TL;DR
Alankrit Verma came to the University of Toronto as a shy, math-driven student on scholarship who felt a deep responsibility to give back.
That instinct led him into student leadership through AMACSS, where he helped build a small experiment called AI Olympics with 39 participants.
That experiment revealed something bigger: students wanted a serious space to build, learn, and belong in AI.
So Alankrit and his co-founder Adib Fallahpour scaled that spark into GenAI Genesis — first as a cross-campus student hackathon, and eventually into one of Canada’s largest student AI hackathons.
Along the way, Alankrit helped lead the vision, website, sponsorships, partnerships, and long-term structure behind the event, including helping establish the GenAI Genesis Foundation so the mission could sustain beyond a single organizing cycle.
And now, in 2026, GenAI Genesis is entering its biggest and most ambitious chapter yet.
From a 39-person experiment to one of Canada’s largest student AI hackathons
“Some communities are joined. Others are built because you cannot stop thinking about the version that should exist.”
There are some things you plan carefully.
And then there are some things that begin so quietly, so casually, that you do not realize until much later that you were standing at the start of something much bigger.
GenAI Genesis was one of those things.
When I joined the University of Toronto, I was, in many ways, still a shy person.
I was not the loudest voice in every room. I was still figuring myself out, still trying to understand what kind of life I wanted to build, and what kind of contribution I wanted to make.
But I did know one thing with complete clarity: I had been given a rare opportunity, and I did not want to waste it.
Coming to this country and this university on a scholarship meant a lot to me. It gave me the ability to study freely, dream more freely, and imagine a future I may not otherwise have had. And from the beginning, that created a very deep feeling in me: I had to give back to the community that had given so much to me.
At that time, I cared about many things at once.
- I cared about math.
- I cared about building projects.
- I cared about recognition, yes — but not just for ego. I wanted to build things that mattered.
- I cared about real-world impact.
- And I cared, very deeply, about community.
Math had been a big part of my identity for a long time. I had prepared seriously for the Euclid Mathematics Contest and scored 90/100, and that experience mattered to me for more than just the number. Euclid is one of those milestones that gives you credibility, but more importantly, it gave me confidence. It made me more ambitious. It made me believe that I could build something meaningful. And it made me want to create spaces where other students could feel that same sense of challenge, excitement, and possibility.
So when I came to U of T Scarborough, I started looking around and asking myself a simple question:
Where is that energy here?
And honestly, at the time, I did not see enough of it.
Especially in the computer science space, the student community was not really booming. This was the period after COVID, when many campus communities still felt quiet, fragmented, and difficult to revive. There was talent, but not enough momentum. Curiosity, but not enough structure. Ambition, but not enough spaces for it to gather.
And somewhere along the way, I quietly made it my mission to help fix that.
Not alone, of course. Communities are never built alone. But I wanted to be one of the people pushing hard in that direction.
That instinct led me to AMACSS — the Association of Mathematical and Computer Science Students, the Departmental Student Association for the CMS department at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
In my first year, I joined as a First-Year Representative Coordinator, where I represented first-year computer science and math students to the association, and the association back to them. I also coordinated a team of seven people, which turned out to be one of my first real lessons in leadership.
Leadership, I learned very quickly, is not just about taking initiative. It is about understanding people. It is about assigning responsibility thoughtfully. It is about getting buy-in. It is about leading with grace when everyone has different levels of energy, skill, confidence, and commitment.
I had always been someone who liked taking initiative, but AMACSS sharpened that instinct into something more deliberate.
And in that chapter of my life, the first version of GenAI Genesis quietly appeared.
Not as GenAI Genesis.
Not yet.
It started as something called AI Olympics.
Before Genesis, there was AI Olympics
AI Olympics was the first real experiment.
The original idea came from a mix of inspirations.
Part of it came from my love for mathematics competitions and the kind of intellectual excitement they create. Part of it came from online hackathons I had participated in, where I had seen how energizing it could be when people come together to build under time pressure. I remember thinking again and again:
Why do we not have something like this at our university too?
