Walytech tops a 6,000-strong Riyadh fintech hackathon

Walytech won the second edition of the AMAD Hackathon in Riyadh, taking SR180,000 of a SR500,000 prize pool at a fintech competition that organisers say drew more than 6,000 participants and over 2,800 teams from across Saudi Arabia. The remaining places went to Sovereign Q, second with SR110,000; Naqlah, third with SR80,000; Yusr, fourth with SR50,000; Souq Ufuq, fifth with SR45,000; and Muttasi, sixth with SR35,000. The six awards account for the full SR500,000, or roughly $133,000, in the in-person track. Winners were announced at a closing ceremony after three days of competition. AMAD is run by Tuwaiq Academy in partnership with Alinma Bank, and it concluded in Riyadh in the days immediately before LEAP 2026 opened rather than at the show itself. More than 1,800 of the participants competed in person, with the remainder taking part remotely. The competition was organised around six innovation tracks, among them generative AI applied to financial services, open banking and customer experience. At the closing ceremony, organisers announced a Guinness World Records recognition for AMAD as the world's largest fintech hackathon. Numbers on that scale change what a hackathon is for. A conventional developer event exists to produce prototypes; a field of 2,800 teams is a recruitment and identification exercise, and the participation figure is doing as much work as the winners' list. For Tuwaiq Academy, whose stated purpose is qualifying programmers at national scale, six thousand people spending a weekend building financial software is a talent census. For Alinma Bank, it is an unusually cheap way to see which teams in the Kingdom can ship something that runs. The track list also says something about where Saudi fintech's attention has moved. Open banking has been the sector's organising project for several years, and its appearance alongside generative AI as a competition track reflects a market where the regulatory plumbing is far enough along that developers can build on it. Financial literacy and customer experience tracks point in a different direction — towards consumer-facing products rather than infrastructure — which is generally where hackathon output is most likely to survive contact with a real user. What has not been published is the more interesting half. None of the six winning teams' products have been described in detail in the coverage available, so what Walytech actually built and whether any of the entries continue past the prize money cannot be established from public sources. Hackathon winners have a poor record of becoming companies, and the honest test of an event this size is not the ceremony but how many of the 2,800 teams still exist in a year. It runs alongside a week in which competition has been the dominant format for finding Saudi and international founders. At LEAP itself, Rocket Fuel narrowed more than 3,000 applicants to 100 finalists competing for $1 million in equity-free prizes, with the grand finale on the closing day, and AWS has run a free AI academy and hackathon on the show floor . The broader training apparatus those events feed was on display too, with the labour ministry launching an AI Arabia Center of Excellence for the existing workforce . The prize distribution is worth one last note: SR35,000 for sixth place is a meaningful sum for a student team, and paying six places rather than three is a deliberate choice about how widely the money spreads. TechScoop is reporting from LEAP 2026 in Riyadh.