Signal Intelligence. Combat First Aid. Maritime Dominance.
Nine months after our first Copenhagen hackathon in November 2024, we returned this August—bigger and stronger!
Last year’s event brought together around 80 participants and mentors across 19 teams. This time, more than 130 people formed 26 teams—engineers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and defense experts—coming together for 48 hours to tackle urgent security tech challenges.
What made this edition stand out was the active involvement of the Danish Defence Command:
Major Kim Nødskov, Head of the MDO Element in the Strategic Development Section, Lieutenant Colonel Nicolai Martinu, Head of Training at the Danish Defence Drone Centre, and their colleagues joined as mentors onsite, sharing insights, among others, from Denmark’s new drone conscription program, which was inspired by Ukraine.
This is what makes our hackathons special: access to military experts, whom you couldn’t just meet over coffee on the street. It ensures our challenges and hackathon project address real operational needs, and provides the team with clear feedback and post-hackathon mentorship to build real solutions that will be used in real life.
Workshops
After an opening keynote by Stephan Lachmann from Helsing on how they’re developing technological superiority across domains, we held a series of workshops preparing the hackers for the hackathon:
- Emilie d’Olne from Helsing and Alexander Hebbe, CEO at Monava, co-led a workshop on acoustic detection
- Major Kim Nødskov gave a workshop on drone identification—friend or foe
- And we had two workshops by Bifrost Defence: Startup Validation in the Defence Sector by David Rogberg and Mats Pagels, and another one on Modular Design Management & Acceleration of the Product-Market Fit by Mathieu Frilet
Unlike last year’s edition, which began the actual hackathon Saturday morning and gave teams just 24 hours to build their projects, this year’s hackathon kicked off Friday evening. The extra time — nearly double — allowed participants to dive deeper, test more, and make significant progress by Sunday.
Themes
The 26 teams explored a wide range of defense and security challenges and solutions, with many focusing on advanced sensing and autonomous systems.
Several groups worked on the acoustic detection challenge by Helsing, training machine learning models to recognize and classify drone and helicopter threat sounds. Others went beyond just writing software and developed networked acoustic and fiber-optic sensor systems to localize and identify drones, including stealth and fiber-optic variants.
Other projects tackled autonomous drone interception, GNSS-denied navigation, and multimodal sensor meshes combining optical, acoustic, and electromagnetic data for situational awareness. And on the biomedical front, participants prototyped a rugged, all-in-one vital-signs sensor for rapid triage in mass-casualty events.
Across the board, the focus was on low-cost, field-ready systems that merge autonomy, sensing, and AI to strengthen defense capabilities.
DTU ASTA
A standout feature of this hackathon was access to DTU ASTA—the Autonomous Systems Test Arena at the Technical University of Denmark.
Thanks to DTU Electro, participants were able to use one of the world’s largest and most advanced facilities for testing autonomous systems and drone technologies. Covering 40×24×14 meters, ASTA offers three testing environments—land, air, and water—allowing teams to move beyond simulations and test their systems in realistic conditions.
Most startups and research teams lack access to facilities of this caliber. This setup gave teams the rare chance to integrate and validate their technologies—from drones and USVs to sensors and AI systems—under controlled but lifelike conditions.
Winning Teams
All teams made remarkable progress over the weekend—and that’s what matters most. The hackathon is about finding the right teammates, testing ideas, getting feedback, and turning early concepts into something real.
From more than two dozen projects, three teams stood out and were selected by the jury for special recognition:
1st Place – Stronghold AI: Developed an 8-microphone sensor array enabling drones to detect and target threats as part of a multi-sensor system. Team: Rafael Licursi and Paulo Fonseca.
2nd Place – Mindfield Defence: Trained an edge AI model for detecting threats using acoustic sensors. Team: Jarno H., Kalle Kivistö, and Timo Kupsa.
3rd Place – DEEPDOCK: Transformed a locally operated SHARK USV into a secure, internet-controllable vessel using Jetson and Starlink.
Huge thanks to our jury members: Timothy McGuire (former US Air Force), Anton Verkhovodov (D3 VC), Alex Mathar (former Major, Danish Defence Command), Emilie d’Olne (Helsing), Valentin Bejan (PLX Health), Mathieu Frilet (Bifrost Defence), and Jesper Hart-Hansen (TYR Ventures).
It was a great pleasure to welcome Lt. Gen. Kim Jesper Jørgensen, the National Armaments Director, as well as his colleagues from the Danish Defence Acquisition and Logistics Organization (DALO), a joint service unit under the Ministry of Defence tasked with the purchase, service, and support of equipment within the Danish Defence.
Partners and Supporters
First and foremost, huge thanks to our key partner Helsing, supporting us as a long-term partner across several hackathons—not just our previous Copenhagen hackathon 2024 but also this year’s edition—and contributing to the challenge track on acoustic detection.
We were glad that the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) hosted us again, giving us access across their facilities — huge thanks to DTU Skylab, DTU Electro, DTU ASTA, the Danish Chips Competence Centre, and our co-organizers Maria Damsgaard and Claus Friis Pedersen.
Finally, huge thanks also to all other partners: Bifrost Defence, the Danish Defence Command, Defense Innovation Highway | DIH, Pilotix, Inflection.xyz, DroneAid Collective, and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence.
