A few weeks ago I had the chance to attend Platanus Hack ft. Firecrawl in Mexico City, and it was an incredible experience. The hackathon brought together a hundred hackers from all over, and the energy in the room was electric. I got to represent Firecrawl and see firsthand how teams used our tool to build some amazing projects.
Kicking things off — 100 hackers, 36 hours, de cero a producto
Firecrawl sponsored the event, which was organized entirely by Platanus and hosted by Fintual. I finally got to meet the Platanus team in person, and they were incredibly welcoming and supportive. They made sure everything ran smoothly, and their passion for building a real developer community was obvious the whole weekend.
A hundred hackers in one room
The hackathon was capped at 100 participants, selected from hundreds of applicants across Mexico. What impressed me most was the diversity: people from China, the US, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, and of course, México — with ages starting at 14 and going all the way up.
This is what the whole weekend felt like
Meeting the people behind the projects
The event was organized around tracks, which were revealed at the opening. Teams had to pick one on the spot — legacy, new media, new interfaces, or AI security — and shape their entire product idea around it. I love this format because nobody arrives with a pre-built project; everything you see at the end was genuinely built over the weekend.
Heads-down and shipping
Throughout the event I walked the rooms and talked with teams about their ideas and how Firecrawl could help them. I was amazed by the creativity and ingenuity in that building. Representing Firecrawl meant I spent most of the weekend answering questions, debugging alongside teams, and just nerding out about web data with people who were genuinely excited to use it.
The caps went fast
Seeing Firecrawl in the wild
Which brings me to the thing I cared most about: seeing how teams actually used Firecrawl. It’s one thing to build the product; it’s another to watch people reach for it under time pressure and bend it toward problems we never anticipated.
Giving the Firecrawl talk — dale acceso web a tus agentes
I saw some genuinely great usage over the weekend — teams pulling in web data to power their ideas, wiring scraping and extraction into their projects, and shipping working demos in a matter of hours. Watching people get value out of something you’ve poured work into is, honestly, the best feedback loop there is.
Something that surprised me: even though this was our first event in LATAM, a good chunk of the 100 hackers already knew Firecrawl. A handful had even attended our previous events in SF, like Hack the Stackathon and our Founders Inc stand earlier this year. It’s a great feeling to see the work travel that far.
The Firecrawl Track winner: Sendero
We announced a small prize for the best use of Firecrawl, and the winner was Sendero — an AI-powered platform for missing persons research. They used Firecrawl to scrape government databases (messy HTML pages, some with PDFs, some with images), organized all of that data so it was actually searchable by name, and then layered an AI agent on top. They also analyzed news articles and other sources to identify risk areas and help families find their loved ones.
It was a powerful example of what web data can do when it’s pointed at a real problem. Out of everything I saw that weekend, this was the project that stuck with me.
Team Sendero, winners of the Firecrawl Track
The runner-up built a live fútbol analytics platform. They used Firecrawl to pull data on both teams during a live match and generate real-time predictions of the outcome. Very different problem, same pattern: fresh web data feeding an AI agent, built in a weekend.
Demo day: 36 hours of work compressed into a few minutes on stage
Meanwhile, outside: México was winning
The hackathon wasn’t the only thing happening in the city that weekend. México beat Korea in the World Cup, and the streets exploded. We grabbed the camera and walked straight into the celebration — flags on every corner, luchador masks, pink smoke, entire families out on the avenue at midnight. Fitting, considering one of our finalist teams spent the weekend building live fútbol analytics.
These are mine:
Flags on motorcycles, pink smoke, and the happiest luchador in the city
Until next time
Huge thanks to the Platanus team for putting this together, to everyone who stopped by to talk, and to my wife for being the best travel-and-hackathon companion I could ask for — she helped organize our table, talked with participants, and even made new friends along the way.
Holding down the Firecrawl table together
As a company we’re looking to show up more and more in LATAM, and this event was a great first step. We can’t wait to see what the next Platanus Hack brings.
And if you’re a community organizer interested in having Firecrawl at your event, reach out at [email protected]. We’d love to support your event and help bring the power of web data to your community.