➣ The Metro Hackathon is a three-day artificial intelligence hackathon designed to solve real operational challenges inside the Baku Metro, built to turn the metro's own data into deployable concepts for passenger flow, congestion, and digital infrastructure. The program is the first hackathon in Azerbaijan focused on metro infrastructure and the first innovation initiative in the history of Baku Metropolitan CJSC an AZCON Holding company delivered with SUP.VC as the operating partner. Held from 1 to 3 May 2026 at the Icherisheher station in the heart of Baku, the program drew more than 1,200 registrations, selected 72 participants across 18 teams, and awarded three winners a combined prize fund of 9,000 AZN, with winning concepts moving into the metro's pilot pipeline.

The brief

➣ Baku Metro carries around 627,000 passengers a day across 27 stations and 40 kilometres of track. Decades of organic growth, peak-hour congestion at key transfer points, and the rising cost of physical expansion have made operational intelligence not new infrastructure the most efficient lever for improving the system. The challenge for Baku Metropolitan was twofold. First, the technical questions: how to forecast and balance passenger flow, manage escalator load, regulate train intervals dynamically, and model the network as a digital twin. Second, the organizational question: how to do all of this in a way that surfaces new talent, signals modernization to the public, and creates a repeatable channel for innovation inside a 58-year-old transit operator. The answer was a hackathon but a hackathon engineered to produce working concepts on the operator's own data, not a branding exercise.

Why Baku Metropolitan partnered with SUP.VC

➣ For a transit operator running its first innovation program, the operational complexity of a hackathon sourcing applicants at scale, designing technical challenges, recruiting expert mentors, structuring judging, and turning winning concepts into pilots sits well outside core competencies. Baku Metropolitan chose SUP.VC as the operating partner for the same reason corporate hackathons are typically run with specialist innovation companies worldwide: the corporate brings the data, the problems, and the leadership exposure, and the innovation partner brings the program design and the ecosystem reach. SUP.VC contributed end-to-end program design and operations, a mentor network spanning AI and data analytics, programming, design, product development, and transport technologies, and the founder- and student-side credibility that converted a niche opportunity into more than 1,200 registrations in a matter of weeks. The collaboration also extended into universities such as Baku Engineering University, where joint info sessions with Baku Metropolitan and SUP.VC representatives built awareness and quality of applications upstream.

How the program worked

➣ Participants were filtered from over 1,200 applicants down to 72, organized into 18 teams. Across three intensive days, teams worked on seven real challenges built on the metro's own operational data: passenger flow forecasting, smart transition management, escalator load balancing, passenger distribution on platforms, dynamic interval regulation, optimization of the boarding and alighting process, and the construction of a mini digital twin of the metro network. The coding and team-work phases took place inside the Icherisheher station itself, embedding teams in the operational environment they were designing for. Final presentations were held in the auditorium of the Baku Metropolitan Technological Complex, where teams pitched directly to leadership.

Three winners were selected:
»team Khatai took first place and 5,000 AZN,
»team Ganjlik took second place and 3,000 AZN
»team Sahil took third place and 1,000 AZN. Winning teams were offered internship opportunities inside the metro system, and the strongest projects entered the pipeline for pilot testing on live infrastructure.

What Baku Metropolitan gained

➣ The most direct outcome of the program is technical. The hackathon produced concrete AI-based concepts addressing seven of the metro's most pressing operational questions, with the strongest projects moving toward pilot deployment. This is the venture-clienting principle applied to a public infrastructure operator: instead of commissioning a single vendor to study a problem, the metro received eighteen parallel attempts at the same problem set in seventy-two hours, with the cost of failure absorbed by the program itself. For an operator that has historically procured technology in long, capital-heavy cycles, this is a fundamentally faster way to surface workable ideas. The second outcome is positioning. By becoming the first metro operator in Azerbaijan and one of the few in the region to run an open hackathon on its own data, Baku Metropolitan moved from being seen as a legacy transit operator to being seen as a modernizing one. The program generated sustained earned media across Azerbaijani, Russian-language, and international tech publications, and positioned the metro alongside the wider Smart City agenda for Baku. For an organization that sits inside AZCON Holding and operates as part of a national infrastructure portfolio, that positioning has compounding value across procurement, partnerships, and policy. The third outcome is talent. The program created a direct, high-signal relationship between Baku Metropolitan and more than 1,200 of the most technically capable young engineers, data scientists, and designers in the country. Seventy-two of them spent three days working inside the operator's own facilities on the operator's own data, supervised by senior metro leadership. For a transit system that needs to recruit a new generation of specialists to run an increasingly data-driven operation, the hackathon is also a recruiting funnel one that no traditional job posting could replicate. The fourth outcome is cultural. Running a hackathon inside an organization with a 58-year operating history sends an internal signal as strong as the external one. It establishes that the metro can move quickly, partner externally, and treat its own data as a resource for open innovation rather than a closed asset. That cultural shift is the precondition for everything that comes after.

What's next

➣ The Metro Hackathon is the opening cohort of a longer innovation track. Winning concepts are moving into pilot testing on live infrastructure, the strongest participants are entering internship and recruitment pipelines, and SUP.VC and Baku Metropolitan are designing the next cohort to expand the challenge set and deepen the path from concept to deployment.