Both Vice President JD Vance and the US Secretary of Defense make a loud noise on Friday about Europe spending more on its own defense and intervening in plates, making Europe’s already far greater investment in defense It may be surprising to see them walking. , especially with technology.
Investments in “defense, resilience, security” (DSR) technology reached an all-time high of 10% of all VC funds in Europe, but the UK and NATO stepped up with their first launch this week . The NATO-approved cohort of startups has collaborated with the UK to work with the Defense Innovation Accelerator (Diana) Programme for the North Atlantic (Diana) Programme
Diana introduces new technologies from startups in NATO countries, including a network of 23 related accelerator sites and 182 test centres. It is designed to connect defense personnel, startups and defense “prime” contractors.
The UK Defense and Security Accelerator (DASA) is leading the UK front in collaboration with the IoT tribe, which leads the Janus Consortium of dual-use technology. This includes Atmos VC, Deep Tech Investor, and SetSquared partnerships, a collaboration between six research-led UK universities and various partners in the defense industry. The “Janus” Monica comes from the Roman god of duality and reflects the dual use of both civilians and defence techniques that emerge from the program.
The first cohort of five startups was selected for a six-month program with DASA. The company is spreading to AI, electronics, semiconductors and materials science, and has been selected from 2,400 applications.
In a call with TechCrunch, IoT Tribe CEO Tanya Suarez said 74 companies have been selected, moved forward, and five have passed through London’s Accelerator.
“With DASA, we raced to defend the UK, bought additional capacity within this system and passed by our company,” she said. “The cohorts we are experiencing now answer the surveillance and sensing calls, so we are looking at the technologies that can be used to essentially monitor either people or equipment.”
“We have a close link to our customers beyond defense, and we also get a truly amazing sense of the problems and the challenges they are trying to overcome,” she added.
“Through our partnership with Dasa and NATO Diana, we are rapidly tracking the development of dual-use technologies.
The selected startups are:
AI Verse (France) “Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies address challenges surrounding image accessibility, quality, privacy, accuracy and labeling to train computer vision models.” Eifys (Finland) “University Founded by researchers in the company, the company aims to commercialize induced junction black silicon photodiodes. “Metahelios (UK) “Company building imaging technology for industry through a nanotechnology approach.” RVMagnetics ( Slovakia) “High-tech companies in the field of microwave-based sensors and identification technologies.” Winse Power (Finland) “Companies developing optical links, solutions for delivering power and data with optical power, Sensing and Surveillance Fields.” application.”