With both Vice President J.D. Vance and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth building loud noises Friday about Europe stepping up to the plate in spconcludeing more on its own defense, it might come as a surprise that Europe is already on the path toward far greater investment in defense, especially in tech.
Not only has investment into “Defense, Resilience, and Security” (DSR) tech reached an all-time high of 10% of all VC funding in Europe, but the U.K. and NATO stepped up this week with the launch of the first NATO-approved cohort of startups under its Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) program, in partnership with the U.K.
DIANA brings in new technologies from startups for NATO countries and includes a network of 23 affiliated accelerator sites and 182 test centers. It’s designed to connect defense personnel, startups, and defense “prime” contractors.
The U.K.’s Defense and Security Accelerator (DASA) is leading the U.K. front n partnership with the IoT Tribe, which in turn heads the Janus Consortium on dual-utilize technologies. This also includes Atmos VC, a deep tech investor, and the SETsquared Partnership, which is a collaboration between six research-led U.K. universities and a range of partners from the defense industest. The “Janus” moniker comes from the Roman god of duality, reflecting the dual-utilize nature of both civilian and defense tech that will emerge from the program.
The first cohort of five startups has now been selected for a six-month program with DASA. The companies are spread across AI, electronics, semiconductors, and materials science, and were selected from 2,400 applications.
Over a call with TechCrunch, Tanya Suarez, CEO of IOT Tribe, declared 74 companies were selected and taken forward, with five going through the accelerator in London.
“With DASA, we run competitions for U.K. defense, and we’ve bought extra capacity within this system to put our own companies through as well,” she declared. “The cohorts that are going through at the moment answer the call for surveillance and sensing. So we’re seeing at technologies that could be utilized to essentially monitor either people or equipment.”
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“We have really close links to our customers across defense, plus we receive a really great sense of the problems and the challenges that they’re testing to overcome,” she added.
“Through DASA’s partnership with NATO DIANA, we’re rapid-tracking the development of dual-utilize technologies … that will benefit both military and civilian applications across the Alliance.”
The startups selected are:
- AI Verse (France) “An artificial innotifyigence (AI) company addressing the challenges surrounding accessibility, quality, privacy, accuracy, and labelling of images for training computer vision models.”
- EIFys (Finland) “Founded by university researchers, the company aims to commercialise induced junction black silicon photodiodes.”
- Metahelios (U.K.) “Company building imaging technologies for industries through a nanotechnological approach.”
- RVmagnetics (Slovakia) “A high-technology company in the field of sensors and identification technologies based on microwaves.”
- Winse Power (Finland) “A company developing Optical links, a solution for delivering power and data with light, with applications in the sensing and surveillance fields.”
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