On April 26, 2026, my team won first place at Open Loop 2026, a national-level 24-hour hackathon at Yenepoya University in Mangaluru. It was me, Havinash Gangisetty, and Saagnik Dey. We built a Chrome extension called FormPilot, entirely on-site, inside the 24 hours.
What that sentence hides is that we spent the first six of those hours building something completely different, and it failed.
This is the whole story. The pivot, the hours we wasted, the part where we were pretty sure we'd lost, and what happened after.
If you want the wider picture of my first year of engineering, I wrote about that separately here: My First Year of Engineering — What I Built, Won, and Actually Learned. This one is only about Open Loop.
Who Is Karan Raj KR
I'm 18, and I'm a first-year B.Tech CSE (AI/ML) student at NIAT–S-VYASA University in Bengaluru, batch of 2025 to 2029.
Outside of college I'm the Founder of KĀRYO, a digital agency that helps businesses build and grow their online presence.
I started competing in national hackathons in my first month of college. Not for the résumé line. I do it because a hard deadline forces a kind of decision-making you can't really practice on your own. You can't fake urgency. You either ship or you don't.
Open Loop was the clearest evidence of that I've got.
Everything I'm building is at karanrajkr.com.
Open Loop 2026: The Event
Open Loop 2026 was a national-level 24-hour offline hackathon, organized by YenTech, the official technical club of Yenepoya School of Engineering & Technology. It ran on April 25 and 26, 2026 at the YMK Auditorium on the Kulur Campus in Mangaluru.
Daijiworld covered it twice: the announcement on April 22, and the results on April 27. As far as I can tell that's the only press the event got.
The numbers:
| Registered participants | 309 |
| Teams | 121 |
| Colleges | 109 |
| States | 14 |
| Cities | 58 |
| Teams that shipped end-to-end | 70% |
| Teams shortlisted for finals | 25 (96 participants) |
The four innovation themes were: Learning & Developer Productivity, Healthcare & MedTech, Banking & FinTech, and Open Innovation.
The schedule, as announced pre-event, ran across 24 hours and included an orientation, mentoring sessions, mid-hackathon reviews, and a formal demonstration and judging round.
The judging panel was all industry:
Vaibhav Salian — AI/ML Engineer, EG A/S (Denmark)
Joywin Bennis — Software Engineer, EG A/S
Darshan Dinesh Bhandary — Infrastructure Specialist, Kyndryl
Adithya Poonja — Business Development, AIC NITTE Incubation Center
Working engineers. Not academics. That distinction matters when your demo is a live product.
Sponsors: Unstop · DK24 · NXT WAVE · .xyz · Kalvium
The valedictory ceremony was presided over by Dr R G D'Souza, Dean of Engineering & Technology, with chief guest Rajesh K Karkera, Director of IT, Yenepoya University.
The Team
Karan Raj KR (me), team lead, business strategy, presentation. Havinash Gangisetty, frontend and backend logic. Saagnik Dey, authentication.
We paid for the trip ourselves. No college sponsorship, no reimbursement, nothing. We bought our own tickets, packed overnight bags, and left Bengaluru at night. Three first-year students going 350 kilometres south because we wanted to.
The Night Before
Around 1:30 AM the bus stopped at a hotel somewhere on the Bengaluru–Mangaluru highway. We got out, stretched, and ate dipped vada at a dhaba on the side of the road in the middle of the night. Then back on the bus.
I woke up around 2:30. Everyone was in that half-conscious state you end up in on long drives, not really asleep but not awake either. I don't remember who started it, but we began talking about ideas. What could we build. What themes might drop. What's actually worth solving in a day.
That went on until about 4, maybe 4:15.
None of those ideas survived the morning. Not one. But I still think that conversation mattered. It put us in the right headspace before we'd even arrived, which is a strange thing to be grateful for in hindsight.
We got to Mangaluru just as the sky was starting to lighten. The Yenepoya campus sits well outside the city, past the last of the buildings, quiet in a way Bengaluru never manages to be. We checked in, rested a little, and then it started.
The Raspberry Pi Mistake
The hackathon began at 11 AM. We had a plan. We were going to build something with a Raspberry Pi.
By 5 PM we had nothing.
Six hours gone. We couldn't work out what the product actually was, or how it would function in practice, or whether hardware even made sense given the time we had. And the more we pushed on it the more obvious the real problem became: the thing we were building already existed, and it cost about a quarter of what ours would. We were putting together a hardware product four times more expensive than something you could already buy, without any of the polish that a real product has.
I was anxious. Not the ordinary kind, where something is hard and you're worried you'll do it badly. The other kind, where you can feel the clock running and you know the direction itself is wrong.
Eventually we said it out loud. All three of us had gotten there separately. This isn't the project.
There wasn't any drama about it, no long argument. We just looked at the situation and agreed.
New direction: a Chrome extension. We called it FormPilot.
