Sponsored Tournaments

A sponsored tournament is a Tournament whose task, robot, or benchmark is proposed and funded by an enterprise, then designed and operated by Nepher on the platform's existing infrastructure.

Request one at https://nepher.ai/enterprise/contact?interest=custom_tournament.

Browse live sponsored events at https://nepher.ai/tournament/sponsored.

How It Works

1. Propose — describe the robot, task, or benchmark you want optimized (e.g. "a forklift robot for a warehouse with dynamic object placement").
2. Scope — Nepher's team turns your request into a concrete tournament: a fixed robot, environment, and metric, following the same Purpose & Scope model used for community tournaments.
3. Operate — Nepher publishes the task repo, required EnvHub environments, and eval-nav evaluation config, then runs the full Tournament Lifecycle — Contest, Submit, Evaluation, Review, Reward — on nepher.ai/tournament.
4. Deliver — you receive the resulting policy checkpoints, task code, and evaluation configs, the same deliverables described in What You Get From a Tournament.

Sponsoring does not give your company direct control over the tournament dashboard, judging, or validator scoring — Nepher operates every sponsored tournament to the same standard as community-run ones. See How engagement works.

How Sponsorship Appears Publicly

When a tournament is marked sponsored, the unified site shows:

• A Sponsored badge on browse cards and list rows
• A Sponsored by … chip in the tournament header
• A sponsor block on the detail page (logo, description, careers link, optional recruitment / Nepher Verified chips)

Admin configuration uses sponsor name, logo, description, and careers URL — there is no public organization ID field in the create/edit UI.

Sponsor Fees vs. Rewards

Sponsor fees are recognized as enterprise revenue, not miner rewards, unless a tournament explicitly states otherwise. Your sponsorship funds Nepher's design and operation of the tournament (task engineering, validator evaluation, review). Miner rewards continue to follow the standard Incentive Mechanism — winner-takes-all TAO payouts from the subnet, independent of your sponsor fee — unless the specific tournament's terms explicitly say sponsor funds are being added to the reward pool.

Always check the published terms of a specific sponsored tournament if you expect your sponsorship to fund miner payouts directly.

Open Publication

Like community tournaments, results from sponsored tournaments are published — code, checkpoints, and configs — to SimStore's open tier, unless your engagement's privacy terms specify otherwise (for example, a private engagement). Discuss data and IP handling with Nepher before launch if you need a private variant.

Getting Started

Submit a request at https://nepher.ai/enterprise/contact?interest=custom_tournament. See the Enterprise FAQ for timelines and pricing questions, and Brand & Credibility for how sponsorship supports visibility goals.