Pinch Me! I Want $50K: Inside Pinch Payments' National Hackathon

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Pinch Payments, a payment orchestration platform serving businesses across Australia and New Zealand, today announced the winner of its national hackathon, Pinch Me! I Want $50K, run in partnership with The Founders Union. Harrison Hreszczuk and Ruby Nanda took home the $50,000 grand prize for Volty, a solution that gives apartment residents a simpler way to charge electric vehicles at home.

Around 150 teams entered the hackathon, which challenged founders, developers, designers and product thinkers to build real solutions using the Pinch Payments API and sandbox environment. Entrants were free to tackle billing and invoicing, subscriptions, payment automation, embedded payments, marketplaces, reconciliation, or any other problem where payments technology could create value, with one condition: the problem had to be real.

Hackathon format

Teams formed ahead of the competition's official launch on 24 July, then took part in an intensive 48-hour build weekend on 25-26 July. Rather than ending at the prototype stage, participants were given a further polishing week to test and refine their products before final submissions closed on 31 July. From the roughly 150 entrants, a panel of judges selected six finalists to pitch live.

Winner announced at Sydney finale

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From the roughly 150 teams took part, six made it through to the final:

Volty - Harrison Hreszczuk and Ruby Nanda

Impulse - Rahul Markasserithodi and Manojvradan Balaji

Moroku - presented by Colin Weir

Monaal Madan

The Bearded Developers - Christopher Dodson, Jacob Gibellini and Luke

Queue Busters - Philip Johns

Volty, created by Harrison Hreszczuk and Ruby Nanda, was named the winner. The product addresses a growing challenge as electric vehicle adoption rises: apartment buildings often require costly, specialised metering and additional power hardware to support EV charging. Volty's approach allows strata managers to use existing power outlets instead, offering a more accessible path to EV charging in multi-unit residential buildings. Hreszczuk and Nanda received $50,000 in cash to further develop the product.

Second place went to Impulse, created by Rahul Markasserithodi and Manojvradan Balaji, who received $25,000 in fee-free payment processing from Pinch Payments to support the product's next stage of growth.

More than a competition

Pinch frames the real win as what happened around the competition rather than the prize itself: strangers forming teams, ideas moving from notes and conversations into working products, and technical and commercial-minded participants pairing up to solve problems together. The 48-hour build weekend created urgency, while the polishing week pushed teams to test whether their idea genuinely solved a problem people would use.

The judging panel included Paul Allen, Carolyn Breeze, Ben Cull, Julian Wraight and Tim Lea, alongside mentors who supported teams through technical, product and commercial challenges.

What's next

The hackathon has ended, but the work continues. Volty now has $50,000 behind its idea, and Impulse has fee-free processing to fuel its next phase. Beyond the two winners, Pinch notes that dozens of teams left with new products, connections, and ideas that didn't exist before the event began, some of which may turn into future businesses or partnerships down the line.