Building FormPilot (React 18, TypeScript, Manifest V3)
FormPilot is an AI-powered Chrome extension that fills any web form intelligently, in one click. It isn't browser autocomplete and it isn't a password manager. The extension reads the form's labels, attributes and DOM structure, works out what each field is actually asking for, maps that to your profile, and fills the whole thing in seconds.
It's harder than it sounds, and here's why.
Browser autocomplete is basically pattern-matching on attribute names. It works fine on plain static HTML. It falls apart on almost every modern web app, because anything built in React or Vue renders its DOM dynamically. Fields appear conditionally. Attribute names shift when component state changes. Your selectors break, constantly.
FormPilot handles that. We also built it model-agnostic from the beginning, so you pick your own provider (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Groq) and bring your own API key. On top of plain text fields it does cover letter generation, and intelligent dropdown matching, where it infers which option you meant without needing an exact string match.
Stack: React 18, TypeScript, Manifest V3.
The hardest single thing was Google Sign-In inside Manifest V3. Chrome's extension security model, the OAuth flow, the way identity gets handled at the extension level, none of it is straightforward. All three of us were stuck on it for three or four hours. Havinash was on it. Saagnik was on it. I tried, and then I made a different call.
I stopped. Not because it was unsolvable, but because I did the arithmetic on the hours left and realised I'd be worth more to the team somewhere else. So I left the auth problem to them and went to work on the business model and the presentation.
While they kept debugging, I mapped out FormPilot's architecture: how the form analysis runs, how the AI call is structured, how data moves from the extension to the model and back. I worked out the pitch in my head, what to say and in what order.
Then I found an empty classroom, got some proper rest, and shot a demo video. Screen recording on the laptop, phone recording me in frame, captions, a script I'd actually written. Not a slide deck. An actual product demo.
By the time the 8 PM mentoring session came around, we had a working MVP.
The Mentoring Session
At 8 PM the mentors did table rounds, going team to team to see what everyone had built so far. It was part of the official schedule.
We had FormPilot running. I presented it, and I presented it well, mostly because after six hours in the Raspberry Pi hole I was so relieved to be showing something that actually worked. They gave us feedback and moved on to the next table.
The Demo
For judging we set up across three laptops and an iPad, each screen doing something different.
Laptop 1: FormPilot live in Chrome, ready to fill a real form
Laptop 2: The codebase, for the technical walkthrough
Laptop 3: Supporting presentation context and the business model
iPad: The architecture diagram. How FormPilot processes a form, what happens during the AI call, how the data flows
We were the second team to be judged.
We were the second team to be judged.
Havinash started. The pressure got to him in those last few minutes and his voice was shaking. He was losing the thread. Saagnik, meanwhile, found exactly the right role without anyone assigning it to him: he just used FormPilot. Sat there and let the extension fill a real form in front of the judge, in real time, and didn't say a word.
I stepped in and took over the explanation. It was not a comfortable moment, and Havinash didn't appreciate it. But I wasn't going to let the presentation come apart while we were standing in front of an industry judge with something that genuinely worked.
The other problem was that this judge wasn't familiar with Chrome extensions. Every other team in that room had shipped a web app or a hardware prototype. We were the only extension. So before I could explain FormPilot at all, I had to explain the category. What a Manifest V3 extension is. Where it lives inside the browser. Why the architecture looks the way it does.
He asked which AI model we were using. What framework. Walk me through this bit of code.
I answered, though honestly I explained more than I answered. The questions were basic because the foundation wasn't there, and I was laying it down as I went.
Then he moved on.
The Lowest Point
After judging finished, the three of us sat down and each of us had, separately, arrived at the same conclusion. We weren't going to place.
The judge had looked uncertain the whole way through. We were the odd one out in a room full of things people recognised. Havinash was completely convinced we'd lost. He wanted to leave. Udupi wasn't far, and he'd rather do something with the rest of the day than sit around waiting for a result that wasn't coming.
I said no. We'd made it to the 25th hour. Let's just stay and see.
So we stayed.
The Announcement
I was zoning out when they started reading the results. Not asleep, just somewhere in between, which is where you end up after being awake that long on adrenaline.
Then the announcer said it. "Karan's team."
That was our registered name. Team ID OL02, Team Name: Karan's Team.
Havinash turned and looked at me in the same instant.
I was already standing. I don't really remember deciding to. I shook the hand of the nearest mentor and went straight for the stage without slowing down, without taking a breath, because some part of me had worked out what happened before the rest of me caught up. Havinash and Saagnik were more composed about it. They went down the line, shook every mentor's hand one at a time, and then came up.
FormPilot — 80 / 100. Runner-up — 60 / 100.
Twenty points. Not a lucky margin. Not a close call. A gap.
