Well, if you have a solution that you think can take down drones better than anyone else’s, now’s your moment.
Yesterday, Brave1—Ukraine’s defense innovation cluster—announced that applications are officially open for the UNITE – Brave NATO joint innovation program.
The program—first announced in late 2025—is designed to “bring together Ukrainian defense companies and companies from NATO member states to develop cutting-edge technologies for the battlefield.”
For the first tranche of teams (which must consist of one Ukrainian company and one company from a NATO country), the initiative is looking for innovative c-UAS solutions and air defense.
Funding of up to €500,000 per partner will be awarded for projects focused on:
- Active Protection Systems against FPV Drones
- Advanced and Affordable Counter-Shahed Systems
- Electromagnetic Support for Signals Intelligence (SIGINT)
- Electromagnetic Attack (EA) technology against FPV drones
- High-Altitude Platforms
Tech submitted needs to be TRL 6+, and companies cannot have ties to “Russia, Belarus, or FATF-blacklisted countries.” Seems fair.
Total funding for this c-UAS challenge is €10M. Funding for the program could rise to a total of €50M to support joint projects if this c-UAS pilot goes well. Operative word being could.
Holding hands: The idea behind the whole partnership is pretty simple:
- Companies inside of Ukraine have spent the last four years honing battlefield tech that countries inside NATO could seriously benefit from.
- Plus, companies in Ukraine can benefit from NATO-born tech and industrial capacity to scale up. Or, for example, it can be as simple as pairing a Ukrainian drone with a proven, fancy NATO sensor.
- It’s also a pretty quick path to getting Ukrainian technology to be interoperable with NATO kit—that means that eventually these systems could move into allied inventories more quickly.
- On the NATO side of things, they can test their systems in real battlefield conditions (all testing will be done in Ukraine) to make sure they actually, like, work.
The idea is to take tech that is already proven and scale it up into “serial production and use on the battlefield” for both Ukraine and NATO countries.
We told you the Ukrainians were coming.
