[10]hackathon
★ A real app, finallyFinvasia Innovation Hackathon 2026
ParticipantA fintech hackathon organised by Evolve AI, my own club at Chitkara, together with Finvasia. Our pitch: finance apps shouldn't feel like slot machines, because money is social. We built BODHI ("Your money. Alive.") with group trip wallets, investment clubs with friends, insurance explained as stories and a voice AI. This was the first time we built a real mobile app that actually felt like a product.
- When
- April 2026
- Where
- Chitkara University, Punjab
- Hosted by
- Evolve AI · Finvasia · Department of CSE-AI, Chitkara University
- Format
- in person · Online round + final
- Track
- Designing the financial super app for Gen Z India
[01]The squad
BUGHACKERS 404
- Govind Jindal← that's me
- Piyush Sharma
- Aaradhya Khanna
My role · Team lead · Full-stack architecture & integration
[02]The rounds
Round 1
The online round
A deck and a recorded demo. The deck opened by turning down both of the problem statements we'd been handed, then pitched a third idea: money is social.
Through to the final ✓
Round 2
The final
Offline at Chitkara on 21 April, with an app we'd redesigned from scratch since round one.
📜 Participated
[03]What we built
BODHI
Trip wallets that self-destruct
Everyone pays in once over UPI, trip spending comes out of the shared pool automatically, and when the trip ends the wallet dissolves and refunds what's left, proportionally. No IOUs.
Venture clubs
Pool money with friends to invest together. Discuss it in a group chat, swipe to vote on every trade, and split the gains and the losses.
GAP, the voice AI
Ask anything about your money in English, Hindi or Hinglish. Gemini works out the intent and Sarvam AI handles speech in and out.
Insurance stories
Upload a policy PDF and get it back as a story you'd actually read, with what's not covered put front and centre.
Time Warp
Replay an investment through the COVID crash or the Russia–Ukraine selloff, or project it forward, and see the result before risking a rupee.
Paper trading
Practise on live market data with candlestick charts and a ₹1,00,000 paper portfolio.
Scan & Pay
QR payments and transfers through Razorpay, with an M-PIN and U-PIN on every payment.
[04]Side quests
We turned down both problem statements
Slide 2 of our deck took both statements we'd been given, investing fear and insurance complexity, and listed why we walked away from each one. Then we pitched our own: money is social.
Plot: our ownHome turf
The organiser was Evolve AI, my own club at Chitkara, so this time we were competing on home ground. 🏟️
Evolve AIA wallet that self-destructs
The trip wallet deletes itself when the trip ends and sends everyone their share of what's left. Splitwise, but it cleans up after itself. 🧹
Wallet.exe 💥The commit that ate its own newlines
At 4:56 AM, a commit message with a full bullet list arrived on one line, every "\n" typed out as text. The voice pipeline it describes worked fine. 🫡
\n\n
[05]Plot twist
Between rounds, we redesigned the whole app. 🎨
Then 😱
For the online round, BODHI was all neon: deep purple, hot-magenta gradients and a glowing yellow button on a dark screen. We recorded the demo, sent it in, and made the final. 🌈
Now 🧠
For the final we rebuilt the look from scratch: warm cream, soft cards, calm colours. Same app, a completely different feeling. If the pitch says money shouldn't cause anxiety, the app shouldn't look like a slot machine either. 🧘
[06]Final day, from 3 AM
$ git log --since="Apr 21" --until="Apr 21 12:10" --no-merges --reverse --oneline
- 6da870902:59build success & added stt
- 6bc162803:20adding gemini api key
- fb68e8f04:56feat(ai): Finalized end-to-end Voice Pipeline\n\n- Switched to reliable WebView-based playback on iOS\n- Fixed native sandbox filesystem bugs for AVAudioPlayer\n- Integrated Python backend stream TTS proxy\n- Enhanced Gemini GAP personality prompting
- fccb79206:20fix(ui): Show STT transcription while Gemini is processing
- 9043f9807:13feat: implement local mock transaction history and AI integration
- 9ea5a6c07:31Completed Onboarding Screen
- 0a2d21a07:36feat: expanded mock transactions dataset, fixed layout overflow, and added dynamic interactive Insight breakdown modals
- 585223807:46Updated GlassCard
- a50621e07:48fix: re-applied dynamic mathematical AI insights on top of VideoSplashScreen updates
- 8aa061f07:59Added Payments +Insurance
- 28ad5cb08:03Glass Card Updated
- d2239b111:59integrating all features
$
- Commits
- 12
- Span
- 9h 0m
- Avg. message
- 61.1 chars
- Shortest
- “Updated GlassCard”
Final day, and the log starts before 3 AM: speech-to-text building at 2:59, the voice pipeline done at 4:56, onboarding at 7:31, then "integrating all features" just before noon. 25 commits that day. And it didn't stop there: 217 commits so far, with an AWS backend, email verification and an admin dashboard. This one was meant to outlive the hackathon. 🌱
[07]From the floor
[08]The certificate
Delivered ✓Certificate found. 📬
Finvasia Innovation Hackathon 2026, 21 April, signed by Evolve AI and the CSE-AI department. 📜 A certificate from my own club's hackathon. Home turf. 🏠
“BODHI is where hackathon projects stopped being demos for me. Turning down the given problem statements taught me to question the brief, and redesigning between rounds taught me that how an app feels is part of what it does.”
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