By Victoria Lawless
London Hack 2.0
The last stop before our summer break, and we touched down in Canary Wharf, London. Skyscrapers packed with finance folk, all ready to hack their way out of a few finance headaches. We teamed up with our customers and friends at Lovable, J.P. Morgan and Atlar for hackathon number 10.
From zero to (vibe-coding) hero
What better way to kick off a hackathon than with our own Head of Finance sharing her journey from zero to hero in the world of vibe coding?
The tricky part of vibe coding is knowing how, and when, to start. The truth? Just get started.
Martina told us how she simply logged in, typed a prompt, and watched it take off from there. It's a rollercoaster: the euphoria of the early wins can dwindle the moment your prompts stop cooperating. But that's exactly when you take a break, regroup, and come at it a different way.
Inspired by Martina's candour, our finance leaders rolled up their sleeves and got hacking.
The builds
Over 30 teams submitted builds, the most structured and collaborative we've seen on the tour so far. Narrowing it down was no easy feat, but with the help of our expert judging panel we landed on a top three.
Board Pack Studio
A CFO-grade board pack workspace that ingests raw company data from Light and produces a boardroom-ready pack in seconds: KPIs, trend charts, narrative commentary, sign-off, and a CFO Actions panel with decisions and confidence-rated recommendations. One click exports a clean, multi-page landscape PDF, replacing the two-to-three-day grind.
Liquidity FlowOS
A Treasury Operating System that turns AR/AP, accounting, bank and reconciliation data into a decision-ready view. Connecting to Atlar and Light, it answers the one question every CFO loses sleep over: can we fund the next 13 weeks safely, with a 13-week forecast, a safeguarding monitor, an action queue and a CFO-ready narrative.
Garden HQ
The finance dashboard that grows with your company. Powered by live data from Light and Atlar, it renders your financial health as a living garden: panels bloom when things flourish and wilt when they don't. Track your cash and money-market position, bank balances and company OKRs, while each merchant grows as its own plant. An AI Finance Intern answers questions grounded in live data. And when cash gets tight? Hit MAYDAY: a one-button crisis cockpit with runway KPIs, scenario planning, and three ready-to-execute plans, dunning emails, held vendor payments and money-market sweeps, all in a click.
And the winner is … Garden HQ
Our judging panel was a serious gathering of finance brainpower: Sabrina Castiglione (CFO at Omnea), Kim Larsson Nyheim (Head of Innovation Economy, Nordics, J.P. Morgan), Martina Porubcova (Head of Finance at Light), Joel Wägmark (CFO & co-founder at Atlar) and Joe Small (GTM at Lovable).
They handed the big win to Garden HQ for solving a headache only start-up survivors truly understand: the dreaded mayday meeting, and needing the numbers yesterday. It was ready to put straight to work, give or take a small gag about cutting employees at the touch of a button. It was also one of the most visually striking hacks of the whole world tour, bringing data to life in a way anyone could grasp, financially inclined or not.
What's next
The building doesn't stop here. Everyone in that room is the future of finance, and today was just day one of their vibe-coding journey. There's still a whole rollercoaster of emotions ahead, and we can't wait to cheer them on through it.
So what comes next? Perhaps a Light Hackathon All-Stars is in order, so we can see how people take what they learned in a single day, keep building, and reconvene a year later to see just how far they've grown. Watch this space…
But one thing we know for certain: London, we'll be back.
If you want to request a Finance Hackathon in your city, head to light.inc/finhack. Follow us on LinkedIn to be the first to know where we're headed next.