At one point, I was brainstorming with Katrina Best, who was the president at the time, about what might make for a strong event for first-year students. At first, we thought about doing something closer to a math contest. Then the idea evolved. I brainstormed with my team as well. Slowly, the concept shifted from Olympiad to something more build-oriented, more alive, more experimental.
That is where AI Olympics was born.
The name came from that same spirit. We wanted something that felt like an Olympiad, but more modern, more hands-on, and more builder-focused. “AI Olympics” felt close enough to that energy, and at the time, it captured exactly what we were trying to do.
It was a smaller hackathon-style event, around six to seven hours long, with 39 participants.
It was essentially the first-year team’s event through AMACSS, and leading it as First-Year Representative Coordinator made it feel especially personal.
Many of them were beginners. The vibe in the room was not “elite competition” in the intimidating sense. It was much more like collective learning. People were curious. People were experimenting. People were just starting to understand what they could build.
We taught participants how to use the tools. We gave them a website template they could plug their work into so they could build faster. We wanted to reduce friction and maximize momentum. We wanted them to feel like they could actually make something, even if they were just getting started.
And maybe one of my favorite little memories from that day is how we kept ordering coffee from Tim Hortons — not once, not twice, but three times — because people kept wanting more, and apparently everyone had collectively decided that vanilla was the flavor of innovation.
Looking back, AI Olympics was small.
But it was not small in meaning.
Because it showed us something important:
- People wanted a space to learn.
- People wanted a space to build.
- People wanted a space where AI felt exciting, approachable, social, and full of possibility.
The feedback made that obvious. People were interested in doing this again. They wanted to keep learning. They wanted to keep contributing. They wanted to build in public. They wanted more.
And that was the moment the idea stopped feeling like a one-off event and started feeling like the beginning of a much larger mission.
AI Olympics was the spark.
GenAI Genesis was the system we built around that spark.
The moment it stopped being small
Around that time, I was also working very closely with Adib Fallahpour, who is not just my co-founder, but also a good friend of mine.
I had first worked with Adib through my first-year team, and over time it became very clear that we were on the same wavelength in a lot of ways. He is a very kind person, a big thinker, and someone with strong vision. We both cared deeply about scaling this beyond its first version. We both felt that it should not remain a small campus event that people vaguely remembered. We wanted it to become something real.
I still remember a moment from second year when Adib and I were housemates. He came into my room, and we started discussing what this thing could actually become. Not just another event. Not just another student initiative. But a serious hackathon. Something with real scale. Something that could create a home for people interested in AI, machine learning, software, and ambitious building more broadly.
That conversation stayed with me.
Because from that point onward, this stopped being a nice idea and started becoming a serious project.
Like most ambitious student things, it began with a lot of conversations, a lot of hustle, and a slightly unreasonable amount of belief.
We first tried to define the idea on paper:
- What exactly was GenAI Genesis?
- What would it look like at scale?
- What kind of experience were we trying to create?
- What problem were we solving?
The problem, at least to us, felt clear.
At the time, there was not enough community in Toronto around this space — not the kind of entrepreneurial, energetic, builder-first AI ecosystem we wanted to see among students. There was talent, but not enough connected ambition. There were students interested in AI and ML, but not enough platforms bringing them together in a serious way.
So we decided to build one.
The name came together surprisingly quickly. We broke it into two parts: GenAI and Genesis. “Genesis” suggested beginning, emergence, evolution. And at the time, “GenAI” was the word in the air. The name reflected the moment, but the mission was always broader than just generative AI — it was about AI, machine learning, software, and the community around building them. Put together, it felt like a beginning worth naming.
We did not have a full team immediately. At first, we were figuring it out from scratch. Both Adib and I were part of Google Developer Student Club, and that gave us one starting point. We knew we could bring in people from there. Then we looked beyond Scarborough and started reaching across campuses, especially to St. George, where some of the strongest technical student communities already existed.
