How Weekend Hackathons Birthed Europe’s Defence Startups

On the last week of June 2024, around 150 people crowded into a Munich hangar for the first European Defence Tech Hackathon. Today, the network behind it, the European Defense Tech Hub, has hosted 35 hackathons across Copenhagen, Paris, Kyiv, Berlin, London, Prague, Brussels and Tallinn, helped birth roughly 40 companies, and watched half of those startups field prototypes in Ukraine.

That growth happened without government grants or accelerator capital. EDTH co-founder Benjamin Wolba, a physicist with no military background, calls the network a bottom-up movement built on the bet that Europe’s traditional primes and ministries cannot move quickly enough on their own.

From Theoretical Physics to Defence Hackathons

Benjamin Wolba completed a PhD in condensed matter physics, researching why materials are magnetic. He walked away from academia with no intention of joining a large corporation. He wanted to build technology with real-world impact, and entrepreneurship felt like the natural next step.

Wolba joined the Entrepreneur First startup programme but did not find a co-founder there. He then spent two years as an associate at the European venture fund Lunar Ventures before setting out on customer discovery of his own.

In February 2024, Wolba was in Silicon Valley, networking and studying the local startup scene. Across the country in El Segundo, near Los Angeles, a defence hackathon was taking place, and he says he was simply fascinated by the idea. He messaged his friend Jonatan Luther-Bergquist, a physicist and partner at the venture firm Inflection, with a proposal: organise the first European version. Four months later, that plan became the Munich event that would seed Europe’s newest defence startup pipeline.

How a Munich Hangar Sparked a Movement

The first European Defence Tech Hackathon ran from June 28 to 30, 2024, in Munich, organised through the EDTH’s main hub for hackathons and community events. Around 150 attendees formed teams and built 34 working prototypes across air defence, demining, counter-drone systems and other battlefield-relevant challenges. Wolba and Luther-Bergquist ran the event with the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, drone maker Quantum Systems and Munich security incubator TUM Venture Labs as founding partners.

‘We had no reputation, no previous experience organising anything like this and, honestly, no real reason to expect people would come,’ Wolba told Tech EU. ‘Yet the response was overwhelming.’ Quantum Systems signed on as a founding partner in Munich, Helsing backed the November follow-on events in Copenhagen and Paris, and a steady stream of investors and Ukrainian operators filled the judging panels. The team had expected Munich to be a one-off; instead, requests for more events followed.

By the numbers

• 35 hackathons hosted since June 2024
• 400+ teams have built prototypes
• ~40 teams have formed companies
• ~50% of those companies field-tested in Ukraine
• Hackathons now span Europe, Singapore, Nigeria and Ukraine

After the Munich event, the requests kept coming. ‘Benjamin, do you know an investor?’, ‘Can you introduce me to someone in defence?’, ‘Can you help us connect with potential customers?’ Someone told Wolba he was no longer running standalone events; the weekends were starting to organise themselves.

He says they were right. The series has since expanded across the continent and beyond, drawing more than 400 teams in total. The events now happen on multiple continents, with the calendar including stops in Tallinn, Singapore and now Abuja. EDTH’s model remains deliberately decentralised, with founders choosing their own paths while the network helps the strongest teams make connections. Around 40 of those teams have gone on to form companies, with about half already completing some form of operational testing in Ukraine.

What an EDTH Build Weekend Looks Like

Every EDTH participant registers individually, even if they intend to compete as a team, because security screening is a prerequisite for a defence-focused gathering. The weekend opens with hands-on technical workshops rather than the conference talks common at industry events. From there, teams of two to six have 48 hours to design and build a working prototype.

• Machine learning for defence
• Data fusion
• FPV drone building
• Battlefield medicine
• Demining
• Electronics

Organisers supply 3D printers, soldering stations and electronic components, and many attendees bring their own tools. By Sunday afternoon, teams present working prototypes, ranging from software applications to drones, sensors and communications systems, rather than slide decks. Investors attend as mentors and judges to spot promising companies at a very early stage, before any funding round. The judging panel combines military experts, defence companies and investors, with Wolba insisting on Ukrainian representation in every panel.

That’s something I really love about these events. People are incredibly hands-on.

Wolba says the hands-on focus is what pulls operators and investors into the room. Many of the same participants return to multiple EDTH weekends in different cities as they refine prototypes with new collaborators.

Zero Industries and the Hackathon-to-Frontline Pipeline

Zero Industries is the best-known success story to emerge from the EDTH hackathon community. Its founders met through the weekends, worked closely with Ukrainian operators, raised outside funding and built a real company, according to Wolba. The startup develops AI-powered navigation technology that lets autonomous drones operate reliably in GPS-denied environments, where spoofing and jamming have made traditional satellite guidance unreliable. Its proprietary Visual Positioning System combines computer vision, advanced mapping and onboard AI inference to keep drones precisely positioned even when GPS signals are jammed, spoofed or unavailable. The company reports sub-20 metre accuracy across three initial field tests on its GPS-denied drone navigation technology page.

Zero Industries is far from the only success story from the network, Wolba stresses. On its website, Zero Industries describes its mission as providing lightweight, cost-effective and plug-and-play navigation solutions for GNSS-denied environments. The company frames the work as critical because GPS-based navigation fails in contested areas, where the stakes for drones losing position are measured in operator lives. About half of the companies formed out of EDTH weekends have completed some form of operational testing in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s Frontline Feedback Loop at EDTH

EDTH has organised three hackathons in Ukraine, with the latest becoming part of the country’s Defence Tech Valley and hosted inside the National Aviation University hangar in Kyiv. Wolba describes Kyiv as the ‘Champions League’ of European defence tech because founders build locally and then travel there to demonstrate progress and receive direct feedback from operators with frontline experience. The model inverts the usual European defence accelerator, in which founders pitch to procurement officers rather than frontline operators.

