A call for startups and innovators to apply for the NATO Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) Challenge Programme has been launched! This programme starts with a competitive call for proposals targeting three strategic focus areas: energy resilience, secure information sharing, and sensing and surveillance.

The Energy Resilience Challenge seeks advanced technology solutions that can provide rapid and sustained power to critical facilities in the aftermath of a natural disaster or during a crisis, including conflict.

The Secure Information Sharing topic will address the necessity for trusted exchange of information between organisations using zero-trust principles with a focus on the Confidentiality, Integrity (trust), and Availability of streaming data (CIA triad).

Sensing the Coastal Undersea Environment will address sensing and information management in subsurface coastal zones. Of primary interest are technology capabilities that significantly extend the spatial scales, persistence, and feature diversity of undersea-environment monitoring.

For each challenge area, ten selected startups (30 startups in total) will receive a support package of €100,000 each, and they will have the opportunity to receive an additional €300,000 each to develop their projects in the second round.

Companies accepted into the DIANA accelerator programme gain access to:

• grants to support technology development and demonstration, and participation in the DIANA accelerator programme;
• 10+ accelerators across the Alliance, with more planned over the coming years;
• 90+ test centres (with more planned) across the Alliance where entrepreneurs can de-risk, and demonstrate and validate their proposed dual-use technological solutions;
• mentoring from scientists, engineers, industry partners, end users, and government procurement experts;
• an investor network for trusted third-party funding;
• opportunities to demonstrate technology in operational environments;
• pathways to market within the NATO enterprise and 31 Allied markets.

Companies can apply until 25 August 2023.
More information: https://diana.nato.int