By Ashutosh Pandey —

The Superteam that won it all - Point Blank's 2025 Wrapped

The Superteam that won it all - Point Blank's 2025 Wrapped
In 2025, Point Blank was everything, everywhere, all at once.

In 2025, Point Blank won thirty Hackathons, including three podiums at NITK's HackVerse and five winning teams at Smart India Hackathon. Twenty -four people got Internships and Job offers from companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, Visa, NASDAQ, CloudSEK, FinalRoundAI. Twenty -three of the worlds five-hundred Linux Foundation Training Scholars were from Point Blank. Ten individuals were involved in Google Summer of Code, seven as mentees and three as mentors. Six members were Linux Foundation (LFX) mentees. Twenty-three individuals attended the selective ACM Summer and Winter Schools.

Point Blank did this, and many more things that I will cover below, while also building for the community. We co-organized the second edition of the Innovations In Compiler Technology (IICT 2025) Workshop, an ACM sponsored event organized at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). We formed the entirety of the volunteer task force, designed creatives, and built the website for SEGFAULT, India's first Compiler themed Hackathon. We volunteered for FOSS United's INDIAFOSS, India's largest free and open source conference. We organized, for the fifth time, the Internal round of SIH at DSCE for over 1100 participants. We built sih.dsce.in and our own AI based Hackathon Evaluation Software in the process. We organized the fourth edition of our Capture the Flag Competition, PBCTF to much fanfare. Other smaller events include our weekly coding contest, the PB Hustle; our Open Day, and volunteering at Aventus and Sandbox Hackathons.

Q1 (January - March): "Waking up a Storm"

Hackathons / Podiums

  • Hackverse NITK: 1st place - Akash, Dhruv, Shreyas
  • Hackverse NITK: Cybersecurity Track winner - PragatiRaj, Tanmay, Aswin
  • Hackverse NITK: AI Track winner - Chetan, Alfiya, Yuktha
  • PES Hackathon: 2nd runner-up - Chetan, Alfiya
  • Innerve 9.0: 1st place - Bhuvan, Mohit, Naman, Vivek
  • Sandbox Hackathon: 1st place - Tanmay, Ashab, PragatiRaj
  • Sandbox Hackathon: 3rd place - Tushar, Yash, Ayush, Dhruv
  • Cellstrat Cellverse: Podium Finish - Kamini, Bhoomi, Prajwal
  • Flutter Kanpur Design Hackathon: 1st place - Angelica
  • Hack-Nocturne: 1st place - Shubhang, Inchara, Harsh
  • OJASS'25 Hackathon: 3rd place - Darshil, Ashab

Internships / Jobs

  • Internship at Cedana - Tushar
  • Internship at The Agentic - Darshil
  • Intern at Aspora - Vivek

OSS / Programs

  • LFX Mentee - Akash

Q2 (April - June): "Open Source, Summer Schools and Beyond"

Hackathons / Podiums

  • HackToFuture: 1st place - Bhoomi, Kamini, Prajwal
  • SentinelHack 2025: 1st place - Rishi, Alfiya
  • Aventus Hackathon: 2nd runner-up - Manas, Raqeeb
  • Aventus Hackathon: Business Track winner - Prajwal, Bhoomi, Kamini
  • Aventus Hackathon: Women’s Track winner - Vanisha
  • Warpspeed: 1st place - Akash, Inchara, Harsh

Internships / Jobs

  • Internship at Cybersecurity India - Samarth
  • Apple London Compiler Engineer Job - Prajwal S N

OSS / Programs

  • 10 GSoC mentees - Dhruv (Prometheus Operator), Suvan (Open Climate Fix), Shuvam (InVesalius), Manas (API Dash), Prajwal (Mentor, CRIU), Rahul (Mentor, Alaska), Bhuvan (DeepChem), Saalim (Linux Foundation), Ayush (IOOS), Pratyush (Mifos)
  • LFX mentee at WasmEdge - Vishruth
  • 23 LiFT scholarships - Aditya, Shreyash, Vishruth, Vanisha, Hemang, Shankhanil, Bhuvan, Yuvraj, Ayush, Lavi, Harsh, Prajwal. Bhoomi, Supreeth, Inchara, Govind, Tanmay, Akash, Chetan, Naman, Ritisha, Rishi, Aswin
  • ACM Summer School: 11 acceptances - Inchara, Bhoomi, Yuktha, Ritisha, Dhruv, Gautam, Yuvraj, Pragati, Bhuvan, Shravan, Ayush
  • Candidate Master on Codeforces - Aditya Raj

