Announcement blog posts usually start with a big build up. But... we can't contain our excitement! The message is simple:
We're part of PayPal's AI Hackathon!
Today, on October 1st, submissions open for Build What's Next with PayPal and AI, a six-week hackathon by PayPal where both AG Grid and Bryntum are partners with our own prize categories.
PayPal + AG Studio = 💙
Take AG Studio for a spin and let your wildest data ideas lead your tools: dashboards with custom widgets, agents that build dashboards for your users, beautiful data visualizations, quirky analytics... whatever you can dream up with a payments API and AI in the mix.
Go play! There's no problem statement to squeeze your idea into. Just PayPal, AI, and six weeks to go build something great.
💰 The prizes
Of course, the real prize is the fun you will have along the way and a spot on our blog and social media. However, there is also cash if you care about that sort of thing.
There's $60,000+ on the table across the whole hackathon. Our slice of it:
- Best Use of AG Studio: $5,000 for 1st, $2,000 for 2nd, $1,000 each for three more.
- Best Use of Bryntum: $1,000 each for three winners.
🤓 What to build
Whatever your heart desires (that uses PayPal and AI)! But, if you want a little creativity booster:
- An anomaly-alert agent: monitors transaction streams and auto-builds widgets flagging suspicious refund spikes or failed payments.
- A nonprofit donation dashboard: live PayPal donation feed, donor leaderboard, campaign progress bars.
- A natural-language finance agent: "show PayPal revenue by customer segment this month" generates a live widget.
- A nudge-bot: a gentle-reminder agent that reads unpaid invoices and drafts friendly nudges instead of demands, with a widget showing who still owes what, styled like a scoreboard rather than a collections report.
- Storefront analytics for Central Perk (Friends), Schrute Farms (The Office), or Luke's Diner (The Gilmore Girls): revenue-by-product widgets, refund rate tiles, geographic sales maps.
- On the Bryntum side: an agency delivery board where a late payment visibly blocks the next phase, an equipment rental calendar, or a scheduler that reroutes itself the moment a payment clears late
📚 Helpful resources
- Code: PayPal + AG Studio boilerplate
- Docs: Quick Start for AG Studio
- Docs: Custom Widgets & Theming
- Blog: Vibecoding a custom widget (and an entire AG Studio dashboard)
- Blog: Introducing the Studio Agent Framework
- Blog: Introducing AG Studio Figma Design System
- Recorded session: Self-serve dashboards in 30 lines of code
- Save the date! October 12th, live session: Build a payments dashboard without building a dashboard, with PayPal's Eddie Jaoude and our own James Swinton-Bland.
😍 Who else is joining the party
A quick rundown of who's in it with you:
- APIMatic: instant PayPal context for your AI agent through their Context Plugin
- Postman: design, test, and document your API on the platform developers already know
- AG Grid: self-serve dashboards, drag-and-drop charts, and the Studio Agent Framework, built directly into your app with AG Studio
- Bryntum: high-performance Gantt, Scheduler, Calendar, and Grid components for React, Vue, and Angular
- Render: deploy and orchestrate your agents at scale
- Kernel: cloud infrastructure so your agents can get out there and actually use the internet
- Channel3: one API for clean product data across 100M+ items, no scraping
- Astropods: agent-native infrastructure to build, deploy, and run AI agents
- Zapier and Elastic round out the lineup, for automation and fast hybrid and vector search
Ready to get started?
Head over to the hackathon portal, register, and... have fun!
