Yugaantar 2025: Student-Led Festival at SST Blends Technology, Competition and Culture

The tech and student crowd in Bengaluru joined together for the Scaler School of Technology's Yugaantor 2025, a four day festival of innovation, competition, and culture. All student organized, the festival attracted thousands of participants from 800 colleges, including those of the IITs, IIITs, and IIMs, and even organizations in five different countries.

There was passion and innovation for four days on campus. What began as a college fest seemed to turn into a ground for budding engineers and startups to test their mettle. Right from live demonstrations to coding competitions, the magnitude and enthusiasm of tech innovation dominated the air.

Student Innovation Takes Centre Stage

Dragon’s Den was an exemplary event, where teams from startups of IIT Hyderabad, NIT Warangal, among others, were invited. The judging criteria of go-to-market strategy, scale of products, and serving the need of users was conducted by Sambhav Jain (Co-founder, FamPay; Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneur), along with Mehul Mohan (Co-founder, Fermion).

The first prize went to an SST student named Jenish Togadiya for NeroSpatial, a duo of smart and contextually aware glasses that work like a personal learning assistant. The glasses help display concepts of STEM-related ideas in real-time so that students can learn them and understand them with ease.

His effort gave him a prize of ₹50,000.

The second highlight of the day belonged to 8-year-old inventor Lakshveer Rao, who flew in from Hyderabad to display his CircuitHeroes, which is a card game and AI-powered application that can teach kids real-world electronics through play. The manner in which he has implemented learning circuits at a level more advanced than mere toy-making impressed the audience and jurors alike.

Scaling Competitions in the Technology Space

Robotics had five events, and they included FPV Drone Race, Robo Soccer, ClimberOne, MazeSolver, and they received some serious crowd attention on campus. FPV Drone Race had SST student Kartik Tare, a national-level drone racer. Robo Soccer, ClimberOne, and MazeSolver had robotics designed from scratch, which required precision robotics and control. These three events had a prize money pool amounting to ₹7.5 lakhs.

The scale only expanded when the hackathon and competitive programming arena opened. 2,500+ registrations were received pan-country at the Dev-force hackathon for students to come together and build. "It is wild how fast a few hours around the right crowd can shift your perspective. Suddenly, 'just another college fest' felt more like a crash-course in what we could become: engineers, creators, co-founders, dreamers," says Ankur Sharma, a student participant from Presidency University, Bangalore.

Over 1,500 participants registered for Competitive Programming, including ICPC regional finalists. Problems for the coding contest too were set by ICPC finalists; hence, increasing the toughness to match the global standards of difficulty.

e-Sports transformed the classrooms of SST into a live gaming battleground, with Valorant, Free Fire, BGMI, and Smash Karts tournaments attracting over 200 teams and adding new dimensions to the competitive spirit.

Industry speakers such as Madhurima Agarwal, Head of AI Transformation at Microsoft, and S. Rajesh, CEO of Reliance Jio Karnataka, delivered sessions on AI, leadership, and how to navigate the early careers. Speakers also mentioned the depth in technology and eagerness of student participants.

Talent, Technology & Togetherness at its best

Fully organized end-to-end by students, Yugaantar 2025 showed scale and ambition as reflections of Scaler School of Tech's build-first culture. The four days pulsed with a sense of ownership and possibility as students walked away tired, exhilarated, and already dreaming about what they'd build next.