Cursor Korea Community, a community for the global AI coding editor Cursor, recently held the Cursor Hackathon Seoul event at the main auditorium of Korea Investment Accelerator in Seoul's Gangnam district.

The event had Cursor, an AI code editor, and Korea Investment Accelerator as official sponsors. Cursor is a next-generation development tool that combines generative AI such as ChatGPT and Claude optimised for coding. Even if developers do not type complex programming languages directly, the AI understands the full source code and writes it immediately when given natural-language commands such as "Create a login function" or "Fix the errors in this code".

Organisers said the hackathon drew about 250 applicants through pre-registration alone. After selection, 26 teams and about 70 participants, including companies in Korea Investment Accelerator's portfolio, completed everything from planning ideas to building working service prototypes over 5 hours with Cursor AI assistance.

The judges included Korea Investment Accelerator executive director Tak-rim Lee (이탁림), Hyuk-hyun Kwon (권혁현), CEO of F4GE and formerly of 500 Global, and Chalmers Brown, CEO of Jarmin, a Silicon Valley company selected for Y Combinator YC25.

First place went to the ffx team, which presented the AI agent management platform AgentBox. The other winners were second place Team AIFirst (a game localisation QA automation tool), third place Yorigo (a short-form linked commerce app), fourth place Sasoo (an AI reading assistance service) and fifth place BBB Project (the travel experience service Wonderline).

Cursor, an official sponsor, provided all participants with paid credits worth $100 per person. It also provided each of the five winning teams with $2,000, for a total of $10,000 in paid credits.

A Cursor Korea Community official said, "This hackathon proved that AI is the strongest partner for putting human creativity into practice, beyond being a simple tool." The official added, "We will hold the second hackathon on April 4 to accelerate the expansion of the domestic AI builder ecosystem."