This past weekend, 1435 Capital Management was proud to support the NJx AI Summer Hackathon hosted at Venture X Skillman located in the Montgomery Innovation Hub, where builders spent 24 hours shipping real cybersecurity and AI safety products inspired by topics jointly created by Russ Abdrakhmanov from neKey.
Teams were challenged to think like founding teams by picking from one of the following topics under cybersecurity: privacy, AI defense, accessible security, and nonprofits & everyday people. Teams built tools that gave individuals more control over their data, made powerful AI safer to deploy, opened up security to people usually left out, and delivered protections that resource-constrained organizations could adopt. Teams were judged on real value, customer fit, innovation, execution, and whether the concept was scalable and fundable.
The first place team from a team of students from Bergen County Technical High School – Paramus and they created ModGuard which tackled security for the gaming world, one of the largest yet least protected digital ecosystems. They built a desktop app that deep‑scans game mods and URLs (including inner .jar files) before a player even launches the game, addressing real‑world attacks like account takeovers and malware‑infected mods that target millions of young gamers.
Second place winners from Rutgers University created Snapkey which was a reimagined authentication for everyday users who are overwhelmed by passwords and increasingly vulnerable to AI‑powered cracking. Their prototype turns “your password is a picture” into reality: snap a familiar object to generate and later recover strong, unique passwords, using modern vision models under the hood while giving non‑technical users something tangible, memorable, and resilient to breaches.
The third place team from Central Jersey College Prep Charter School (CJCP) created KinCode which focused on defending families from AI‑driven voice clone scams, where a cloned voice can convincingly impersonate a loved one in distress. Instead of trying to “beat” deepfake detection, KinCode routes around it with a one‑tap verification flow between a senior parent and a trusted adult child, backed by private memory‑based challenges and real‑time analysis of scam tactics.
We’re grateful to NJx for convening this community, to the mentors and judges who pushed teams to think beyond the weekend, and to all the builders who chose to spend their time protecting gamers, seniors, nonprofits, and everyday families. At 1435 Capital Management, we’re excited to keep backing founders at this intersection of AI, security, and real‑world impact and we look forward to supporting future NJx hackathons as these projects mature from weekend builds into lasting products.
Ben Jen
Curtis Lee
Amar Hirani, MBA
Chris Gittings
Aliea Nallbani