Q3 (July - September): "Conferences, Ecosystems and The Month from Hell"

Hackathons / Podiums

  • Kaspersky Pan India Hackathon: 3rd place - Samarth BC

Internships / Jobs

  • SDE at Google India - Divya
  • Intern at Prauga - Shivansh
  • SDE at New Relic - Divyansh
  • Internships at ICICI Pru AMC - Inchara, Harsh, Shubhang
  • SDE at Amazon Ireland - Ayaan Shakil
  • FOSSEE IITB internship - Yash Suthar

OSS / Programs / Community

  • LFX Mentees - Yash, Naman, Dhruv, Madhur (LKMP)
  • Organized PBCTF 4.0 - 4th Edition of our flagship Capture the Flag Competition, saw participation from over 300 students across India. Overseen by Shreyas, Tanmay, Aswin, Sanjay and team.
  • Organised Internal Round of Smart India Hackathon - 1100+ participants across 180+ teams, we built the internal hackathon portal, an AI to evaluate problem statements, conducted two rounds of evaluation with 30+ judges and an online mentoring session for all the teams. A shoutout to Rudraksha, Yash, Govind, Ayush for their contributions.
  • Organised Innovations In Compiler Technology Workshop 2025 - Designed creatives - website, posters, banners, mementos, formed the entirety of the volunteer force at the venue, built the website for the SEGFAULT Hackathon, co-located with IICT - Shoutout to Shivansh, Rudraksha, Yash, Govind, Manish and the entire volunteering team.
  • Volunteered at IndiaFOSS 2025 - IndiaFOSS is India's premier Free and Open Source Software Conference. Point Blank turned up in large numbers on both days to volunteer and participate at the Conference. We also met and hosted the head of Open Source at sentry.io, Chad Whitacre.
  • Completed CKAD Certification - Bhuvan

Q4 (October - December): "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once!"

Hackathons / Podiums

  • IITB × JIPMER INCUBATE Hackathon: Podium finish - Yash, Ayush, Kamini, Piyush
  • Feature Engineering Hackathon (Ramaiah): Runner-up - Balaji
  • Bruteforce Hackathon: Podium finish - Balaji
  • Hackman: 1st place - Inchara, Yash, Shubhang
  • Hackman: Runner-up - Govind, Kamini, Shivansh, Ananya
  • Hack Karnataka: 1st Place - Mohit, Bhuvan, Naman, Vivek
  • CICADA Hackathon: 1st Place - Ananya
  • SIH 2025 Grand Finale: 5 Grand Finale Winners -
    • Team Point Blank - Akash, Dhruv, Inchara, Shubhang, Deval, Vanisha, mentored by Ashutosh
    • Team Dedsec - Aswin, Pragatiraj, Tanmay, Ritisha, Sanjay, Shreyas, mentored by Hariom
    • Team Win Diesel - Yuktha, Alfiya, Chetan, Rishi, Ananya, mentored by Anukul
    • Team Five States - Bhoomi, Kamini, Supreeth, Tushar, Prajwal, mentored by Samrath.
    • Team Clutch SIH - led by Balaji CV.

Internships / Jobs

  • FTE at Microsoft - Alfiya
  • Intern at Aspora - Dhruv
  • Intern at CloudSEK - Manas
  • Intern at CloudSEK - Supreeth
  • Internship at PRED - Rudraksha
  • Internship at Visa - Aswin
  • SDE at NASDAQ - Sanjay
  • SDE at NASDAQ - Geethika

Research / Academic / Competitive Programming

  • Two papers at CSS workshop (FSTTCS, BITS Goa)
    • Comparative Analysis of IR's for security tasks : Kamini, Prajwal, Madhur.
    • Security Aware Prompting Alone does not prevent crashes in LLM-Generated C Code: Ashutosh Pandey
  • ACM Winter School 2025: 12 selections - Saniya, Shreyas, Madhur, Inchara, Samarth, Ananya, Prajwal, Shreyas Reddy, Alfiya, Aswin, Vanisha
  • Meta Hacker Cup: 4 people to Round 2 - Yuvraj, Gautam, Yash, Soumyadipta
  • 2 teams selected for ICPC Regionals - Aditya Raj, Yuvraj, Anurag Jain, Aochuba

#WeArePointBlank