That is how collaborations started taking shape with groups like:
- GDG
- UTMIST
- UofT AI
- and later, CSSU
But I want to be careful and clear here, because this matters to the story.
That distinction matters because founder stories can get flattened over time into partnerships, logos, and sponsor lists. But the truth is usually more human than that. It begins with a few people seeing a gap and deciding they are not willing to leave it empty.
The people who helped us scale it
Some of the most important early support came from people who believed in the idea and helped us take it seriously.
Richard, from UTMIST, played a crucial role in 2024. He was a senior to us and incredibly strong operationally. He helped us understand what it means to run something at scale, what it means to think through logistics properly, and how to turn energy into structure.
Nimit, through UofT AI, also played a very important role in helping the initiative come together. Both Richard and Nimit helped us build the cross-campus support that allowed GenAI Genesis to grow beyond its first form.
These collaborations mattered a lot. Not because the event “belonged” to those communities, but because they helped us bring the mission to the scale it deserved.
Sometimes scaling an idea is not about finding people who will take it over.
It is about finding people who understand it enough to help it rise.
A quick timeline
| Year | What happened | Why it mattered |
|---|---|---|
| Winter 2023 | We ran AI Olympics through AMACSS with 39 participants | It proved there was real demand for a build-first AI space |
| Winter 2024 | We launched the first large-scale GenAI Genesis | The experiment became a serious institution |
| 2025 | We scaled dramatically with more sponsors, more prizes, and many more submissions | The hackathon became a recognized force in the student AI ecosystem |
| 2026 | We are taking it to our biggest scale yet | Bigger footprint, bigger ambition, bigger future |
A tiny behind-the-scenes truth
Every row in that table was held together by a lot of invisible work: outreach, relationship management, budget stress, website iterations, venue uncertainty, and a hundred tiny decisions that never show up in a recap post.
2024: when the idea met reality
The 2024 edition was the moment things started to feel very real.
In winter 2024, we launched the first large-scale GenAI Genesis in downtown Toronto.
Up until that point, the idea had energy. It had promise. It had momentum. But 2024 was when it had to survive the test every ambitious student project eventually faces:
Could we actually execute this at scale?
That year taught me a lot.
And by “a lot,” I mean the kind of lessons that only appear when vision collides with logistics.
We had to learn how to:
- work with a much larger team
- coordinate across campuses
- lead people with different styles, strengths, and expectations
- manage conflict and disagreement without letting it fracture the mission
- build trust with sponsors
- make big promises responsibly
And in the middle of all that, I was deeply involved in the work itself.
From the very beginning until now, I have led the website side of GenAI Genesis. Tech has always been one of the areas I stayed especially close to. I was also heavily involved in sponsorships and partnerships — doing cold outreach, talking to organizations, building those relationships, and helping create the external support system that made the event possible.
One of the most memorable parts of that journey was our connection with Google, and how that relationship went from something that initially felt surreal to something that became a meaningful long-term thread in the GenAI Genesis story. There is a strange feeling when big names start trusting something you built. It is exciting, but it is also sobering. It makes you realize the stakes are now real.
The 2024 edition brought in support from names including Google, Knockri, Wombo, Vector Institute, the Academic Advising & Career Centre at UTSC, and the Rotman School of Management.
We had around 254 participants submit a project and awarded roughly $3,000 in prizes.
But what I remember most is not just the number.
I remember how much we had to figure out on the fly.
Venue booking was a huge hassle. A lot of things were fragile. Judging, especially, was something we did not have perfect prior experience with at that scale. And yet, when the time came, the team handled it with surprising grace. We made last-minute changes to make sure the judging process was fair, thoughtful, and well run. That moment stayed with me because it showed me something essential: even if we were new to this scale, we were capable of rising to it.
That was the year GenAI Genesis stopped feeling like a hopeful experiment.
