Without further ado, here are the winners:
Stringer Safety
Team captain: Anjan Sundaram
Anjan Sundaram is a renowned journalist who has repeatedly put his life at risk to cover underreported conflicts and expose authoritarian corruption, most notably in Rwanda. Understanding the risks of reporting firsthand, he and his team created Stringer Safety, an app designed to help protect journalists working in high-risk environments. Journalists build a trusted network of contacts, with whom they can securely share their location and periodic status updates in the app. In moments of danger, a one-click SOS alert shares safety context with the userтАЩs network and triggers response recommendations using the encrypted AI tool Maple. The developers plan to continue this project to provide end-to-end encrypted location sharing, messaging, and other features.
Pathos
Team captain: Leopoldo L├│pez
Venezuelan democratic opposition leader Leopoldo L├│pez aims to support activists in authoritarian regimes that block access to communication and financial channels. To address this, he and his team created Pathos, an application running on the decentralized Nostr protocol that governments cannot shut down. Pathos enables activists to join country-specific communities to securely report events on the ground, share them globally, and even win money for their contributions. Pathos has already proven effective in Venezuela, where people earned bitcoin for sharing images of political prisoners. The app integrates a self-custodial Bitcoin wallet (Breeze SDK) for instant, private micro-donations, Bitchat for offline messaging during internet shutdowns, and a private AI assistant for organizing strategy.
Corruption Disrespector
Team captain: Anna Chekhovich
Russian activist Anna Chekhovich works as the financial director of Alexei NavalnyтАЩs Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF), where investigators sift through thousands of documents to uncover the KremlinтАЩs elaborate corruption schemes. Chekhovich and her team worked to automate this process with the Corruption Disrespector. Investigators can upload corporate registries, financial records, court filings, and documents in multiple languages, and the AI will extract relevant people, companies, addresses, and accounts, and compare findings with the organization’s existing research. The tool surfaces hidden connections between seemingly unrelated entities and visualizes them in clear network maps.
– Anna Chekhovich
