Bridgewater Immersion: AI Innovation Hackathon

📅 Event Date: April 23-25, 2026
📍Location: New York City
🎯 Application Deadline: March 20, 2026

At Bridgewater – we study super-intelligence.

For 50 years, we have been mapping the cause-and-effect relationships that govern financial markets – which move and interact in ways too complex for any one human, or historically, one machine to fully comprehend. Bridgewater approached this challenge by building an "expert system," in which computers systematically apply human-generated causal understanding to trade financial markets.

Through time, Bridgewater’s knowledge compounded to build, what we believe, is the most valuable expert system in the world. However, new technology pushes us to transform our approach to understanding the world. Launched in 2023, Bridgewater’s AIA Labs is a dedicated group within Bridgewater that seeks to utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning to generate returns in the market. As we speak, AIA Labs is building an artificial investor designed to perform rigorous, explainable, fundamental research at a scale no human-based process can ever achieve.

This next leap requires a new kind of investor – an inventor defined by creativity, analytical rigor, and independent thinking – capable of interrogating our systems and bringing to bear the best of engineering and science.

Participants will work alongside Deputy Chief Investment Officer Blake Cecil and a team of Bridgewater’s investors and systemizers to:

• Build and defend an original concept directly to Bridgewater leaders operating at the frontier of AI and investing. 
• Collaborate with Bridgewater engineers and investors to build agentic workflows, custom tooling, and predictive systems. 
• Ship a working prototype — go from concept to code on a live market puzzle and demo it in front of the group.

Please apply to our 2027 Internship Program with your Hackathon Project idea and Innovative Project Submission by March 20, 2026 to be considered to attend this event.

About Deputy Chief Investment Officer Blake Cecil
In 2024, at the age of thirty-one, Blake Cecil became the first Deputy Chief Investment Officer in Bridgewater’s 50-year history. He partners with Managing CIO Greg Jensen to oversee our flagship strategy, Pure Alpha, to manage 200+ investors, and to shape the future of Bridgewater in an AI context. Blake earned those responsibilities because of his incredible capabilities and his commitment to challenging the status quo, which has manifested in every stage of his life.

While in high school, he became the top contributor to a website that helped thousands of students without access to specialized test preparation navigate college admissions. Later, he became the first person from his central Illinois town to attend an Ivy League institution. After dropping out of Columbia University and joining Bridgewater without a degree, Blake challenged everything we knew about currencies – reshaping Bridgewater systems from the ground up. Now, Blake is creating new opportunities for any student to access the hedge fund industry. Two years ago, he developed a first-of-its-kind forecasting competition which drew thousands of applicants to Bridgewater from around the world in all walks of life, augmenting meritocracy and accessibility in our recruiting pipelines.