🚨 Becoming Ready for Deployment: Key Results From Our First European Defense Tech Hackathon

In late June, we hosted Europe’s largest defense tech hackathon for the first time in Munich, bringing together over 100 hackers from across Europe and beyond.

But we’re not just organizing hackathons for the sake of organizing events. Our goal is to develop solutions that will be deployed in the real world. 

Here’s a brief overview of who kept going after the hackathon:

Magnus Freyer and Joshua Soutelo have founded Munin, a startup developing first-line gear to protect soldiers from drone attacks.

Kaloyan Miladinov, Ognyan Razsadov, Filostratos Titopoulos, and Aleksandar Mechkarov have founded a company, SentIRX, to detect landmines using drones and thermal imaging.

Dima Vovchuk and Anton Kharkhalis from the startup NORDA Dynamics specialize in autonomous piloting and targeting systems for UAVs and landed third place at the pitch competition of IT Arena 2024.

Claudio Flores explored during the hackathon how fluorescent nanoparticles can help with ecologically stealthy reconnaissance, and he continues to do so as part of his bio-nanotech startup, Mimotype Technologies.

Nino Lindenberg and Nura (Ngurah) Linggih founded PLENO, building a modular autonomous system for first-person view (FPV) guidance of drones.

Vytautas Mikalainis started Unbound Autonomy, developing an AI pin to convert noisy, unstructured tactical communications into digital battlefield updates.

Want to learn more? We’ve written a blog post about the themes and projects:

Upcoming Events

After the Defense Hive at PAKCon, IT Arena 2024, the Resilience Conference, and the BRAVE1 Summit, Jonatan and Benjamin from our team will be in Madrid for the second European Defense Tech Summit, and there’s a bunch of upcoming events we’re organizing:

Second Meetup in Berlin

Tomorrow, we're holding the Second European Defense Tech Meetup together with XAnge in Berlin – stop by if you’re in town:

Virtual Demo Day

​Out of the 34 projects from our first hackathon, several startups were newly founded or started looking into dual-use.

​Sign up for our virtual demo day on October 30 to learn more about what they have developed and ask questions (and as an alumnus, please sign up if you’d like to present your startup or project):

Second European Defense Tech Hackathon

Join us and 100+ hackers from all across Europe for the second edition on November 15-17, 2024, in Copenhagen:

Due to venue availability, we had to move the Paris hackathon to two weeks later, Nov 29 - Dec 1, but the good news is we now have a venue, and if you want, you can take part in both of our November hackathons :-)