We talk a lot about the digital state, but let’s be honest: behind many sleek digital interfaces, there is often still a dusty room full of handwritten ledgers holding up the line.
To finally bridge this gap, AI-HOUSE, alongside the Ministry of Economy, Environment and Agriculture, Ukrainian Catholic University, and the Ministry of Digital Transformation, has launched the Handwritten to Data national AI hackathon. The mission? To bring together top AI/ML engineers to build tools capable of digitizing millions of handwritten government documents, applications, signatures, and seals.
We are incredibly proud that De Novo — a leading Ukrainian cloud provider and an active member of Diia.City United — is stepping up as the official technological AI partner for the event.
Turning complex, unstructured manuscripts into clean data requires serious computing horsepower. De Novo isn’t just sponsoring; they are handing the engineers the keys to a dedicated cluster powered by NVIDIA H200 accelerators, deployed right here in the Ukrainian cloud.
As De Novo’s AI Director (and hackathon mentor/judge) Dmytro Fedorenko pointed out,
Solving this requires the latest in Computer Vision and NLP. Participants will have access to a heavy-hitting multimodal stack, including GLM-5, Gemma-4, Gemma-3, Qwen-3.5, and Qwen-3.6, alongside Whisper and NVIDIA Parakeet for complex audio archives. Crucially, all operations stay on domestic servers, ensuring absolute digital data sovereignty.
The immediate incentive is a $7,000 prize pool, but the pragmatic value is much bigger. The winning architecture is slated for real-world deployment inside ministry workflows to genuinely speed up public services. To keep the momentum going, De Novo is also offering interested government agencies three months of free GPU access post-hackathon.
De Novo already has a proven track record here — the AI module powering automatic document verification for the state’s «eDozvil» system is actively running in their secure cloud environment.
At Diia.City United, we believe Ukraine’s trajectory toward global tech leadership relies exactly on this: pragmatic, no-nonsense collaboration between the state and the private sector. We are proud of our members who are doing the heavy lifting to drive the country’s digital transformation forward.
