The European Defense Tech Hub (EDTH) brought its inaugural Australian Defense Tech Hackathon (ADTH) to Canberra last weekend (6-8 February), connecting innovators and defence stakeholders in a mission-focused environment.
Over 200 Hackathon attendees – including participants, mentors, and visitors – converged on the UNSW Canberra City precinct to tackle some of the most pressing defence and security challenges for Australia.
The Australian defence industry has been clamouring for opportunities to contribute to national security, but can have difficulty supporting its ideas and talent without ADF-led innovation pathways.
Events like the Hackathon offer the opportunity for industry to begin developing practical technology and solutions for the challenges that currently face the ADF.
Emerging from a desire to develop a pan-European defence innovation network with strong global allies, EDTH was established by two civilians who could see the clear demand for and importance of defence industry opportunities.
The concept for ADTH was jointly developed by EDTH co-founder, Ben Wolba, and Rhys Kissell, founder of the Australian electronic warfare startup Panop, while they were in Ukraine.
The initiative was pitched to UNSW Canberra and Beaten Zone Ventures as a unique opportunity to drive local innovation, with both organisations eagerly stepping in to support it.
The event was further bolstered by sponsors and supporters including Advent Atum, GDI Strategies, Innovation Central Canberra, Canberra Innovation Network, and Cognitive Advantage.
“We’ve been running hackathons all across Europe for the past 18 months, aiming to build a truly pan-European network for defence innovation. We run these events bottom up to get more people and more talent into the industry,” Wolba said.
“It felt very natural to think, maybe we can make an Australian edition happen – more specific to the Australian context, geography, and war theater. We do this because we think it's important, and it needs to be global to make an impact.”
ADTH is the organisation’s first event of the year, but Sweden, Germany, the UK, Estonia, Greece, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Slovakia are already on the lineup for the first half of 2026.
More than 50 mentors gave up their weekends as volunteers to support the Australian event, experts including serving military personnel from Australia and the US, experienced industry leaders, and leading academics.
They were onsite to offer precise guidance every step of the way, from narrowing down the challenge statements to preparing the pitch – with several pulling all-nighters alongside the dedicated teams.
Twenty-one teams participated in the Hackathon, tackling one of the 17 provided challenge statements or their own project, working closely with mentors to ensure it addressed a meaningful defence or security problem.
Provided statements laid out challenges in OSINT, computer vision and edge AI, unmanned and autonomous systems, electronic warfare, modular sensors, and hypersonics and missile defence, with many of the teams choosing to focus on drone and counter-drone tech.
Challenge statements were sourced from partners in Australia, as well as from a database of challenges from NATO, EU, and Ukraine, adapted to the local Australian context.
The winning projects were selected by a panel of seven judges, all with an extensive background in Defence and industry – with representation from Ukraine, the US, the UK, and Australia.
The top three teams were:
- Crowd Shield – crowd-sourced defence to identify, classify and neutralise unauthorised drone activities.
- HPM and Shielding Solutions – established the design of HPM/EM shielded systems that can be manufactured in small, distributed labs.
- Circinus – low cost integrated standalone platform for remote threat detection and categorisation.
UNSW Canberra senior lecturer, Dr Oleksandra Molloy, served as a mentor and judge at the ADTH, and said the event mirrored battlefield reality.
“Innovators from the defence industry had to come up with effective solutions under time pressure – not on a scale of months or years, but within 48 hours,” she stated.
“Challenges in Australia are not arising from a lack of innovation, but the need for clearer and faster pathways from ideas to adoption, at speed and at scale, aligned with Defence and security challenges. Leveraging diverse innovators’ expertise from industry and academia can generate practicable and deployable capability at speed, and provide the needed resources to support Defence.”
Ukrainian ambassador to ANZ, Vasyl Myroshnychenko, also spoke at the event, providing additional insight and context for the challenges of current and future warfare.