Originally published on the Kulissa blog: Winning the Cursor Track at RAISE: the walk through Paris that planted Kulissa
On 5 July 2026 our team won the Cursor Track at the RAISE Summit Hackathon in Paris. The press has already told the story better than I could at the time: El Español, El Correo Gallego and La Voz de Galicia all wrote about it, and the clippings sit on our about page and in the press kit. This post is the part I could not say in a phone interview. What it felt like, what it started, and who we need to thank.
Twenty-four hours, and then the brief changed
The format was simple and unforgiving. Build a working product in 24 hours and demo it live to technical judges. No slides to hide behind. The hackathon was driven by Cursor and co-organized with Cerebral Valley, right before the RAISE Summit opened at the Carrousel du Louvre.
We came in as five people under the name TN1: Ilias Ismanalijev, Ivan Glushenkov, Yanik Almer, Sergey Novikov and me. The first problem on the table was how to stop AI from hallucinating on design problems. We had a plan for that. Then, late in the event, the organizers changed the challenge. The plan was gone, the clock was not.
So we went for a walk
Under pressure I remembered something my mother taught me about the Peripatetic philosophers: they taught and argued while walking. It sounded absurd to leave the room with hours left. We did it anyway and walked the streets of Paris.
Somewhere on that walk the idea arrived. I studied Fine Arts and trained as an actor before I worked in technology, and acting is role-play: you rehearse, you get feedback, you repeat until it lands. Companies ask their people to perform the hardest conversations of their working lives, a skeptical buyer, a price objection, an angry customer, with almost no rehearsal. What if every team had a stage to rehearse on, with a partner who answers back?
When we got back, Ilias had a first prototype running in about ten minutes. From there the team split the work the way it still splits today: Yanik on the real-time voice and avatar stack, Sergey on the scenario and evaluation engine, me on design and brand. We put a live demo in front of the judges, a company's own documents turned into a voice practice partner that adapts to what you say. We won the track.
Why it was empowering
I want to be honest about this part. Winning did not make Kulissa a company. Customers do that, and that work is still ahead of us. But the win did something a pitch deck cannot. It told five people, in public, that the idea was worth our next years.
For me personally it closed a loop. I left Santiago at 18 to study Fine Arts in Madrid and become an actor. For a long time I felt the theatre half and the technology half of my life did not talk to each other. In Paris they did. The name Kulissa comes from the theatre wings, the place where you prepare before you step on stage. That night the whole team was standing in them.
It also gave us permission to be ambitious out loud. A jury of builders looked at something made in a day and took it seriously. That is a seed. Everything since has been watering it: the product, Kulissa, the hiring, onboarding and training use cases, and the many rewrites in between.
Thank you, Cerebral Valley and Cursor
None of this happens without the people who build the room.
Cerebral Valley invited us and co-organized the hackathon. Running an event where strangers ship real software in a day, and then changing the brief to see who can adapt, is a craft. It was the right test, and it shaped how we still work: when the plan breaks, go for a walk, then build.
Cursor drove the hackathon and put its name on our track. We built the first Kulissa prototype with Cursor, and we have kept building with it since. Their support did not stop at the award. The further help we have had from both teams during our product development has meant more to a young company than they probably know.
We are very thankful to both.
What comes next
The seed from Paris has grown, but the idea underneath has not changed. Most people walk into the hardest conversations of their working lives without ever having rehearsed them. Actors would never be asked to do that. We want every team to have the wings of a theatre: a place to prepare, to get it wrong safely, and to step on stage feeling ready. If you want to feel what we demoed that day, grown up a little, see how Kulissa works.
Read next
- The press coverage and team photos: kulissa.com/about and kulissa.com/press
- Why we named her Maya: why we named her Maya
- Field notes from building her: what we learned building Maya
Related reading
- What we learned building Maya
- Sales coach for hiring, onboarding, and continuous training
- Confidence is built before the call
Kulissa is a sales coach with live virtual customers for hiring, onboarding and training sales teams. See how it works at kulissa.com.
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