It felt real.
genesis:
v0: "AI Olympics"
participants: 39
then:
- an experiment
- a room full of beginners
- a lot of coffee
- a lot of belief
now:
- a cross-campus movement
- a large-scale AI hackathon
- a serious community
constant:
- vision
- people
- momentum
2025: scale changes everything
Then came 2025.
And 2025 felt different.
This was the year when GenAI Genesis started feeling less like an event and more like an ecosystem.
By then, we were no longer operating entirely from instinct. We had learned processes. We had built systems. We had a better understanding of what worked, what broke, what participants valued, and what scale actually requires. We planned earlier. We moved more formally. We operated with more clarity.
The leadership structure also evolved.
In the earlier chapter, the co-chair structure included me, Adib, Nimit, and Richard. By 2025, the co-chairs were me, Adib, and Matthew Tamura.
Matthew had already been involved as a strong contributor in 2024 through UTMIST and was someone I deeply appreciated — thoughtful, visionary, and strong at leading a team properly. In 2025, he stepped into a bigger leadership role with us, and that made a real difference.
We also worked hard to improve the participant experience in ways that went beyond the surface.
We brought in more sponsors.
We created more networking opportunities.
We designed stronger supporting events during the hackathon.
We sharpened logistics.
We elevated the experience.
And the scale reflected that.
In 2025, we had:
- around $15,000 in awards
- 621 participants submitted a project
- backing from Google, BWC, Cohere, AMD, CGI, RBC, Northeastern University, Edge.io Solutions, the Academic Advising & Career Centre, and the University of Toronto
- support from partners including the United Nations Association in Canada, One Degree Cooler, Vector Institute, and Hack Canada
One of the most exciting moments that year was when AMD came in and supported us in a way that allowed participants to run more complex machine learning workloads on an AMD GPU-backed local cluster. That felt genuinely wild. It was one of those moments where you step back and realize the hackathon is not just getting bigger in numbers — it is getting more technically meaningful too.
From the outside, growth can look glamorous.
From the inside, it often looks like spreadsheets, calls, follow-ups, contingency planning, team alignment, venue negotiations, technical troubleshooting, partnership mapping, and a hundred open loops in your head at once.
People usually see the lights.
Founders remember the wiring.
And by 2025, I was exhausted. Truly.
But it was also the kind of exhaustion that comes from building something you care about so deeply that you keep choosing it, again and again, even when it would be easier not to.
There were many moments in those years where I could have spent my time doing something else for my résumé — some other project, some other opportunity, some other clean, convenient line on paper.
And again and again, I chose GenAI Genesis.
Because by then it was not just a project.
It was a commitment.
What people see vs. what it takes
People usually experience a hackathon at the moment it becomes exciting.
Founders experience it in the months before that, when it is still fragile.
What goes into building a hackathon like this?
Not just posters and prize money.
It looks more like this:
- sponsor outreach and partnership management
- website design and technical infrastructure
- judge and mentor coordination
- cross-campus relationship building
- team alignment across different working styles
- planning future editions before the current one is even over
- making sure the vision survives internal complexity
- solving ten operational problems before breakfast
- keeping something founder-led while still making it collaborative
- doing a lot of invisible thinking about what the next step even is
A polished event always has a chaotic prequel.
And a surprising amount of inner work goes into making sure the chaos does not win.
What GenAI Genesis has meant to me
At one level, GenAI Genesis is about AI and machine learning.
But if I am being honest, it has never only been about AI.
It is about belonging.
It is about ambition.
It is about opportunity.
It is about building the kind of space I wish existed more abundantly when I first arrived.
A place where students do not just come to listen, collect swag, and leave. A place where they come to make things. To meet each other. To stretch. To take themselves seriously. To find their people. To realize that they are more capable than they thought.
That is what I wanted to create.
And I think that is why this has become more than just a hackathon to me.
It has become a community, a signal, a platform, and in some ways, living proof that if you build the right room, the right people will find each other inside it.
I have also learned a lot about myself through this.
