Nothing gets the blood—and innovation—pumping like a little bit of healthy competition to round out the year.
On Wednesday, NATO DIANA, the alliance’s defense tech accelerator, announced the 150 startups from across 24 member states that made the cut for its 2026 Challenge Program, and it was a particularly intense one.
Making the call: Each year, DIANA runs “challenge calls” for different high-priority areas, and defense-focused startups compete for funding, contracts, and, most importantly, eternal glory. The Accelerator Program accepts startups of all shapes and sizes, but the tech should be at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 4 or above.
The ten priority areas for this year’s cohort ranged from contested electromagnetic environments to unmanned systems, space operations, logistics, and biotechnology.
Here’s how the Accelerator program works:
- Phase One: Called “Boot-camp,” the first stage gives selected startups €100K in non-dilutive funding and a shot at evolving or adapting their tech for NATO’s defense priorities, in line with their respective pitches. Startups gain access to DIANA’s 16 accelerator sites and more than 200 test centers across the 32 member states.
- Phase Two: Top performers move to Phase Two, called “Scale,” and receive a €300k grant and six months to demonstrate tech, develop transition strategies, and engage investors and end users to target pathways to adoption.
Heating up: Since NATO opened up the DIANA accelerator and test sites in 2022, competition has gotten fierce. Last year, roughly 2,600 startups submitted proposals. This year, NATO received a record 3,680 pitches across the alliance, with 150 passing through the gauntlet.
As Nathan Mintz, CEO of California-based electronic warfare startup and DIANA 2026 cohort member CX2, told Tectonic, “It’s kind of like getting into an Ivy League school.”
Matchmakers: For smaller startups, the money is nice, but access to testing sites and the opportunity to get their tech in front of NATO defense ministries and end users is the real draw.
“It gives us access to a lot of feedback, gets us into the marketplace, and allows us to talk to a lot of European MoDs at once,” Mintz said. “Otherwise, it could be quite daunting, whereas with this, you come to them and [DIANA] acts as the matchmaker.”
Proving ground: Greek autonomous systems startup Delian Alliance Industries, one of the more established startups in the 2026 DIANA class, plans to make full use of the testing sites to get their UK subsidiary’s plug-and-play GPS-denied UAV navigation module, Osiris, field-ready and in front of the right faces.
“During the course of the DIANA program, we’ll be trying to test as much as we can and get it in the hands of as many partners as possible,” Delian’s UK head Matthew Wright told Tectonic.
“Our core deployments today are on Europe’s borders in Greece, and we’ve just done a big exercise in Finland, but that’s for our surveillance network,” he added. “Osiris is our main product designed for Ukraine, and our focus [in DIANA] is definitely on Eastern European partners.”
Despite the competition heating up, it’s more of a “rising tide lifts all boats” kind of situation, at least for the companies that made the cut.
“It’s a bright day in defense when we have our best and our brightest trying to figure out how to solve these hard problems for the West,” CX2’s Mintz said. “I’m just thrilled to see Europe starting to reach out and build a healthy defense ecosystem for startups. It’s a huge, bold step in the right direction.”