It’s snowing about an hour outside Munich city centre, and a recruiter from German autonomous drone startup Quantum Systems jokes that it’s like “Christmas”. He isn’t referring to the weather though. Instead, he’s talking about the host of hardware parts the startup’s lending to engineers to help them build their startup ideas at a European Defence Tech Hub (EDTH) hackathon, a four-day event coinciding with the Munich Security Conference and the first in Ukrainian defence innovation platform Brave1’s Global Defence Tech Hackathon series.
The event, taking place in the UnternehmerTUM entrepreneurship centre of the Technical University of Munich, aims to “get more brainpower” and talent into the defence space building actual products, says Benjamin Wolba, who cofounded EDTH with Jonatan Luther-Bergquist, a partner at early-stage VC Inflection, in the spring of 2024.
Since its launch, EDTH has attracted a number of big sponsors, including AI defence unicorn Helsing and US venture titan General Catalyst. Still, there’s no monetary prize for the engineers building: “We don’t want you to chase, you know, $5,000 prize money. If you’re that good, we’ll help you raise $1m,” says Wolba, who before launching EDTH studied theoretical physics then worked as a venture partner at early stage VC Lunar Ventures.
The Munich hackathon comes at a time when geopolitical tensions are bubbling up. Under president Donald Trump the US has signalled it will be far more protectionist and has urged Europe to step up its own defence. Defence secretary Pete Hegseth warned last week of “stark strategic realities”. Meanwhile the war in Ukraine rages on.
The stance of the US is part of the reason why hackathons like the one at EDTH are urgent right now, says Luther-Bergquist. “We have a nihilist in power who does not care about anything beyond domestic issues and China. There’s little incentive for him right now to support Ukraine,” he says of President Trump. “We can’t count on the US. We don’t have the money, we don’t have the people and war is happening — there’s one solution to this for us, at least, and that is tech and adoption of tech.”
The hackathon is EDTH’s fourth since it launched — it’s had events in Munich, Paris and Copenhagen — and Wolba says it’s aiming for at least 11 others this year, including a partnership with the London Defence Tech Hackathon. There have been hackathons by others in Europe recently too, including the one in London last April.
All about drones and AI
Nearly everyone Sifted spoke with at the hackathon says the big themes in defence tech right now are drones and AI. It’s not hard to see why: big defence techs like Helsing and Quantum Systems have both raised large sums of venture capital to manufacture AI-powered drones (both are sponsors of the hackathon). Unmanned drones in particular are also highly scalable and relatively cheap.
There are a lot of first-timers in Munich looking to build. When Luther-Bergquist asked how many people were attending a hackathon for the first time during a meeting on Friday morning, dozens of people put their hands up.
Other founders are repeat hackathon-goers: Stelios Koroneos, who has spent the last “20-plus years” working in commercial shipping, satellite communications and telemetry, is building AI copilots for defence companies to incorporate into their hardware, using a dataset of tagged military objects (like drones and tanks). He attended EDTH’s Paris hackathon in November and returned to teach a workshop. But Koroneos sees value beyond just tinkering: “It’s not just the hackathon itself; it’s to educate and bring people with the same mind together — exchange ideas, exchange even LinkedIns,” he says.
Ukrainian founder Yurii Stasinchuk is using AI for vision processing for drones to find targets. “We are working on the edge autonomy for drones and different systems”, including first person view (FPV) drones and big and small drones, he tells Sifted. This year his startup, FoxFour, which is already working with manufacturers in countries like the Czech Republic and the US, aims to have a lot of demos with NATO forces. “That’s the main goal: the experience from the Ukrainian battlefield should not only be in Ukraine. We should export it.”
Others like Andrii Yakovyna have bigger AI ambitions. Together with two of his former classmates from Kyiv he founded Bynesoft, which lets customers incorporate AI for voice-to-text language translation — it could, for example, help translate Russian radio chatter. But he says he wants it to become the “Hugging Face for defence,” referring to the American AI/ML platform that provides users with a library of data sets and open-source AI and computer vision models to use for their own purposes.
“In defence, nobody knows anything until somebody needs something [from] another person,” Yakovyna says. He wants his startup to be a platform “maintaining security, providing compliance and letting every prime or relatively large company that wants to access AI capabilities to get this access much faster.”
Helsing, Quantum Systems eyeing talent
Wolba and the others have bigger ambitions for the EDTH. They want it to also serve as something of a talent portal, connecting engineers and would-be founders with larger startups like Helsing or Quantum Systems looking for fresh talent.
“It’s in their interest also to have more startups in the ecosystem,” says Luther-Bergquist. “That helps not just Helsing but it helps General Catalyst with their resilience platform, it helps Quantum Systems, it helps ARX Robotics, it helps Nordic Air Defence — all of these partners that want to project this image of defence tech being the new era of startup ecosystem where all the intelligent people are going,” he says.
He tells Sifted that he’s already helped set up two interviews with Helsing for hackers in the last couple of weeks.
“If we meet good hackers, good programmers, it’s always an option,” Michael Kriegel, cofounder of Quantum Systems, tells Sifted at the sidelines of the event. “It’s beneficial for us and for them. If they can show me during the hackathon that they are good programmers, I’m happy to employ them. It’s basically like a very good, easy job interview.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/european-defence-tech-hackathon-munich/