Official result, as covered by Daijiworld (April 27, 2026):
🥇 First prize: SVYASA College, Bengaluru — Team lead Karan Raj KR, with Havinash Gangisetty and Saagnik Dey
🥈 Second prize: PACE, Mangaluru — Team lead Prateek D Shriyan, with Sharath S N, Rafan Ahamad Sheik, and Darel Oliver Tauro
🥉 Third prize: SDMIT, Ujire — Team lead Harshith, with Priya Bhargavi, Rakshitha C R, and Roopesh H N
Prize: ₹20,000. Total prize pool: ₹1,00,000.
The whole way through I'd held maybe 80% confidence in my head. Not certainty. Just a reasoned belief that we'd built something real and that it should count for something. When they said our name it went to 100, and I had no idea what to do with that.
In the Press
Yenepoya School of Engineering and Technology hosted OpenLoop 2026 as a 24-hour national-level hackathon at the YMK Auditorium on the Yenepoya Kulur campus. It was organized by YenTech and open to students from institutions across India.
The event drew 309 registrations from across the country, and 96 of those participants advanced to the final round for the 24-hour sprint.
Both Daijiworld pieces, the pre-event announcement and the results coverage, form the official press record of Open Loop 2026.
What Happened After
Most hackathon projects die on demo day. The team scatters, the repo goes quiet, and that's that.
We didn't let FormPilot go that way. Back in Bengaluru we kept building. It's live on the Chrome Web Store now. Installable, working on real sites, used by real people.
🔗 Try FormPilot on the Chrome Web Store
Going from "hackathon project" to "published product" is where nearly everyone stalls, and I understand why. The code already exists. The deadline is gone. Nothing is forcing you. You have to choose to keep going for no reason other than that you want the thing to be real, and that turns out to be harder than the 24 hours were.
Open Loop wasn't the only hackathon I did in my first year, either. I placed in the top 40 out of 2,500+ teams at HackBLR 2026 with VoiceRx, a RAG-based voice health assistant I built solo in 24 hours. Before Open Loop I built the KĀRYO Lead Intelligence Agent for Agentathon 2026. The full picture is in my first-year retrospective.
What I Actually Learned
The pivot saved us. We wasted six hours, and that's the honest version of it. But throwing away six hours at 5 PM beats shipping the wrong thing at 11 AM the next morning. Being willing to bin the work is what made everything after it possible.
Know what you can contribute under pressure. I couldn't crack the auth problem. Rather than keep grinding at it out of stubbornness, I moved to what I was actually good for: the business model, the pitch, the demo video. That let me be useful instead of stuck. Reading the moment beats fighting it.
Build the product, not the pitch. Three laptops, an iPad, a live extension filling a real form while the judge watched, and Saagnik quietly using it without commentary. When the product works, showing it work is the strongest argument available. Every minute we spent building was a minute we didn't spend on slides, and I think that showed.
A 20-point gap isn't luck. Multi-provider AI support, proper React and Vue DOM handling, cover letter generation, intelligent dropdown matching. That technical depth created a distance that better presentation skills couldn't have closed. The score was about the product.
Being a first-year isn't a ceiling. There were second- and third-year students in that room, from 109 colleges across 14 states. It didn't occur to me at the time that I shouldn't be there. That thought only arrived afterwards, and by then it had inverted into something better. Karan Raj KR, 18, first-year engineering student, national hackathon winner. That's just a fact now.
The competition doesn't end at submission. FormPilot is on the Chrome Web Store because we decided to keep going once the pressure was off. That decision is the whole difference between a project and a product. Every team there built something in 24 hours. Very few kept building after.
If You're On The Fence About Your First Hackathon
Go.
Not for the prize, and not for the LinkedIn post afterwards.
Go because 24 hours of real constraint forces a quality of thinking that months of side projects won't. You'll hit a wall. You'll have to throw something away. You'll have to ship anyway. That sequence, failure into pivot into delivery, is the actual skill, and there aren't many places you can practise it.
We wasted six hours, switched ideas at 5 PM, and still beat 109 colleges. The time limit isn't the obstacle. It's the point.
About Karan Raj KR
Karan Raj KR is an 18-year-old first-year B.Tech CSE (AI/ML) student at NIAT–S-VYASA University, Bengaluru (Batch 2025–2029) and the Founder of KĀRYO — a digital agency helping businesses build and grow their online presence ("Your partner in building online presence").
He has placed 1st at Open Loop 2026, Top 40 at HackBLR 2026 (2,500+ teams), and built multiple shipped products including FormPilot, VoiceRx, and BRAVE.
He documents everything he builds publicly.
🌐 Portfolio: karanrajkr.com
💼 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/karanrajkr
🐦 X / Twitter: x.com/karan_raj_kr
💻 GitHub: github.com/Karan-Raj-KR
📸 Instagram: instagram.com/karan.rajkr
✍️ Hashnode: karanrajkr.hashnode.dev
FormPilot is live — install it here. Read the full first-year story: My First Year of Engineering.
Tags: #hackathon #open-loop-2026 #chrome-extension #ai #formpilot #build-in-public #student-developer #karan-raj-kr #react #typescript
Top comments (0)