Mumbai 2.0 Hackathon: Coders Take on Real-World Animal Welfare Challenges at Lodha Place
Ash Singh, CEO of Electric Sheep, and Sam Tucker-Davis, CEO of Open Paws, delivering talks at the India Animal Welfare Forum.
The Code for Compassion campus is many things at once. It’s a coding hub for animal rights technologists, a space to host hackathons and build real-world solutions, and a lush green campus designed for co-working and meaningful networking. It also serves as a venue for advocates to gather and host events, just like the upcoming Ultra Impact for Animals event hosted in support with Kickstarting For Good, and as the permanent home for the Electric Sheep and Open Paws teams.
And when that energy moves beyond the campus, it scales…..
Mumbai, 1 February 2026 | One Lodha Place transformed into a hub of ideas, code, and collaboration as developers from across the city gathered for Mumbai 2.0, a high-energy hackathon dedicated to building solutions for India’s animal welfare ecosystem.
This marked the second hackathon in Mumbai organized by Code for Compassion, a joint initiative of Electric Sheep and Open Paws.
What made this hackathon unique was its immediacy and relevance. Participants received the problem statements just one day before the event i.e on 31 January, during a landmark conference organized by the Upadhyay Foundation, which convened the first-ever India Animal Welfare Forum (IAWF).
The IAWF conference brought together funders, NGOs, researchers, and practitioners from across the country, creating a national platform to discuss systemic gaps and opportunities in animal welfare and advocacy. The insights and challenges shared at the forum directly informed the hackathon themes, ensuring that coders were working on real, urgent, and field-tested problems.
From Dialogue to Action
On 31 January, the IAWF set the tone. Leaders from across the animal welfare sector spoke about challenges such as rescue coordination, scattered data, funding transparency, and limited access to technology for grassroots groups.
By the end of the day, these discussions were turned into clear problem statements and shared with developers just hours before the hackathon began.
By the morning of 1 February, One Lodha Place was buzzing with energy. Teams of engineers, designers, and product thinkers were divided into teams, building prototypes that could support animal protection work at scale.
Throughout the day, participants:
Collaborated across disciplines
Validated ideas with mentors from the animal welfare and tech sectors
Built MVPs focused on impact, usability, and scalability
The atmosphere was intense yet hopeful driven by shared purpose.
Mumbai 2.0 demonstrated a powerful model: connect sector experts and changemakers first, then hand the baton to technologists to build solutions fast. The result was not just a hackathon, but a pipeline from conversation to code to change.
With its success, Mumbai 2.0 marked an important step in bridging India’s animal welfare movement with the country’s dynamic tech community. It was about alignment, urgency, and building tools that truly matter.
As Ash Singh, CEO of Electric Sheep, put it:
“The coding community in Mumbai has done it again. An incredible selection of AI for impact applications delivered in record quick time by brilliant young minds. Together they are rewriting the rules on how AI is driving impact. The whole of India should be proud of what they are achieving through Code for Compassion.”
Learn more about the problem statements and the solutions developed during the hackathon on our demo page here.
ENDS
Contact: hello@electricsheep.is
Notes for Editors:
Electric Sheep is a global accelerator and edtech for secure, compassionate AI. Its fellowships, hackathons and dedicated bricks-and-mortar acceleration hub in Bangalore are laser-focussed on reducing AI harms while building AI that supports the welfare and flourishing of all sentient life - www.electricsheep.is . It was incubated along with technical partners and compassionate AI model pioneers Open Paws - www.openpaws.ai - by Kickstarting for Good in November 2024.
2. Find more info on Code for Compassion and the campus here:
www.electricsheep.is/code-for-compassion
