Building France - Builders Contests

Enter the Building France AI contest and build software for one real problem in your business using Emergent. Free to enter, no coding needed, 100 winners share over €40,000. Open across France.

Key dates

All times are Central European Summer Time (CEST), with GMT alongside.

Submission and upvoting run together for the full window and close at the same moment. Both are enforced by the platform clock.

Submit early, then keep building

Only the 200 most upvoted submissions advance to judging, and voting closes at the same moment submission does. The longer your entry is live, the more time it has to collect votes. Submit as soon as you have something working, then keep improving it. Improvements to your deployed app reflect on your submission automatically, so there is no reason to wait until it feels finished.

Prizes

The top ten take the largest cash prizes, and every place down to 100th wins something.

Across all 100 winners that is over €40,000 in total value.

Standard plan credit is issued to your Emergent account and must be activated within 90 days of notification. It is non-transferable.

Payment follows identity, eligibility, tax, banking and compliance verification, which has to be completed within 30 days of notification. Withholding tax is deducted at source where the law requires it, so the amount you receive will be less than the headline figure. Taxes and bank charges are the winner's responsibility, and winners are advised to seek independent tax advice.

How to start build?

Important: deploying your app does not submit it.

Submission is a separate step, reachable from your Homepage or your Profile section. This is the most common reason people miss the deadline. You are submitted when you have both a confirmation email and a Submitted status on your entry. Check both before the deadline. Not finding your app in the public showcase gallery means nothing, since that list is long and unsorted.

You can build whenever you like, including before the challenge opens. Submission itself is only open between 10th to 25th August.

One active submission per participant or team. Resubmitting is not necessary, because your submission always shows your current deployment. To enter a different app, delete your current submission first. Deleting clears every upvote it has collected, so you would start again from zero with less time to rebuild them. Deletion is blocked once submissions close.

You can edit your app name and description up to the deadline, after which they are frozen. Your submission URL is generated automatically and cannot be changed.

Who should enter?

You should enter if you run, operate or work closely with a business in France and understand a real problem that software could solve. You do not need to be a developer.

The test is whether you can describe the problem, not whether you can build the fix. That covers the business owner who wants to stop tracking orders manually, the founder who needs a better sales follow-up system, the operator who wants visibility across teams, vendors or approvals, the creator managing leads, sponsorships or content workflows, and the agency building a system for a client workflow. If you watch the same process waste time every week, you qualify.

Teams can enter. Nominate one person as the primary point of contact, and all communication, verification and prize payment goes through them.

What to build?

Software that solves a real business problem. This is an AI app building contest, so what you submit has to be a working app rather than a concept or a deck. The strongest submissions are specific tools built around one real workflow, not generic apps.

Most entries fall into one of five areas. Treat them as starting points, not categories you have to fit into.

1. Revenue and sales

Tracking leads, follow-ups, quotations, customer conversations, lost opportunities, pipelines or repeat orders.

2. Operations and teams

Managing tasks, approvals, vendors, inventory, delivery, production, reporting or internal coordination.

3. Customer experience

Managing support, complaints, requests, onboarding, status updates or service workflows.

4. Finance and admin

Managing invoices, expense approvals, payment follow-ups, purchase requests, vendor payments or internal documentation.

5. Founder and business dashboards

Bringing scattered business data, updates, team progress or key decisions into one place.

How winners are chosen?

Selection runs in four stages.

• All submissions are ranked by upvotes. The 200 most upvoted advance to judging.
• Those 200 are scored against the rubric below, producing the top 100 and their ranking. All 100 win a prize.
• The 10 highest ranked are invited to the Finale.
• The 10 present at the virtual Finale on 19th September, where a separate Final Panel decides the top 3.

No single person picks the winner. Selection runs through public upvotes, rubric based judging, and the Final Panel. The process is led by Emergent with a pool of investors and industry experts. Panel composition will be shared closer to the Finale.

The rubric

Scoring is against a fixed rubric. Nothing outside it counts, including follower counts, social reach and past achievements.

This is not an AI innovation challenge looking for the most novel idea. The rubric rewards one real problem solved well. Every entry that advances is scored on all five criteria below, and you do not need to be strong in all five to place.

Business impact is the heaviest criterion, so evidence it. Time saved per week, follow-ups no longer missed, cost or revenue movement, team adoption, user feedback, before-and-after screenshots. Concrete beats aspirational.

Upvotes and your showcase page

• Every submitted entry appears in the showcase gallery at app.emergent.sh/showcase/building-france and gets its own public page.
• To share it, open your submission and use Share your submission.
• Anyone with the link can open it, see your app and upvote.
• The link gives no access to your account or editor.
• Voters need a free Emergent account. One vote per account per app.
• Milestone rewards unlock as your vote count grows. The full set is shown on your showcase page.
• Upvote counts shown during the voting period are indicative. Final counts are those recorded at the close of voting, after integrity review.