Drone Interception. Contested Comms. Maritime Autonomy.
At the beginning of July, we returned for our second European Defense Tech Hackathon in Italy. For one weekend, a new generation of builders — engineers, founders, operators, and defense innovators — turned ideas into prototypes, tackling the urgent security challenges Europe can’t afford to ignore.
What Made This Edition Stand Out
Rome ran under the patronage of the Centro Studi Militari Aerospaziali «Giulio Douhet» (CESMA), and mentors on the ground included representatives of Ukrainian military units — people who bring operational reality straight from the field into the room.
This is what makes our hackathons different: direct access to operators and military experts you couldn’t just meet over coffee. It grounds every project in real operational needs, and gives teams the kind of feedback — and post-hackathon mentorship — that turns a weekend prototype into something that gets used later on.
The Challenges
Teams in Rome worked on challenges related to Europe’s air defense and autonomy stack — counter-UAS and drone interception — as well as secure communications, maritime coordination, and edge autonomy. Different tracks, with one shared premise: the link goes down. Every challenge pushed teams to build for the moment the datalink drops, the signal can’t be trusted, and there’s no operator in the loop to save the mission.
That meant autonomy that lives on board rather than on the ground, coordination that survives radio silence, and systems that keep working when the electromagnetic environment turns hostile. The through-line was low-cost systems that fuse autonomy, sensing, and AI.
The Teams That Stood Out
Every team made real progress over the weekend, and that’s what matters most. Overall, three were selected by the jury for special recognition:
1st Place — Ghostlock. An edge-native counter-UAS interceptor that never loses its target. GPS-denied, comms-denied, one RGB camera, everything onboard. By predicting where the target is going rather than searching the whole sky, the team reduced detection compute by 89% while maintaining a stable target lock. Built on the ELT Group challenge by Leonardo Russo, Michelangelo Ghignoni, Vlad Fatu, Yannis Leon Bößmann, and Nour Albagoury
2nd Place — Omnivision. Swarming software that lets multiple drones coordinate and operate as one system — planning and executing missions collectively rather than as individually piloted units. Built by Daniel Guan, Sabina Nurseitova, and Santiago M. Henao.
3rd Place — Mondrian. A plug-and-play visual positioning kit for UAVs in GNSS-denied environments: preloaded Earth observation maps matched against live camera imagery by onboard neural networks, delivering absolute positioning without external signals. Built by Jacopo Alati, Samuele Ebano and Nicolò Giandinoto.
Some of the builders behind that third-place team we’d seen before — first at our Milan hackathon last October, now in Rome. They’re building Raysilience, working on resilient navigation for autonomous aerial platforms in GNSS-denied environments — the same problem they tackled over the weekend, but for real. They came back to build with us again, and that’s how you know it’s working.
The real success measure of our hackathons isn’t the demo day on Sunday afternoon. It’s who’s still building months later — still testing, talking to end users, and eventually deploying.
Huge thanks to our jury members — Stefano Beco (AIAD — Italian Industries Federation for Aerospace, Defense and Security), Alessandro Casiraghi (NVM), Andrea Fortunato (Mantavia), Irbis (Ukrainian Armed Forces), Tristan Mallet (Parrot), and Alessandro Nicolosi (ELT Group) — for giving every team sharp, honest feedback and picking out the projects that stood out.
Partners and Supporters
Huge thanks to our host, Zest Group, and to our hackathon partner, ELT Group, whose challenge anchored the counter-UAS track. Thank you also to our partners Parrot, Mantavia, and NVM — and to the Centro Studi Militari Aerospaziali «Giulio Douhet» (CESMA) for their patronage.
Finally, thanks to Paolo Trecate for running the event end-to-end, to Akim Karpach for the photo and video coverage, and to every mentor and team that spent the weekend building.