Guidewire DEVTrails Turns a University Hackathon Into a Real-World Build

Why a Hackathon?

The best engineers don't start looking for great companies after graduation. They form impressions years earlier through the problems they're exposed to, the brands that show up on their campus, and the experiences that stick with them.

DEVTrails came from that idea. If those early impressions matter, the best way to connect with students is to give them something real to work on.

Instead of recruitment drives or branded giveaways, students take on messy, industry-grade challenges that go beyond writing code. The goal is to give them a reason to care about insurance technology and the kind of work Guidewire does every day.

In 2025, we launched DEVTrails as Guidewire's first virtual university hackathon in India. It was a multi-week, elimination-based competition designed to simulate the pressures and rewards of building real products. Students formed teams, tackled industry-grade problems, and advanced through each stage from early ideas to final pitches.

The response exceeded every expectation.

The Proof of Concept in 2025

DEVTrails 2025 focused on Kubernetes and open-source technologies, a theme that resonated strongly with engineering students. We had:

• 10 universities across India
• 739 teams and 3,003 participants
• 5 finalists presenting at Guidewire's DEVSummit
• 3 winners

So we asked ourselves what it would look like to do this at five times the scale and make it more relevant to the work students would actually be doing.

Scaling to 18,000 Participants with a Purpose in 2026

For DEVTrails 2026, we brought onboard two key partners who elevated the program significantly. National Insurance Academy (NIA), Pune joined as our Academic and Strategic Insurance Knowledge Partner, bringing deep insurance expertise and a strong academic perspective that kept the hackathon closely tied to the industry. EY came onboard as a partner, recognising the value of the proposition and the level of engagement we had built.

For 2026, a few decisions shaped how the program came together:

1. The Theme: AI-Powered InsurTech with Social Impact

In 2025, the challenge focused on Kubernetes and open source. For 2026, we wanted students to engage with what makes Guidewire unique. Insurance.

We wanted a use case that students would care about personally, something that connected technology to a real problem in their world.

We landed on AI-powered parametric insurance for India's gig economy delivery workers.

India's 15+ million platform-based delivery partners, the people who bring your food from Zomato, your groceries from Zepto, your packages from Amazon, lose 20-30% of their monthly income when external disruptions hit. Extreme weather, pollution, natural disasters, curfews. When it rains too hard to deliver, they don't earn. And they have no safety net.

The challenge to students was to build an AI-powered platform that protects gig workers' income using machine learning and intelligent automation. Teams had to build risk models for delivery workers, create pricing that adjusts based on local conditions, use real-time data to trigger claims automatically, and spot fraud like GPS spoofing or fake weather reports.

Students had to understand how delivery workers actually live and work, look at real disruption patterns, and think through what fair coverage should look like for a group traditional insurance has largely overlooked.

Many teams took it a step further and spoke directly with their delivery partner to understand the problem firsthand.

2. Two Tracks: Open Market and Guidewire Platform

With 18,000 participants across 30 universities, we needed a structure that could work at scale while still showcasing Guidewire's platform to the right audience.

Track 1 — General Track (Engineering Universities): Open to 30 universities. Students worked on the gig worker insurance problem using any technology stack. This track was built for scale, with thousands of teams competing across AI, ML, and full-stack development.

Track 2 — NIA Track: A smaller group of insurance students working directly on the Guidewire Cloud Platform. They used Guidewire tools, like Advanced Product Designer (ADP) and PolicyCenter, to design and build insurance products, using real-world workflows.

This approach gave us both reach and depth. We engaged a large pool of engineering students, while also giving future insurance professionals real exposure to Guidewire.

3. A Gamified Startup Simulation

DEVTrails 2026 is a 45-day startup simulation.

Every team operates like a startup. They’re given seed capital and have to manage it across six weeks of work, decisions, and eliminations.

Progress comes from completing milestones and challenges, while costs and penalties steadily chip away at their balance. Teams have to make practical choices about where to focus and how to use their limited balance as costs and events keep adding pressure.

At each stage of the competition, the bottom 25% of teams are eliminated. If a team’s balance hits zero, they’re out.

Midway through the competition, we introduced a market crash scenario, in which teams had 24 hours to respond to fraud cases like GPS spoofing. Some handled it well because they had already built fraud detection into their systems. Others did not. The goal was to see how well their solutions held up under pressure and how they performed when things changed.

Along the way, students started thinking differently. They were building while also making trade-offs and adjusting as conditions shifted.

By the final round, the top five teams will earn their spot at the Grand Finale DemoJam at Guidewire DEVSummit 2026.

The Power of AI in Running the Hackathon

AI played a central role in how DEVTrails was run.

One of the biggest challenges was evaluation. Scaling from hundreds to thousands of teams meant reviewing thousands of GitHub repositories against a detailed rubric. At 20 to 30 minutes per review, this would have taken months of engineering time.

To handle that, we built DEVTrails Judge, an AI system that reviews and scores submissions.

It reads each repository and evaluates it against the rubric, producing scores along with clear explanations and references to specific parts of the code. It also adjusts how deeply it reviews based on the submission, spending more time on complex projects and quickly assessing simpler ones.

What would have taken weeks was completed in two days with a small team. Every team was evaluated using the same rubric and consistent standards, with written feedback they could learn from.

We also built automation to connect the evaluation results to the admin system, with human review and approval for every entry. The process stayed consistent while still keeping people involved.

Insurance Domain Intelligence

Evaluation went beyond code quality. The rubrics checked whether teams understood how insurance decisions are made and how claims are handled in practice.

The AI agent could also tell whether teams had built real risk models or just hardcoded values. In addition, it could spot the difference between meaningful fraud detection and simple rule matching, as well as whether data feeds were actually integrated or just simulated.

The People Behind the Program

DEVTrails 2026 was designed and run entirely by Guidewire employees.

A small team of engineers, alongside their day-to-day product work, built the program and kept it running across 45 days, 30 universities, and 18,000 participants.

They developed the use case, set up the competition structure, and built the evaluation system. They also coordinated with universities and supported students across social platforms and a dedicated helpdesk.

The DEVTrails 2026 core team I had the privilege of working with:

Deepthi H, Ayush Kumar, Jayashree O, Krishnan K M, Adarsh S Pakkala, Jerrin Francis, Ajay Surya Jampana, Gagan H R, Gaurav Shrivastava, Krishna Sankannavar, Mohitha Velagapudi, Nandhini Devi Devaraj, Premika M, Hima Sree N, Vibhor Chinda, Pandiyarajan Parthasarathi, Shubhakar Rao J, Vigneshmani Ramanathan, Sangi Naveen Kumar, Ansawara Suresh M K, Roshni R, Anagha Vijay and Rajkumar Manokaran

We did it because we believed in it. Because reaching the next generation of engineers and showing them what insurance technology can be is worth the effort.

The Impact

DEVTrails creates impact that extends well beyond the competition itself.

What’s Next

DEVTrails 2026 is currently underway, with teams moving through the remaining stages of the competition.

The final teams will present at the Grand Finale DemoJam at Guidewire DEVSummit 2026, where the winners will be selected.

This is how the next generation of engineers gets ready to build in the real world.

Seed. Scale. Soar.

DEVTrails is led by Guidewire's India engineering team. For more information, visit guidewire.com.

Want updates on DEVTrails and other developer programs? Subscribe here to the Guidewire Developer Newsletter.