Eighty-five students from the Jerusalem College of Technology (JCT) built practical solutions to industry-driven challenges in just 48 hours at the school’s 10th annual Great Minds Hackathon, held this week in Jerusalem. The event brought together Haredi and national religious students from Israel and around the world—including India and the United States—for two days of intensive, real-world innovation.
Hosted by JCT’s Schreiber LevTech Entrepreneurship Center, the hackathon featured more than 20 challenges across sectors including HealthTech, AI, defense, education, fintech and venture capital. Teams were tasked with designing and pitching proofs-of-concept judged by senior executives from Israel’s technology, VC and defense industries.
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The hackathon at Jerusalem College of Technology
(Photo: Jerusalem College of Technology)
The top prize went to ReMind, a scalable HealthTech platform that aims to lower dropout rates in youth therapy. The solution creates a “zero-friction” link between therapists and families by gamifying children’s therapeutic routines and delivering actionable, data-driven insights for clinicians. “We wanted to work on something that truly mattered,” said ReMind team member Israel Shteinberg. “Even if we didn’t win, we wanted our work to have meaning.”
Second-place team SmartTest tackled a major pain point in education: manually grading handwritten exams. Their AI-powered tool, built on Vision Language Models (VLM), delivers fast and scalable results for the $300 billion global education sector.
In third place was The Roots, a team that developed an AI agent for automating venture capital due diligence. Their tool extracts key data from pitch decks, performs market research, flags risks, and enables investors to explore startups via a conversational interface.
Other standout projects included NexaNav, which addressed the challenge of navigating in GPS-denied environments, using advanced signal processing with defense applications; and SignalCap, winner of the best presentation award, which developed a contract-analysis and equity management platform for startup founders.
The judging panel included leading figures from Israel’s tech ecosystem: Gabi Levenberg (CYE), Lt. Col. (Res.) Avi Avraham (Dor Information Technologies), Dotan Levi (NVIDIA), Noam Fraenkel (JFrog), Aaron Zucker (Sapir Venture Partners), and Yaron Magal (ICAP). Teams were evaluated on technical execution, scalability, and business viability.
“In just 48 hours, our students turned real-world problems into working technology,” said Orlee Guttman, co-founder of the LevTech Center. “They demonstrated not just creativity, but the ability to execute under pressure.”
The Schreiber LevTech Entrepreneurship Center runs innovation programs year-round for students, faculty, and alumni, from entrepreneurship training to accelerator programs. For many teams, the hackathon marked the beginning of continued development toward commercialization—underscoring JCT’s growing role in shaping Israel’s tech landscape.