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850+ Coming and One Week To Go
Fostering Defense Innovation for European Sovereignty
Fynn van Rießen & Benjamin Wolba
August 13, 2026
850+ people from 36 countries and over 500 different organizations have already registered for the first European Defense Tech Festival.
Next Thursday, we’re taking over an airfield just outside Berlin for four days of field testing and live demos. If you’ve built a prototype and are ready to test it with operators, this is your final call to register.
After the Festival, our hackathon series returns to Hamburg from August 28–30 and continues around the world through the autumn. For all upcoming events, read below or check out our full event calendar.
And from October 1–8, the EDTH Defense Tech Days are coming to London: eight days of events across the city, organized with our partners and alongside Deep Tech London.
Also below:
What happens after our hackathons? Three recent updates from EDTH alumni: Steggo, Caslog, and Lancelot Systems
Our co-founder Benjamin Wolba at the Turnaroundkongress 2026 in Weimar
🚨 One Week Until the European Defense Tech Festival
From August 20–23, the European Defense Tech Festival will bring 850+ people to one hangar and a kilometer-long airstrip near Berlin. Think of it as an “ILA light”: an industry exhibition inside the hangar, combined with outdoor flight testing and live technology demonstrations.
Teams will fly drones, test autonomous systems, demonstrate counter-UAS concepts, and work on communications and sensing systems with direct operator feedback.
Who’s Coming?
Attendees are coming from companies such as STARK, Airbus Defence and Space, and Rheinmetall, as well as NATO, the Ukrainian military, venture funds, research institutions, and hundreds of founders and builders from early-stage teams.
If you have a system ready to demonstrate, bring it. You will get direct operator feedback and meet people who can help move it toward deployment.
If you have not registered yet, this is your final call:
Event website: eurodefense.tech/festival
Let People Know You’re Coming
People across the community have already started sharing that they are coming to the Festival.
Use our template to create your own card, post it on LinkedIn, tag European Defense Tech, and tag the people you want to meet at the airfield:
🇬🇧 EDTH Defense Tech Days Are Coming to London
From October 1–8, the EDTH Defense Tech Days will run across London, ahead of and alongside the Resilience Conference and Deep Tech London. Together with our partners, we’re creating eight days of events across the city: enough density for the same people to keep meeting and working together.
Here is what we have planned so far:
October 1 — Counter-UAS Forum
Founders, operators, industry, investors, and government will discuss how Europe can develop, procure, and scale counter-UAS systems faster.
October 2–4 — European Defense Tech Hackathon
Our London hackathon returns with challenges informed by UK and Ukrainian practitioners. The strongest teams will present their prototypes at Sunday’s Demo Day.
October 7 — Build With Ukraine, UK Edition
British, European, and Ukrainian manufacturers will explore production partnerships and joint ventures for scaling battlefield-proven technology!
Hackathons Worldwide
🇩🇪 Hamburg, Germany | August 28–30, 2026
The weekend after the Festival, our hackathon series continues in Hamburg.
More than 100 hackers will spend three days working on defense challenges, supported by mentors and military practitioners.
The weekend ends with a Demo Day for EDTH Community members, where the strongest teams will present what they have built.
More Hackathons Across Europe and Beyond
We’re building our hackathon community und networking platform:
What EDTH Teams Are Building Now
Dozens of projects and companies have emerged from EDTH events. This week, three alumni shared what they have been working on since their respective hackathons.
Steggo: From Winning EDTH London to Ukraine
Steggo took first place at our London hackathon in June with a system that turns radio communications into structured battlefield intelligence.
The prototype converts fragmented voice communications into a live knowledge graph of entities, locations, and events.
This week, Theo Bailey started publishing a day-by-day account of the team’s recent trip to Ukraine. The team spent a week speaking with potential users and learning how military communications work in practice — only six weeks after first developing the idea at EDTH London.
Caslog: From an EDTH Prototype Toward Deployment
At EDTH Warsaw in December 2025, Swiss officer and software developer Fabio Hamilos-Keller met Mykyta Puz from Ukraine’s Azov Brigade.
Together, they started working on a problem in battlefield medicine: critical information about wounded soldiers can be lost as they move through the evacuation and treatment process.
Caslog converts medics’ spoken information into structured casualty records that remain connected to the wounded soldier throughout the evacuation chain.
The team won EDTH Warsaw and later reached the podium at EDTH Munich. Startup Kitchen has now reported on Caslog’s latest field test with Azov: two days of realistic training with the brigade’s medical instructors, followed by a letter of request for 100 units.
Lancelot Systems Joins Orcrist Technologies
Lancelot joined EDTH at our Hamburg and Berlin hackathons in 2025 and later returned as a mentor. Orcrist is an EDTH Industry Network member and has supported several events and teams across the network.
Lancelot works on intelligence technology for European defense and has developed its systems directly with users in Ukraine and major European defense companies. The merger brings that experience into Orcrist’s data-fusion and AI platform, which turns sensitive, distributed information into actionable intelligence.
More From the Ecosystem
BRAVE1 Publishes 53 New Technology Priorities
BRAVE1 has updated its grant program with 53 technology priorities based on the current needs of Ukraine’s Defense Forces.
The priorities range from autonomous and swarming systems, radar, and navigation to underwater drones, electronic warfare, directed-energy weapons, and evacuation UAVs.
Depending on their technology-readiness level, Ukrainian developers can receive between UAH 500,000 and UAH 8 million. Separate competitions for capital-intensive technologies will offer more than UAH 100 million per project.
Credit: Telegraph
A routine security assessment found that camera components on the Royal Navy’s K3 Scout uncrewed vessels were sending “heartbeat” communications to an IP address in China.
The cameras had been sourced through a third party that had given assurances about their security. The UK Ministry of Defence disconnected them from the internet after discovering the communication.
The MoD says it found no evidence that sensitive information, military systems, or government data had been accessed or transmitted. But the supplier assurances did not detect the behavior; security testing did.
Every connected component in a defense system needs independent scrutiny — not only the finished platform.
🇩🇪 German-only: Turnaroundkongress 2026 in Weimar
Neudenken unter Druck – Geschäftsmodelle im Ausnahmezustand
Am 31. August und 1. September findet der Turnaroundkongress im Hotel Elephant in Weimar statt. Er richtet sich an Unternehmer, Transformations- und Restrukturierungsexperten, Finanzierer sowie Vertreter aus Politik, Verwaltung und Streitkräften.
Unter dem Leitmotiv „Neue Allianzen zwischen Mittelstand, Politik und New-Defense“ geht es darum, wie Unternehmen ihre bestehenden Fähigkeiten für neue Märkte und Anforderungen einsetzen können.
Unser Mitgründer Benjamin Wolba ist einer der Referenten. Er berichtet darüber, wie bei EDTH-Hackathons Studierende, Ingenieure und ukrainische Einsatzkräfte innerhalb weniger Tage gemeinsam an Lösungen für konkrete operative Probleme arbeiten.
Am zweiten Tag bearbeiten die Teilnehmer in einem Zukunftslabor und Unternehmer-Hackathon realistische industrielle Szenarien. Unterstützt werden sie von Praktikern aus der Bundeswehr, dem ukrainischen Defense-Tech-Ökosystem sowie dem Innovations- und Turnaroundmanagement.
Die Veranstaltung findet auf Deutsch statt.