We did it again: Last weekend, we organized Europe’s largest Defense Tech Hackathon in Paris with 170+ participants and 34 projects.
It great to see how European defense tech has been gaining momentum since our first European Defense Tech Hackathon in Munich back in June 2024, and the Copenhagen Defense Tech Hackathon two weeks ago. It’s exactly why we’re organizing these events: to bring more innovators into defense tech to solve some of the most urgent problems of our times.
In Paris, we had a strong kick-off day, starting with a keynote talk by Antoine Bordes, Vice President, Artificial Intelligence at Helsing, and a panel discussion involving
- Florent Ogès, Ex-GIGN (elite police tactical unit of the French National Gendarmerie),
- Noémie Gélis, Cheffe de bureau à la Cellule d’anticipation stratégique de la DGA,
- Éric Marti, Managing Director of Defense Angels,
- and our moderator, Thomas Bernaudon
It was also a pleasure to welcome Florian Maillarbaux, Head of Business Development, at Comand AI for a talk on “War in Ukraine – A New Paradigm in Warfare and Military Technology Driving Strong Opportunities for Startups.” And we had a talk from Kristjan Pihus, CTO of DefSecIntel Solutions: “How to see while no one is watching- challenges in surveillance AI development”
Hackathon Winners
We don’t have prize money at our hackathons, and that’s on purpose because we want to encourage our teams to focus on building real solutions rather than chasing prize money.
Still, we want to honor the teams which have made the most progress during the hackathon and have the best chances to continue toward deployment. Our evaluation criteria included:
- are you solving a real problem?
- how effective will the solutions be?
- how original and innovative is your solution?
- how mass-manufacturable will it be?
- how much progress and drive have you demonstrated during the hackathon?
We had 34 teams working on a broad range of challenges we had prepared together with our partners, from building underwater reconnaissance systems to the interception of Shahed drones and helicopters, and swarm coordination in GPS-denied environments.
Here are the winning teams:
1st place: “Automatic event-based detection and tracking of UAVs and Shahed drones in challenging lighting conditions” by Gregor Lenz, Karl Vetter, Florian Corgnou, Shannah Santucci, Kai Dierenbach, Filipp Trigub, and Patrick Madlindl
2nd place: “Magnetic Navigation for Sub-marine drones” by Hugo Biais, Axel Nguyen–Kerbel, Stefan AGRICI, David Podolskyi, and Yoan Di Cosmo
3rd place: “Anti-Helicopter Mine” by Antoine Besset and Adhémar de Senneville
Thanks to our jury, Max Makarchuk, Bryan Sardoch, Cyrus Hessabi, Lukas Koestler, Adeline Bailly, and Madis Koplimäe for evaluating the hackathon submissions!
Next Steps & Acknowledgments
First and foremost, huge thanks to our key partner, Helsing, whose early commitment has been crucial for making this hackathon happen and bringing an entire team on-site to mentor the hackathon participants.
And we also want to thank all our sponsors and supporters again: Delian Alliance Industries, Comand AI, General Catalyst, DefSecIntel Solutions, Entrepreneur First, HCVC, Inflection.xyz, SE3 Labs, Defense Innovation Highway | DIH, BRAVE1, the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, and STATION F
A huge thank you goes to our mentors on-site and online, who answered questions and gave feedback directly to the teams: Max Makarchuk from BRAVE1, Enrique Munoz de Cote from Mutable Tactics, Kateryna Bezsudna and Maksym Cherkis from Defence Builder, Kyrylo K from Quantum Systems, Bryan Sardoch, Tom Palmaers, Andreas Kröpfl, Ties Klinkhamer, Miel Van Den Brekel, Piotr Andrzej Oszytko, our pitch coach Gleb Maltsev, and many others.
Finally, many thanks go to our co-organizers Satyam Goel, Cyrus Hessabi from OpenOcean, Pauline Commereuc from Entrepreneur First, Thomas Bernaudon and Nathanaël Espinha Deloire from the stealth startup Zephtech.
In February 2025, we’ll organize our next defense tech hackathon in Munich in conjunction with the Munich Security Conference, for which you can sign up here: munich.eurodefense.tech
