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First European Defense Tech Hackathon

After-Movie of the first European Defense Tech Hackathon | Credits: babyPRO

On the last week of June 2024, we gathered 150+ hackers from across Europe and abroad in Munich for the first European Defense Tech Hackathon and 48 hours of intense hacking.

We wanted to bridge the gaps between technologists, the public sector, investors, and operators in dual-use and defense technology, with a focus on prototyping and validating ideas around defensive and life-preserving technologies.

And it wasn’t just about drones. How about fluorescent nanoparticles to track unmanned vehicles? Or using machine learning for 3D map reconstruction and environmental change detection?

Hackathon Winners

34 projects originated from the hackathon that could save lives, and we’re super excited to see how they will evolve.

1st place: Distributed signal and target detection with software-defined radio and TDoA: Sirvan Almasi, Satyam Goel, and Johannes Pfannschmidt

2nd place, and landing an invitation to the Resilience Conference in London: microMANPAD, a tool for defense against unmanned aerial systems: Aabharan Hemanth, Akarsh Gopal, Magnus Freyer, Joshua Soutelo, and Stavros Messinis

3rd place: Module for detecting and localizing anti-personnel mines based on their thermal signature: Kaloyan Miladinov, Ognyan Razsadov, Filostratos Titopoulos, and Aleksandar Mechkarov (a high school team!)

We are grateful to have had several subject-matter experts and technology experts from across Europe as mentors on-site to give direct feedback to participants so that they could iterate quickly based on direct feedback. Also, we had intentionally set the challenges wide to allow for creativity rather than building something exactly to specification, and it led the teams to work on a wide variety of problems and approaches to solutions.

Next Steps & Acknowledgments

We’re not in the business of organizing hackathons for the sake of hackathons. Our goal is to catalyze startups that develop solutions to actual solutions and products that get deployed in the real world.

At this point, we’d like to thank our sponsors and supporters for making this event possible—first and foremost, Entrepreneur First, Helsing, and Auterion, whose early commitment has been crucial to getting this off the ground.

We would also like to thank many others, including DefSecIntel Solutions, Spleenlab, Quantum Systems, Lambda Automata, TYTAN Technologies, ARX Robotics, General Catalyst, D3 Venture Capital Firm, Presto Ventures, Project A, Inflection.xyz, Bundeswehr University Munich, TUM Venture Labs Aerospace, BRAVE1, Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub, and ​the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.

See you for the second hackathon edition in February 2025 in conjunction with the Munich Security Conference.