The tactical knowledge flowing back from Ukraine is concrete. Ukrainian operators know exactly how Shahed drones behave in flight, including the low-altitude profiles they use to evade radar detection and the high-altitude cruise patterns that put them out of reach of machine guns. Understanding those tactics matters as much as building the technology itself, Wolba argues, and Ukraine is the source of that knowledge. ‘They’re generating operational knowledge that every European military should be learning from,’ he told Tech EU.

Wolba uses Germany as the example. The overwhelming majority of German defence spending still flows to legacy systems built for a different kind of war, he says, and those systems have a role, but they do not address the new threats. Europe needs capabilities designed for drone swarms, autonomous systems and modern air defence, with companies such as Xavveo’s photonic radar for low-flying drone detection now working to close specific gaps in detection. He argues that understanding how to use new technology is just as important as building it, and that frontline feedback from operators is what makes the difference. EDTH insists on Ukrainian representation on every hackathon judging panel precisely because of that frontline knowledge.

That is why so many of the EDTH-born companies head to Ukraine for testing before they approach European militaries. Wolba argues the hackathon network has become a shorter path to deployment than the traditional ministry procurement cycle.

Three Hackathons on EDTH’s July Calendar

The summer of 2026 is the busiest stretch in EDTH’s short history. The network is hosting hackathons in three cities across two continents in a single month, and the Berlin edition sits inside a much larger gathering. Berlin Defense Tech Week runs from July 6 to 12, per the July 2026 European defence events digest, and includes the Counter-UAS Forum on July 7, the Berlin Defense Tech Forum on July 8, Build with Ukraine on July 9, an FPV Arena and a European Defense Tech Meetup. The week turns the German capital into a hub for founders, investors, policymakers and military operators from across Europe. None of it, Wolba stresses, is funded by government grants.

The Rome weekend is the second Italian edition and is expected to draw more than 150 hackers. The Abuja hackathon is EDTH’s first on the African continent and a sign of how far the network’s ambitions now reach. The Berlin weekend, sitting inside Defense Tech Week, is where Wolba will spend most of his time between mentoring sessions and investor introductions.

Beyond July, EDTH has scheduled the European Defense Tech Festival for August 20 to 23 on a hangar airfield near Berlin, bringing together more than 1,000 builders for four days of building, testing and live demonstrations. The festival marks a step up from the original Munich hackathon in both scale and ambition. The progression from a 150-person weekend in June 2024 to a 1,000-person festival in August 2026 captures how quickly the network has scaled. Wolba insists the format will stay open: anyone can contribute, whether by building drones, writing software, organising events or introducing founders to investors.

Why Europe Needs a Thousand Defence Startups

Wolba argues Europe needs thousands of new defence companies, far more than the existing pipeline of primes and ministries produces on its own. He points to air defence as the clearest example of the gap, where warfare has shifted from a small number of costly platforms to huge numbers of inexpensive autonomous systems. New systems need better communications, onboard computing and coordination across air, land and sea, he says.

If we’re relying entirely on governments or the large defence primes, progress will simply be too slow. What Europe needs is thousands of founders tackling thousands of different problems. We need a thousand defence technology startups. That’s how we’ll build the capabilities Europe needs for the future.

Wolba said in a Tech EU interview that the goal is volume rather than a few moonshots, with many small teams solving many narrow problems in parallel. The measure of success, by his own account, is what happens after Sunday afternoon, whether prototypes move from pitch to operator deployment. He says Europe cannot afford to wait for traditional procurement cycles to catch up. The Munich weekend that started it all is now a year-round, three-continent operation.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the European Defense Tech Hub (EDTH)?

EDTH is a network that organises weekend defence technology hackathons across Europe, connecting engineers, founders, investors and military operators to prototype battlefield-relevant technologies. It is not a venture studio, accelerator or government programme, and it operates on a deliberately decentralised model in which the strongest teams get help making connections rather than following a fixed path.

How does an EDTH hackathon actually work?

Friday opens with hands-on technical workshops covering machine learning for defence, data fusion, FPV drone building, battlefield medicine, demining and electronics. Teams of two to six then have 48 hours to design and build a working prototype, which they pitch on Sunday afternoon to a judging panel of military experts, defence companies and investors, with Ukrainian representation in every panel.

Who is Benjamin Wolba?

Benjamin Wolba is the co-founder of the European Defense Tech Hub. He completed a PhD in condensed matter physics in 2021, researching why materials are magnetic, then spent two years as an associate at the European venture fund Lunar Ventures before organising the first European Defence Tech Hackathon in Munich in June 2024.

What is Zero Industries?

Zero Industries is a startup that emerged from the EDTH hackathon community. It builds AI-powered navigation systems that allow autonomous drones to operate in GPS-denied environments using a Visual Positioning System that combines computer vision, advanced mapping and onboard AI inference, with the company reporting sub-20 metre accuracy across its three initial field tests.

Why does EDTH run hackathons in Ukraine?

Wolba has described Kyiv as the ‘Champions League’ of European defence tech because founders can test their prototypes with operators who have frontline experience. EDTH has organised three hackathons in Ukraine, with the latest held inside the National Aviation University hangar in Kyiv as part of Defence Tech Valley.

How can someone join an EDTH hackathon?

EDTH is hosting hackathons in Rome (July 3-5, 2026), Berlin (July 9-12) and Abuja (July 24-26) this summer, with the European Defense Tech Festival near Berlin scheduled for August 20-23. Participants register individually through EDTH’s event calendar and can attend as visitors or competitors, regardless of background.