We're joining Audiotool's Let's Build! NEXUS Hackathon Series as a content partner and judge, alongside BBC Research & Development, the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT, and Music Hackspace.

Let's Build! is a free, global hackathon running through 6 July 2026, open to developers, musicians and creative technologists at every level. Participants receive up to $500 in AI credits and compete across six categories for a prize pool worth more than $70,000.

The series runs on NEXUS, Audiotool's open-source SDK for building inside their browser-based DAW environment. NEXUS gives developers open API access, AI intercommunication, collaborative multi-tool sessions, and no licensing fees. For audio developers used to wrestling with cross-platform plugin tooling, that's a meaningful shift.

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"For years, serious audio developers have had to choose between power and accessibility. NEXUS opens that conversation back up: not by dumbing anything down, but by removing the friction that kept great ideas from becoming real tools. We're joining Let's Build! because we want to see what developers who've never had this kind of platform at their fingertips will actually build with it."

– Joshua Hodge, our founder

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As content partner, we'll be producing video content and resources to support participants throughout the series, and joining the judging panel alongside the other collaborators.

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"This collaboration connects two complementary layers of the same vision: Audiotool and NEXUS are where music gets made and where tools get built; PHARE is where that music gets owned, protected, and monetized. For the first time, the moment of creation and the moment of rights registration can happen simultaneously."

– Andreas Jacobi, co-founder and CEO, Audiotool

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BBC R&D's Future World Design team is leading a dedicated challenge track around PHARE, their new prototype platform for transparent ownership, rights registration, and monetisation infrastructure for music creators. Tools built on NEXUS during Let's Build! could feed directly into PHARE's creator-facing toolkit.

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"PHARE was built to solve real problems for real music makers. The developers who build on Audiotool NEXUS are exactly the people we want stress-testing our ideas and creating rights-aware tools. Let's Build! gives us the opportunity to put our research into the hands of a global creative community. We're excited to see what they build."

– Edward Fotheringham, Product Principal, BBC Future World Design, Research & Development

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The Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT brings a research focus on how AI can support co-creation in music: how AI tools, with structured multi-track access to a live session, can become genuine collaborators in the creative process.

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Music Hackspace is running the series' in-person events, including the Boston meet on 6–7 June 2026, co-hosted with Berklee College of Music following the Berklee AIMS conference. They're also producing educational content throughout the series.

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"Building music plugins used to mean C++, cross-platform headaches, and years of toolchain experience. NEXUS changes the equation completely: build apps directly in the browser, with a shared runtime that lets your tools talk to everything else happening in the session in real time. For the next generation of music tool builders, this is the on-ramp we've been missing."

– Dr. Jean-Baptiste Thiebaut, CEO, Music Hackspace

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How to take part

Find out more and sign up at audiotool.com/LetsBuild.

Audiotool's online DAW and the NEXUS SDK are at audiotool.com.