AGIMA runs corporate AI hackathon in support of RUNIT sports festival

Russian digital integrator AGIMA held a corporate AI hackathon timed to the RUNIT sports festival, which took place on July 5, 2026, in Meshchersky Park and drew around 10 thousand people. Company employees spent about a month preparing for it, building online games.

How the RUNIT festival grew

AGIMA has supported RUNIT since its founding in 2018, and does so every summer in different ways. Over the years, the festival has grown from a local run into one of the more prominent sporting events in the Russian IT community, bringing developers, designers, and people in related professions together around a shared activity.

• The first run in 2018 drew about 100 participants from the IT community
• Participation then grew to 750, then to 2 thousand, then to 3.5 thousand
• In 2025, almost 4.5 thousand runners received RUNIT medals, and about 5 thousand more came to cheer
• In 2026, the festival took place on July 5 in Meshchersky Park, with an expected turnout of about 10 thousand participants and spectators

That trajectory — nearly a hundredfold growth in under eight years — has turned RUNIT from a corporate activity run by individual companies into a notable fixture on the Russian IT industry calendar, one that dozens of studios and agencies prepare for every year.

What AGIMA did this year

In 2026, the company decided to support the festival not only through its usual formats but also with an internal corporate AI hackathon — an event that, according to AGIMA, "the whole company has been living with for a month now." As part of the hackathon, employees brainstormed, came up with ideas, and built online games tied to the festival's theme.

The company describes this as an experiment in a new way of supporting RUNIT: instead of a one-off sponsorship activity, AGIMA organized an internal competition spread over several weeks of preparation ahead of the sporting event itself. According to the company, interim results from the hackathon are already in, and AGIMA plans to focus its next update on the project on them.

The fact that preparation stretched over a month rather than a couple of days of a hackathon weekend suggests that, for AGIMA, the format is not a one-off stunt but a full-fledged internal project, with teams working in parallel alongside their regular workload. The choice of online games as the deliverable isn't accidental either: they are easy to show to the festival's broad audience, and any RUNIT participant can use them — not just the company's own employees.

As a digital integrator, AGIMA regularly takes part in industry initiatives like this, and in that sense the AI hackathon is a logical continuation of the company's practice of turning its team's internal expertise into a publicly visible product tied to a specific event.

What it means

For IT companies, corporate AI hackathons tied to external events are becoming a way to motivate employees, test applied AI tools on real tasks, and strengthen the brand's connection with the community, all at once. In AGIMA's case, that takes the form of games built specifically for the audience of a sports-focused IT festival.

For RUNIT itself, AGIMA's participation with a dedicated AI hackathon signals that the festival is no longer just a run: an additional layer of content and activities is forming around it, created by partner companies specifically for the event's audience.