London, UK—22nd September, 2026— A new AI-focused hackathon taking place in London this November will be among the first to see if AI agents can make money online. “Make Me Money” is the latest in the Shipyard event series, and the first public benchmark of AI agent autonomy, with real money. With a £10,000 prize pool up for grabs for the winning entrants, participants will fund their agents with £100 and see if they can turn a profit.
The event will run from November 2nd - 21st, with a live leaderboard tracking the agents’ profits and human inputs. The event will conclude with a public demo day on November 21st, announcements of the winners, and the prizegiving ceremony. Learnings from the event will be published in an upcoming research paper with the aim of exploring how autonomous funded AI agents could supercharge the global economy.
Existing research on the potential economic impact of autonomous AI agents predicts massive growth in the coming years. A study published in April by global tech strategist firm Juniper Research predicted that agentic commerce spend will reach $1.5 trillion by 2030. Meanwhile Penn Wharton Budget Model research indicates that AI will increase productivity and result in a net positive impact to U.S. GDP of around $430B per year. However, much of this research is academic and theoretical. Make Me Money sets out to prove the hypothesis by running a real-life event with real money on the line.
Speaking about the event, Efe Kucuk, head of the Shipyard series, said, “Every major forecaster, from the IMF, to McKinsey and even Goldman Sachs, has a number for what AI agents will be worth to the economy. Nobody has actually watched one earn a pound. Make Me Money is the first public, live experiment to find out whether autonomous agents can go from zero to real revenue, with real strangers, real money, and every human intervention logged. Trading competitions test agents against markets but they don't touch the real world. This tests them against the actual, messy economy: the one economists are still trying to model. Whatever the leaderboard says on November 21st, it's the first hard data point in a debate that's currently running on projections."
Participants receive free credits from ElevenLabs, Tavily, and Daytona, plus hands-on workshops run directly by the teams behind those tools. Teams can build from a dedicated coworking space in Soho or remotely, depending on what best suits their workflow. Progress will be tracked on a live public leaderboard, with every agent ranked by what it actually earns, before the whole cohort comes together for Demo Day at Encode Hub.
Registrations for Make Me Money are open now. Find out more at https://shipyard.london/