I learned how passionate I am about the things I truly care about. I learned how much I care about my team. I learned that leadership is not something you perform; it is something you practice. I learned how much invisible thinking goes into visible outcomes. I learned that building something meaningful costs time, energy, sleep, and sometimes other opportunities.
But I also learned that some things are worth choosing repeatedly.
And this was one of them.
The foundation behind the future
As GenAI Genesis grew, it became increasingly important to make sure it could sustain itself beyond just the intensity of one year, one organizing cycle, or one group of students.
That is a big part of why I helped establish the GenAI Genesis Foundation as an NGO, along with four other directors.
That step mattered deeply to me.
Because if GenAI Genesis was going to keep growing properly, it needed more than momentum.
It needed structure.
It needed continuity.
It needed a long-term home.
Founding the Foundation was part of making sure that what we built would not just peak.
It would endure.
And I am very proud of that.
People I want to thank
No founder story is ever truly solo.
And GenAI Genesis certainly was not.
I started this with Adib Fallahpour, my co-founder, and I want to begin there. Thank you, Adib, for building this vision with me from the early days, for dreaming big, for caring deeply, and for helping turn a small experiment into something much larger than either of us could have reached alone.
I want to thank Richard, who helped us significantly in 2024 through UTMIST. Richard brought strong operational guidance at a time when we were still learning how to scale properly, and his support played an important role in helping us bring the hackathon to life at a bigger level.
I also want to thank Nimit, who helped us through UofT AI and contributed meaningfully to the growth of the initiative in its earlier large-scale chapter. Cross-campus support mattered a lot, and Nimit was part of that story.
For 2025, I want to thank Matthew Tamura, who joined me and Adib as a co-chair in 2025. Matthew brought a lot of clarity, vision, and leadership to that year, and I deeply appreciated building that edition alongside him.
And for 2026, I want to thank Hasleen Kaur and Ivan Semenov, who are co-chairing this year alongside me. Both are wonderful people and wonderful friends, and I am genuinely grateful to be building this chapter with them.
There are many people behind the scenes who have contributed to GenAI Genesis over the years — teammates, sponsors, organizers, mentors, judges, friends, and supporters — and I carry a lot of gratitude for all of them.
Communities may remember the banner.
But founders remember the people who helped hold it up.
And now, 2026
And now we arrive here.
What started as a 39-person experiment has grown into something far bigger, and in 2026, we are taking GenAI Genesis to its biggest scale yet.
This year, we are going much, much bigger.
We are preparing to bring together close to 1,000 people in person. We are building across three major spaces at the University of Toronto — Convocation Hall, Bahen, and Myhal — to create an experience that is bigger not just in attendance, but in ambition, energy, and depth.
This year feels different.
Not because the mission has changed, but because the scale has finally caught up to the size of the vision.
We are crossing into four digits.
We are building across multiple buildings.
We are thinking bigger than ever before.
And for me personally, this year is meaningful in another way too.
2026 will be my last year serving as Co-Chair of the hackathon. After this, I will be moving into more of an advisory role.
There is something beautiful about that.
Because one of the deepest measures of building something well is whether it can continue growing beyond the chapter where you are the one carrying it most directly.
That is what I want for GenAI Genesis.
I want it to outgrow any one person, any one year, any one team.
I want it to keep becoming a place where ambitious students find each other, where builders take themselves seriously, where new ideas are given room to breathe, and where community feels like a force multiplier rather than just a word on a poster.
So if you have been watching from the sidelines, this is your sign.
Join us on March 13, 14, and 15, 2026.
Come build with us.
Come meet the people shaping what comes next.
Come be part of something that started small, but refused to stay small.
And when you do, I hope you feel what I felt at the beginning of this whole journey:
That strange, beautiful energy that appears when ambitious people gather around an idea and decide to make it real.
That, in the end, is what GenAI Genesis has always been about.
Connect with me
If this story resonated with you, feel free to connect with me online, follow GenAI Genesis, or reach out.
I always love meeting people who care deeply about building communities, technology, and meaningful things.
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