How Slash announced its role behind Hack the North on X

Slash is a business banking platform that issues corporate cards with per-card limits and gives companies accounts for holding and moving operating cash. At Hack the North 2026, Slash was behind the scenes on the spending for Canada's largest student-led hackathon. The University of Waterloo event brought more than 1,000 hackers to campus for a weekend of venues, catering, advertising, and flights, and the organizers used Slash cards to pay for it. In the launch video, organizers describe a six-figure annual budget whose transactions pile up across food, travel, venues, and last-minute purchases. Sorting those charges and handing people a way to pay had been difficult. Slash let them issue a card for a specific category and cap what it could spend, so a purchase such as poker tables could go through on a card that was already live. An organizer could call the vendor and read off the number without pulling someone else off the floor. The team has to turn three buildings, each about six or seven floors, into a working venue in roughly eight hours. Slash co-founder and CTO Kevin Bai started in engineering at Waterloo before leaving in 2020 to build the company with CEO Victor Cardenas. Hack the North, now in its 13th year and still run by students, has to function like a small company for one weekend. The launch shows how category cards and hard limits work when the people spending are volunteers, the vendors are scattered, and the time to get the buildings ready is short.