🚨 Inside Our Most Ambitious Month Yet: Four Cities, Hundreds of Builders, One Defense Tech Community

Coming out of a busy October, this November has been incredibly packed.

For the first time, we ran two hackathons at the same time: Our flagship event in Kyiv brought together more than 400 participants, including frontline soldiers, who built 30 projects despite heavy ruzzian attacks.

At the same time, we ran a 48-hour hackathon in Paris with 120 participants and 19 teams.

One week later, we hosted our largest-ever hackathon in Berlin together with the Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub—with 350+ participants and 65 teams—and our annual conference, the New Defense Summit, bringing together EDTH alumni, investors, and industry experts

There will be two more European Defense Tech Hackathons this year—in Switzerland, marking the country’s first-ever defense tech hackathon, and Warsaw, returning for a second time this year.

And we’re not stopping there! Last year, we ran three events. This year, we’re on track to surpass twenty. Next year, we plan to double that number.

Looking forward to seeing you at one of them! 🤗

🛰️ Upcoming Events Across Europe

📍 Switzerland | Nov 28-30

Switzerland has the talent, the industry, and the strategic need — and now we're bringing everything together 💥

We’re hosting our first-ever European Defense Tech Hackathon this weekend in Switzerland, with more than 140 builders, engineers, and founders already signed up:

📍 Warsaw, Poland | Dec 5-7

Next month, we’re heading back to Warsaw, from December 5 to 7, 2025!

With the Polish Development Fund (PFR) and our key partner, Nordic Air Defence, we’ll bring together more than 100 hackers to work on new ideas in air defense, swarming drones, reconnaissance, anti-drone systems, protecting critical infrastructure, and robotics.

👀 Even More Events

European Defense Tech Hackathon – Tallinn

​​Join us for the European Defense Tech Hackathon on January 30-February 1, 2025, in Tallinn, Estonia. ​​​We're thrilled to co-organize this hackathon together with Tehnopol, the largest science and business park in the Baltic states.

https://luma.com/edth-2026-tallinn

Australian Defense Tech Hackathon

​Join us for the first edition of the Australian Defense Tech Hackathon on February 6-8, 2026, in Canberra, Australia.

https://lu.ma/adth-2026 

European Defense Tech Hackathon – Munich

At the same time as the Munich Security Conference, we'll be organizing once again Europe's largest defense tech hackathon: Join us for the European Defense Tech Hackathon on February 12-15, 2026, in Munich.

https://lu.ma/edth-2026-munich 

Upcoming Webinars (as part of our Unlimited Community)

• ​EDTH Community Meetup: Online Networking for Defense Innovators (Dec 4): https://luma.com/edth-community-networking 

• EDTH x ThinkUp⁩ – From Idea to Funding: Build Your Startup the Right Way using AI tools (Dec 17): https://luma.com/edth-ThinkUp-mastermind 

• EDTH x ThinkUp⁩ – From Dream to Reality: Build Your Startup for Success (Hands-On Workshop) (Jan 15): https://luma.com/edth-thinkup-workshop

​From the European Defense Community:

Components of Freedom Forum (Dec 2, Kyiv, Ukraine 🇺🇦)

IRON Cluster and Snake Island Institute are bringing together Ukraine’s growing ecosystem of local drone-component makers to accelerate defense industrial localization.

Info & registration: https://ironcluster.org/announcement

AI in Defence Summit 2026 (Feb 2, 2026, Brussels, Belgium 🇧🇪)

Another exciting initiative advancing Europe’s defense innovation: the AI in Defence Summit 2026, backed by the European Innovation Council.

We received some discount codes for you 🤗

• EDTHSU50 — 20% off Defense Startup tickets

• EDTHGA20 — 20% off General Attendance tickets

Sign up here: https://aidefencesummit.eu/

The Word is Spreading

We’re working with Defender Media to show what’s really happening in Europe’s defense tech scene.

Over the next few months, they’ll interview partners, founders, investors, and EDTH alumni to highlight the people and ideas shaping European Defense Tech.

The first interviews are already published with Nicholas MacGowan von Holstein (Bifrost Defence) and Dr. Rafael Licursi (Stronghold AI).

Süddeutsche Zeitung Spotlights Our Drone Defense Hackathon in Munich

Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany’s most reputable newspapers, recently covered our Drone Defense Hackathon in Munich, where 250 students developed drone-defense prototypes at TUM Garching. The article stressed that young engineers and innovators are crucial to European defense.

Table.Media Profiles EDTH’s Co-Founder

Table.Media — one of Germany’s leading policy and industry outlets — published a feature on EDTH founder Benjamin Wolba, highlighting how EDTH is helping new talent break into Europe’s defense tech ecosystem.

“Investors can help you take your company from level ten to level 30. But how do you get from level minus one to zero and then to level one? That’s where we come in.” — Benjamin Wolba

Hackathon-Alumnus Trusk secures €350,000 to build autonomy for interceptor drones

Trusk, alumnus of our Amsterdam hackathon in March 2025, has successfully secured €350,000 in funding from Innovatiefonds Noord-Holland. This investment will be dedicated to developing innovative autonomous guidance software for low-cost interceptor drones.

The mission of Trusk is to make drone defense both affordable and scalable. Their vision includes creating cheaper interceptors that are guided by fast and precise autopilots, while incorporating a human-in-the-loop approach to ensure safety. They aim to complement existing air defenses and to provide enhanced protection for Ukrainian and European airspace.

Based in Amsterdam, Trusk has a clear operational focus on Ukraine, where rapid deployment and mass production are of paramount importance.

SentIRX Secures Runner-Up at the Regional Defence Summit 2025

We’re excited to see SentIRX, alumni from our Munich hackathon in June 2024, earn the runner-up spot at the Regional Defence Summit 2025 pitching competition. The team keeps advancing synthetic thermal imaging, helping militaries and innovators train ML models to detect landmines, drones, vehicles, and more.

Congratulations to the entire team for being recognized by a top jury of European investors and defense leaders!

GutSee Health Launches Large-Scale Phage Therapy Partnership in Ukraine

GutSee Health, alumni from our Warsaw hackathon in April, announced a major partnership with the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, the Ministry of Health, and Feofaniya Clinical Hospital to launch one of Eastern Europe’s first large-scale phage therapy projects.

Their mission is to combine medicine, biotechnology, and AI to help soldiers and civilians with infections that no longer respond to traditional treatments.

Stronghold AI Joins the Hexa Sprint Program

It's great to see Stronghold AI, alumni from our EDTH hackathons, selected for the Hexa Sprint. They support mission-focused defense and dual-use startups with €500k and six months of hands-on help.

Stronghold AI is rethinking counter-drone defense from the ground up. They are building a distributed, multi-sensor, and cost-effective detection system designed to meet real operational needs.

Defense Tech Monthly — October

Here’s another must-read from the Snake Island Institute. Like the previous editions, it offers a clear, data-driven look at how defense innovation is happening on the front lines.

It explores Ukraine’s rapid localization drive, new front-line iterations in strike drones and UGVs, Russia’s evolving use of AI, aerostats, and glide bombs, and how battlefield innovation is transforming the defense industry in real time.