About NXT1

Game-changing technology, inspired by the future and powered by an expert team.

High-Velocity, Secure SaaS Deployment & Automated Operations

NXT1 was founded with a vision to make SaaS security better for everyone, allowing developers to focus on building innovation and subscribers to benefit from it faster. We aspire to accelerate the impact of SaaS, reduce founder & investor risk, make OPEX irrelevant and increase the cyber economic cost to the adversary (cyber criminals).

Our Mission

The NXT1 mission is to free all software developers and vendors from the traditional overhead of infrastructure management, cybersecurity and security operations, compliance, and marketplace subscriptions, allowing them to focus 100% of their resources, energy and creativity on building innovative software and the success of their customers.

NXT1 meets software vendors where they are, regardless of their business or software maturity, and enables them to deploy compliant, innovative secure SaaS technology to their subscribers in weeks, not years.

The NXT1 LaunchIT application platform offers a streamlined development and SecDevOps experience that virtually eliminates production environment ramp-up, allowing software creators of all types to focus on product quality and innovation.

Leadership

John Sobczak is a proven thought leader and strategist with more than 25 years’ experience developing and delivering more than $6B in technology solutions to the Public Sector. He is driven by the potential impact of technology innovations on real-world problems today and into the future. He co-founded NXT1 to offer such innovations to independent software vendors and SaaS subscribers alike by envisioning the democratization of SaaS security.

As CEO, John encourages the NXT1 team to push past traditional boundaries and explore that which is often just out of reach. His aptitude for communicating complex concepts and solutions to any audience level – from developers and engineers to C-Suite Executives – promotes collective understanding and faster progress toward common goals.

John’s technical acumen grew from a bachelor’s degree in computer science and his early experience at Unisys and Booz Allen Hamilton, where he architected, implemented, and managed sophisticated IT projects and programs across multiple disciplines and domains supporting DoD and DHS. As Govplace’s Vice President of Sales, John’s leadership and focus on solutions led to 150% CAGR over 10 years with strategic awards on multi-year contracts such as DHS CDM. In this role he gained valuable experience working with impressive trailblazing technology companies as they struggled to find traction, lacking many key business assets, including strategy, messaging, relationships, and in particular, a path to achieving regulatory compliance.

Seeing a clear opportunity, John founded RockITek in 2017, a progressive technology distributor and aggregator. He bootstrapped this startup to $12M+ in the first 2 years. With RockITek, John set out with a clear strategic vision and approach that would prove to accelerate the impact of their partners’ technologies. The opportunity to work closely with dozens of early-stage companies and their executives helped him more deeply understand their world and provided a roadmap of friction that needed to be eliminated to facilitate their success. This experience provided impetus for the founding of NXT1.

Darren House is a seasoned technology executive with over 20 years' experience in providing strategic leadership and innovative solutions in the government markets. He currently serves as the Chief Technology Officer at NXT 1, empowering Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to securely launch and manage game changing SaaS faster and more cost-effectively.

Previously, Darren established RockIT Labs and served as CTO of RockITek. He led the development of TheKeyosk, a cutting-edge security key managed service, and ultimately, NXT1 LaunchIT. Under his leadership, RockITek expanded its capabilities from a solutions-based aggregator to a cloud security provider, providing automated detection and protection features for cloud environments that integrate with existing cloud products and data.

Prior to co-founding NXT1 (as CTO of RockITek), he served as a Senior Security Specialist for Amazon Web Services. At AWS, he partnered with the Head of Business Development for AWS Worldwide Public Sector for Security Services to develop business aligned technical global public sector strategies and GTM plans; execute solution and strategy alignment; create and lead development of AWS security solutions, evangelize, blog, and create webinars to communicate AWS security positioning and technical capabilities to the global public sector market.

