The finalists of nwHacks 2025!

Awarded to the team with the most creative and inspiring project, chosen by the members of the nwHacks organizing team.

Awarded to the team with the best project consisting of at least 2-3 first time hackers.

Awarded to the team with the best design. This prize recognizes projects with exceptional creativity, functionality, and user experience.

Awarded to the project with the most potential positive impact on an underrepresented community. Design with empathy, build for accessibility, and help us use tech as a tool for empowerment and equity!

Awarded to the project with the greatest potential to grow into a viable business. Celebrate innovation, market impact, and entrepreneurial vision!

Awarded to the project with the most innovative solution for healthcare and wellness.

Register your domain name with GoDaddy Registry for a chance to win a Hack from Home Kit! Each Kit contains an assortment of awesome swag along with a tote for easy transport.

Utilize Terraform in your hackathon project this weekend for a chance to win some awesome Hashicorp prizes for you and each of your teammates!

Build a DApp using Midnight this weekend for a chance to win wireless headphones for you and each of your teammates!

Calling all Hackers! It’s time to push the boundaries of what's possible with Gen AI. Do you want to build AI-powered apps to make your friends say, "Whoa, how'd you do that?" This weekend, we want you to build projects that bring Gen AI APIs to your end users. Each member of our winning team will take home a FitBit and Wacom Drawing Tablet.

Streamplace Best Overall Applications

Demonstrate a hack with a functioning technical integration with Streamplace, Livepeer, or video on the AT protocol to be eligible!

Prize: $3000 prize pool

Leverage technology to build a more environmentally and socially sustainable future

At TELUS, we strive to challenge ourselves and those around us to seek innovative ways to drive positive change - from building stronger communities and helping those who need it most to ensuring equal access to technology and driving innovations in healthcare and sustainability.

In this challenge, we’re looking to leverage technology innovation to help us build stronger communities.
Some project topics could include:
• Improving accessibility to basic human needs
o Healthcare, agriculture, food, shelter, clothing, safety, education, employment
• Support resources for individuals and community groups facing social issues
o Gender inequality, racial inequality, poverty, mental health
• Social engagement and connection
o Helping students to get back to in-person activities
o Helping seniors to become more involved in community activities
• Helping local businesses recover from the pandemic

We look forward to seeing the creative solutions that you come up with.

Prize: For a team of max 4 - $250 Gift Card per person (Total $1000 Gift Cards)

Purrformance Act: A Reverse Engineering GIF Challenge (4x $50 Amazon Gift Cards)

Drop by CSE’s workshop happening @2:30PM in LSI 1013 to learn more about this prize, and visit CSE’s booth for clues!

Best Security Hack

Show us your take on cybersecurity! Build a creative security-focused hackathon project that keeps simplicity and usability at its core. Submit your project for a chance to win a $100 CAD Best Buy gift card - so you can do more of what you're passionate about - as well as a 30-minute chat with a member of 1Password's Emerging Talent team!

Prize: $100 CAD Best Buy gift card per each team member + recruiter chat

Present your project ideas with a video created using Filmora Video Editor! Download Filmora to craft your video and submit it on DevPost now. The winning team(s) will receive a $200 cash gift card!

Wondershare Filmora is proud to support the innovative hackers and young creators at nwHacks 2025. Visit our booth on January 18 to grab free swag and explore how Filmora 14’s powerful AI features make video editing easier than ever.

- If total submissions are under 30: There will be one winning team, receiving a $200 cash gift card.
- If total submissions exceed 30: There will be two winning teams, each receiving a $200 cash gift card.

Glaive's vision is to democratise and commoditise AI, enabling a future where anyone can have a fleet of models working for their use cases.

This prize will be awarded to the team that makes best use of any open-source LLM in their project. Our judges are looking for applications that leverage any model in novel & effective ways, without proprietary API-access models (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude) or remote GPU compute.

(Teams without access to a GPU on their local machines are permitted to use Google Colab(https://colab.research.google.com/)

to run their models.)

Use Defang in your project this weekend and you'll qualify to win a Touch Screen IoT Sensor for you and each of your team members! Criteria: Best use of Defang. Bring your own domain.

Prize: Touch Screen IoT Sensors

Best Developer Tool

Build a hack that focuses on improving the developer experience in some meaningful way - this could be tackling any part of the development lifecycle (creating, modifying or testing software)! Also note that you do NOT have to use Warp in order to be eligible for this prize. However, we'd love for you to try it out if you're on Mac, Linux or WSL (we just launched Warp on Linux recently and we're working on native Windows!).

Prize: Keychron mechanical keyboards

Show Your Feedback!

Use Ception and share your insights about our platform, and your team could win access to manage up to 10 projects and unlock exciting upcoming features. 

Criteria: actionable, impactful, and creative feedback that enhances user experience. 

Prize: Ception Premium Subscription for 1 year