Almost five months have passed since our first European Defense Tech Hackathon in Munich, gathering 150+ participants from all across Europe, making it the largest defense tech hackathon in mainland Europe.
We have received a lot of positive resonance and inbound requests, so we went one step further and started to build the European Defense Tech Hub – an ecosystem of defense innovators across Europe. Our ambition is to bring more innovators into defense tech to solve some of the most urgent problems of our times.
And we’re back with two more European Defense Tech Hackathons this year—the first one took place last weekend, November 15-17, 2024, in Copenhagen, Denmark.
We had a strong kick-off at IDA, the Danish Society of Engineers, with a panel on “Navigating Defense Innovation: Building Strategic Capacity for the Nordics,” involving
- Jeffrey Saunders, CTO of The National Defence Technology Centre,
- Camilla Frost, COO of Normark Defence,
- Colin MacLeod, CEO of Mutable Tactics,
- Thomas Dybdahl Ahle, Head of ML at Normal Computing,
- and moderated by Jonatan H. Luther-Bergquist, General Partner at Inflection.xyz and co-founder of EDTH.
It was also a pleasure to welcome Jesper M. Johansen, who spoke about the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark‘s efforts within defense and security, Dan Kerry from Helsing, who talked about AI and data management in the defense sector, and Aske Nerup from the Danish Ministry of Defence, who gave an overview of how to do business with the Danish Armed Forces.
Hackathon Winners
We had 19 teams working on a broad range of challenges – not just drones. How about building a concrete 3D printing robot for the frontline, combining multiple data sources to train an object detection model or sensors for detecting landmines hidden 30 centimeters below the surface?
Here are the winning teams:
1st place: “Unmanned aerial vehicle identification to avoid friendly fire by interceptor drones” by Benjamin Mirad Gurini, Khrystyna Rozhenko, Moritz Holz, Martin Kistler, a student team from Technical University of Denmark and the University of Applied Sciences Munich
2nd place: “Unmanned underwater vehicle navigation by a deployable system” by Filip Bąk, Wiktor Kurdek, Jędrzej Drozdowski, team Aquahub
3rd place: “BRUMBAAL – Control system for a fly-by-fiber drone swarm” by Matúš Bojňanský, David Hlavinka, Peter Zajac, Tomas Ondrejka, Michal Ondrejka, a student team from the Technical University of Denmark
We prepared a broad range of challenges together with our partners and experts who have been to the frontline, from intercepting enemy drones to navigating underwater environments and detecting landmines. Our goal: to put our participants in the best position to develop real solutions to real problems.
Next Steps & Acknowledgments
First and foremost, we’re thrilled to have Helsing as our key partner, whose early commitment has been crucial to making this hackathon happen.
And we want to thank all our sponsors and supporters again: Delian Alliance Industries, the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark, Normal Computing, Nordic Semiconductor, Inflection.xyz, SE3 Labs, PSV, Nordic Air Defence, Defense Innovation Highway | DIH, BRAVE1, the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, and DTU – Technical University of Denmark
Finally, we’re also grateful to our mentors, for being available to answer questions and give feedback directly that they couldn’t share publicly: Aske Nerup, Major from the Danish Ministry of Defence, Kateryna Bezsudna and Maksym Cherkis from Defence Builder, Anton Verkhovodov from D3 Venture Capital Firm, Jeanette Hvam from DECPT, Niels Vejrup Carlsen from Final Frontier, Colin MacLeod from Mutable Tactics, Misha Rudominski from HIMERA, Jeffrey Saunders from The National Defence Technology Centre, and many others.
Finally, huge thanks to DTU – Technical University of Denmark, especially Poul Sørensen, Thomas Vain and Rikke Herbst-Jensen, for hosting our hackathon.
The second part of this hackathon will be in two weeks, November 29 – December 1, 2024, in Paris, France – sign up here: paris.eurodefense.tech.
And in February 2025, we’ll organize another defense tech hackathon in Munich in conjunction with the Munich Security Conference, for which you can sign up here: munich.eurodefense.tech