AGIMA held a corporate AI hackathon in support of RUNIT sports festival

Russian digital integrator AGIMA held a corporate AI hackathon timed to the sports festival RUNIT, which took place on July 5, 2026 in Meshchersky Park and drew approximately 10,000 people. The company's employees spent about a month preparing for it, developing 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 most notable sports events in the Russian IT community, bringing together developers, designers, and related professions around a shared activity.

• The first run in 2018 drew about 100 participants from the IT community
• Then the number of participants grew to 750, then to 2,000, then to 3,500
• In 2025, nearly 4,500 runners received RUNIT medals, with another 5,000 coming as spectators
• In 2026, the festival took place on July 5 in Meshchersky Park, with an expected turnout of about 10,000 participants and spectators

This momentum — a hundredfold increase in less than eight years — transformed RUNIT from a corporate activity of individual companies into a notable event on the Russian IT industry calendar, which dozens of studios and agencies prepare for annually.

What AGIMA Did This Year

In 2026, the company decided to support the festival not just through traditional formats, but with an internal corporate AI hackathon — an event that, according to AGIMA, "the whole company has been living for a month." Employees participated in brainstorming, came up with ideas, and developed online games timed to the festival theme.

The company describes this as an experiment with a new format for supporting RUNIT — instead of a one-off sponsorship activity, AGIMA organized an internal competition stretched over several weeks of preparation before the sports event itself. According to the company, there are already intermediate results from the hackathon, and AGIMA plans to devote further discussion to the project.

The fact that preparation was stretched over a month, rather than a hackathon weekend, suggests that the format for AGIMA is not a one-time action, but a full-fledged internal project with parallel teamwork against the backdrop of regular work tasks. The choice of online games as the format for the result is also no accident: it's a product that is easy to show to the wide audience of the festival and that any RUNIT participant can use, not just employees of the company itself.

As a digital integrator, AGIMA regularly participates in such industry initiatives, and in this sense, the AI hackathon naturally continues the company's practice — turning internal team competencies into publicly visible products timed to specific events.

What This Means

Corporate AI hackathons timed to external events are becoming a way for IT companies to simultaneously motivate employees, test practical AI tools on real tasks, and strengthen the brand's connection with the community — in AGIMA's case, this is expressed in games created specifically for the audience of the sports IT festival.

For RUNIT itself, AGIMA's participation with a separate AI hackathon is a signal that the festival has ceased to be merely a run: an additional layer of content and activities is forming around it, which partner companies create specifically for the event's audience.