Otinga.io, the AI-powered innovation partner that helps enterprises run structured hackathons and innovation programmes, announced its role as the event facilitation and platform partner for the impact.com AI Build Sprint Hackathon 2026, held on 23 April 2026 in Cape Town. The one-day build sprint formed part ofimpact.com’s Developer Summit and brought together more than 250 engineers, product managers and technical leaders to accelerate practical AI adoption across the organisation, to be a part of the largest AI-focused engineering event impact.com has ever held.
South Africa is producing exceptional engineering talent that global technology companies depend on. impact.com is one of several companies with significant, engineering operations in Cape Town, investing in its South African teams, not just outsourcing to them.
The hackathon brought together some of the most prominent AI development tools in the industry, including Cursor and Gemini, reflecting the platforms reshaping how engineering teams build at scale.
“Let’s be honest, a lot of ‘AI adoption’ right now is just people doing demos and calling it strategy. But really, if your AI story doesn’t change the work your engineers can ship at scale, it’s just theatre. This build sprint is different because it treats adoption as an engineering discipline: clear goals, structured execution, and measurable follow-through. The one take-away is this: if you can’t measure the real change in output, it’s not transformation,” said Francois van der Merwe, Founder & CEO at Otinga.io.
“AI only becomes meaningful when it’s embedded into how engineers actually build, ship, and iterate every day. What made this hackathon different is that it wasn’t about experimentation for its own sake, it was about applying AI in real workflows, against real product challenges, with measurable outcomes.” said Tian Schoeman, Manager, GenAI Productivity at impact.com. “Working with Otinga allowed us to structure that process in a way that moved teams from ideas to execution quickly, while still maintaining a high bar for impact. The result is not just prototypes, but a clearer path to how AI can accelerate productivity across our engineering organisation.”
As the event’s facilitation and platform partner, Otinga supported the end-to-end structure of the Hackathon, helping translate strategic objectives into clear challenge framing, team workflows and execution pathways designed to convert sprint outcomes into follow-through.
The event took place in a developer ecosystem that global tech companies are paying close attention to. Cape Town, “Africa’s Silicon Valley”, is home to an estimated 38% of South Africa’s developer population, with 450+ tech firms and 40,000+ tech employees based in the city. GitHub reported 664,000+ developers from South Africa in the past year, 23% year-on-year growth.
South Africa’s GitHub user base grew 23% from 540,586 (2023) to 664,000+ (2024), while Africa’s developer community is expanding at 21% per year (2019–2024), the fastest growth rate of any continent, and now totals 4.7 million developers. At the same time, AI tool adoption among South African developers jumped from 33% to 51.9% in 2024. Africa’s developer ecosystem is growing faster than any other continent. impact.com‘s initiative is part of a broader trend of global companies recognising and leveraging this talent pool.
“There’s a tired narrative that Africa is ‘emerging’ in tech. In fact, there are world-class software developers here. Forward-thinking global employers are coming to Cape Town and investing in its South African team, not simply outsourcing to them. “This creates a great opportunity for South Africa to step onto the world stage as a key talent player in AI accelerated software development.” van der Merwe concluded.
