In late June, we hosted Europe’s largest defense tech hackathon for the first time in Munich, bringing together over 100 hackers from across Europe and beyond.
Our ambition was to develop solutions for the most critical challenges of our times. How can we save lives in the face of war? How do we deter conflict in the first place? And how can we ensure Europe’s sovereignty through technological innovation?
We’re not just organizing hackathons for the sake of organizing events but to develop solutions that will be deployed in the real world and found startups that bring them to market.
Here’s what came out of our first hackathon:
What Did The Hackathon Projects Focus On?
With this hackathon, we wanted to show that defense innovation is not just about killer drones; there are various challenges where innovative technological solutions are urgently needed.
We had prepared hackathon challenges for people new to defense innovation who wanted to use the hackathon to explore a new project. At the same time, we were open for people to bring their projects, so long as they were about defense and made their progress clear.
Here’s what the 34 hackathon projects overall focussed on:
1) Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems (CUAS) Solutions
How do we take out unmanned aircraft systems, primarily enemy drones, before they complete their mission? Hackathon projects explore software for terminal guidance and last-mile targeting and hardware solutions, such as developing a pulse jet engine, an ultra short-range air defense system using stingers, cheap interceptor drones, and eliminating Shahed killer drones through entanglement with slings.
2) Autonomy for Unmanned Systems
How can we avoid the loss of lives during conflict? Every unit that can operate autonomously and without human intervention on the ground does not incur fatalities if it’s being attacked. Hackathon teams explored both building autonomous microdrones and autonomous systems for first-person view (FPV) control of drones; future hackathons have a lot of potential to explore autonomy for drones, ground vehicles, and naval drones.
3) Digital Battlefield
How do you know where friend and foe are on the battlefield? Hackathon projects explored building digital twins of a battlefield and updating it in real-time based on human intelligence, detecting changes in the environment, and integrating different sensor inputs to allow for strategic and tactical planning.
4) Reconnaissance and Localization
What are novel ways to gather intelligence about your enemy’s operations? Hackathon teams explore entirely new channels for reconnaissance, such as using stealthy nanoparticles and sounds-based localization methods, as well as effective AI solutions to localize drone footage, image search, and object tracking, given only restricted computational power.
5) Demining
How do you detect and remove landmines before they kill innocent civilians? This topic is also relevant to the aftermath of war, with hackathon teams exploring different solutions based on cheap magnetometers or thermal signatures to find and localize anti-personnel mines.
Which Projects Kept Going After the Hackathon?
Looking into counter-UAS solutions already during the hackathon and landing second place overall, Magnus Freyer and Joshua Soutelo have founded Munin, a startup developing first-line gear for our last line of defense, protecting soldiers from drone attacks.
Kaloyan Miladinov, Ognyan Razsadov, Filostratos Titopoulos, and Aleksandar Mechkarov, a team of Bulgarian high school students, secured third place at the hackathon; now, they have founded a company, SentIRX, to detect landmines using drones and thermal imaging.
Dima Vovchuk and Anton Kharkhalis from the startup NORDA Dynamics worked with several others during the hackathon on autonomous navigation to a target for the last mile. NORDA Dynamics generally specializes in autonomous piloting and targeting systems for UAVs and landed third place at the pitch competition of IT Arena 2024.
Claudio Flores explored during the hackathon through project FAR SIGHT how fluorescent nanoparticles can help with ecologically stealthy reconnaissance; he continues exploring this as part of his bio-nanotech startup, Mimotype Technologies.
Nino Lindenberg and Nura (Ngurah) Linggih founded PLENO, a startup developing autonomous systems for robots; through the hackathon, they looked into building a modular autonomous system for first-person view (FPV) guidance of drones with only a vision-based navigation system for GPS-denied environments.
Vytautas Mikalainis started Unbound Autonomy before the hackathon, developing an AI pin for mission-critical operations. Its technology converts noisy, unstructured tactical communications into digital battlefield updates while also capturing and understanding specific visual actions. By analyzing these visual inputs, its platform automatically updates the digital battlefield with crucial status information, delivering a more comprehensive and real-time operational picture.
Calvin Krieger, Christoph Brauer, and Richard Krümmel are founding a stealth startup that uses large language models for intelligence processing.
We know three more hackathon alumni who are building startups in stealth, which we cannot make public at this time.
Finally, Satyam Goel, who was part of the winning team for our first hackathon, is helping us to organize the Second European Defense Tech Hackathon in Copenhagen this November. In addition, there will be a Paris edition for the second hackathon.
We’ll also have a virtual demo day at the end of October, where you can learn more about the startups and projects from our first hackathon and ask questions.