With extensive experience in technical roles, Darren has successfully led large projects and major program captures, developed proof-of-concept solutions for on-premise, cloud, and hybrid environments, and authored white papers, articles, and blogs on emerging technology topics. He has also delivered sales and technical presentations on Virtualization, Data Center, Cloud, Security, and their relationship to Government trends. Darren has held various leadership roles including CTO, Director of Solutions Management, Technologist, Architect, and network and systems engineering, showcasing his diverse expertise in the technology industry.

Darren is recognized as an industry thought leader and is known for his strategic vision and expertise in leveraging innovative technologies to solve complex technology security challenges.

Bruce Popky leads strategic and operational marketing for NXT1. He is an accomplished business leader with over 20 years' experience connecting technology solutions with markets and customers. Most recently, he served as Director of Marketing for asset management SaaS pioneer, EZO. Previous roles include heading marketing for IoT startup Precision Fermentation and enterprise IT performance monitoring software company, eG Innovations.

Bruce has provided marketing leadership and tactical direction for technology-driven businesses across a wide variety of industries, including IT, financial services, healthcare, biotech, commercial printing, and wholesale distribution. He earned his B.A. in Philosophy from Dickinson College. Bruce is based in Austin, Texas.

Our Story

NXT1 is a direct result of our founders’ experiences as leaders of RockITek, a Maryland-based enterprise technology consulting and solutions provider. The RockITek team worked closely with emerging software vendors challenged with delivering enterprise SaaS that would meet customer’s security and compliance requirements with their existing budget and resources.

When the opportunity to build a SaaS product presented itself in early 2022 that required compliance with FedRAMP requirements, John and Darren discussed a highly secure and automated architecture that could be reusable in the future.

Darren engineered a solution with Zero Trust security, multi-tenancy, scale, and automated operations at its core using a 100% cloud-native, serverless architecture. With this architecture, RockITek’s product TheKeyosk was built and launched in just 2 months.

Together, John and Darren founded NXT1 to launch the LaunchIT platform, inspired by the success of this initial exploratory work and the potential to accelerate the impact of secure SaaS.

Our Culture

We are driven true believers, excited by the possibilities presented with each new technology.
We are a group of curious and talented individuals working hard to make a difference, not only in our careers and in the company, but in the world.
We each bring our unique talents and ideas to make a direct impact.
We desire to democratize security technologies by removing barriers.
We are passionate about launching the next wave of game changing software to the world.

News

Visit the NXT1 Media Kit

Careers

Join our Team and Help Build the Future

NXT1 is always interested in hearing from talented, driven professionals, across all areas. Please reach out and let us know how you excel and why NXT1 inspires you.

Currrent Openings

We have no current openings. Please check back again.

Thank you NXT1 for giving EntropiQ a platform to accelerate our development and go to market. NXT1's LaunchIT allowed EntropiQ to develop our platform in under 120 days, saved us $1.8M in security spend, cut 18 months of dev time, and allowed us to be compliance ready day 1 for our clients. If you are an executive LaunchIT allows your dev team to focus on their core and expedite delivery.

Joe FaxlangerCo-founder, EntropiQ

At Parallel, we specialize in developing secure software for regulated industries where trust and compliance are paramount. LaunchIT has been a game-changer for us, offering a managed and opinionated IaaS platform that lets us focus on what we do best – writing exceptional software. Their platform enables us to easily manage and monitor all of our clients' applications and infrastructure at a glance, enhances observability, and ensures that our projects are always built on a solid foundation of security. Choosing LaunchIT means we can confidently tackle high-risk projects, knowing the infrastructure side is expertly handled.

Emaad AliCEO, Parallel

XSOC chose NXT1 LaunchIT because we need to offer SaaS that is both globally available and strictly compliant with all of our customers’ regulatory frameworks. We’re very excited to be able to manage customer subscriptions and scale our services without requiring teams of additional resources. LaunchIT is a key component in our strategy for revenue growth.

Richard BlechFounder & CEO, XSOC CORP

Go from code to published, secure SaaS
in just 15 minutes.

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NXT1 LAUNCHIT

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