge, Take Home a Blueprint

Written by cyrill kutter on 29. July 2026.

Hack Apertus is searching for companies and public-sector organisations to contribute real-world challenges and collaborate with top Swiss teams during a series of on-site hackathons across six Swiss cities from October 2026 to May 2027. Part of Switzerland’s AI Action Plan, the initiative mobilises the community to accelerate the adoption of Apertus, Switzerland’s open large language model, and to build open-source blueprints for sovereign, compliant deployment.

Together with over 80 organisations, we are part of a joint community effort to accelerate the adoption of the Swiss AI model, Apertus. With @Hack Apertus we help mobilise people to build open-source blueprints for embedded solutions across sectors, industries and regions, on a sovereign foundation.

Hack Apertus runs from Oct ’26 until May ’27 in three connected stages:

🌍 Online Hackathon: 1–16 Oct ’26, remote and open to everyone, including Academia Track

🏙️ On-site Hackathons: Oct ’26 to May ’27, in 6+ Swiss cities

🏆 Grand Finals: 14 May ’27 in St.Gallen,

Hack winner teams pitch for the Main Award As part of the Swiss AI Action Plan, Hack Apertus feeds directly into Switzerland’s positioning ahead of the Global AI Summit 2027 in Geneva, contributing open, trustworthy and reusable AI assets that demonstrate the country’s leadership in responsible AI innovation.

Find more information on the official website -> https://hackapertus.ch/calls

What are the participation benefits?

As a Challenge Partner, your organisation brings one challenge from your operations to a 2 day on-site hackathon. Interdisciplinary teams use the Apertus model family to build a working open-source prototype your organisation can run air-gapped, on-premise or on your private cloud infrastructure. The result is reusable across other organisations in your sector, and every output is published as open commons.

Your contribution: one real-world challenge, a domain expert on-site for the day, and sample data or a representative scenario.

What your organisation gets:

A working on-premise / private-cloud prototype for a problem in your sector
A hack booth on-site plus a 60-minute workshop slot
A jury seat and naming rights on a Hackathon Award
Tickets for the Grand Finals in St.Gallen (14 May 2027)
Talent access, brand visibility and dedicated media coverage

Your challenge becomes part of an official Action of Switzerland’s AI Action Plan, a broadly supported initiative for actively shaping the application of AI in Switzerland.

Participation investment: CHF 12,000 (On-site Hack Challenge Partner). Further partner tiers are available

Organization and Contact

Sabine Wildemann, Co-Initiator & Project Lead, aiLights Association, sabine.wildemann@ailights.org

Michael Wegmüller, Co-Initiator, Artifact S.A., michael.wegmueller@artifact.swiss